Mercy


Sunday, July 11th, 2004 (proper 10(15))
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 10:25-37

25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26 He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" 27 He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." 28 And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30 Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" 37 He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The Good Samaritan.

I would venture to say we could have all told the story from beginning to end without missing any of the details: the trip, the road, the robbers, the Priest, the Levite, and finally the Samaritan. Some of us may have even gotten the lawyer at the beginning, and the fact that he wanted to justify himself with the question he was asking.

The thing is we’re never going to understand half the impact of the story unless we change the key player’s name. I remember hearing a sermon preached on this same story several years ago, and the preacher replaced ‘The Good Samaritan’ with ‘The Good Homosexual’. Perhaps today we could replace it with ‘The Good Iraqi Insurgent’, or ‘The Good Terrorist’, and we might get a sense of just what sort of regard the man Jesus told the parable to held the Samaritan people.

We still get the other details, the condemnation of those who self-righteously parade around claiming to be good, who show no true love for their neighbor in need, but the whole focus of the story changes, doesn’t it, when we have to struggle to get over the first huge hurdle – Jesus just called a Terrorist my neighbor – and made him out to be a better person than the preacher and the theologian down the street?

What do we do with that?

We realize that the story has more to do with how OUR prejudice blinds us and less and less to do with who made the right choice and who made the wrong choice.

Labels serve two purposes. They cover up and they inform. Forget for a moment that there are clear labels, let’s just talk about your basic, old fashioned, paper with glue on the back labels that we’d find on a can of Campbell’s soup, for example. That’s a best-case example. Labels are DESIGNED to be helpful in those instances when we can’t see what’s in the packaging. They tell us what is in the can and what to expect to find when we open it.

Well, now that I think about it, they are designed for the same purpose when it comes to using them with people. We can look at someone’s exterior, but we don’t really know what’s going on inside; what motivates and inspires someone, what moves them to tears, or laughter, or anger, or desperation so incredible that they would be moved to kill others or themselves in an act that would be considered by the vast majority of the world’s population as inhuman and insane. So we come up with labels. Arabs. Terrorists. Martyrs. It’s a kind of shorthand that tells us where they are from, what they do for a living, and how they see it as their place to carry out these acts.

There is a terrible danger in labeling people, though. When we label people, we try to freeze them, to fit them in a particular box, with a particular set of convictions, beliefs, and motivations. We say they hate us because that is all we can understand through their actions.

The Jews of first century Palestine were used to ascribing motives to people they had come to view as less than human.

Meier Kahane, a radical Jewish Rabbi, who founded the Jewish Defense League, crystallized for me what it does to you when you label people. Though I’m sure he had his calmer moments, I don’t remember seeing him in either an interview or a talk show when he wasn’t spewing venom in the form of hatred and insults aimed at the Palestinian Arab people. He wouldn’t let an Arab walk past him without calling the person a dog or something worse. I remember watching the report of his death – at the hands of a person of Arab descent, if memory serves - and thinking ‘what a terrible, terrible waste.’ What compelled him to such a passionate hatred of other human beings?

I think removing the ‘human being’ from the equation had a great part to do with it.

How easy is it for us to dehumanize our enemies? It seemed fairly easy to dehumanize the greater part of the population of USSR, at the height of the cold war, or the Iraqi National Guard troops, during the Gulf War, as well as the latest war in Iraq, or the Taliban, as we entered Afghanistan. But can we really find ourselves doing the same thing that is easy to do on a national level on a local level? What if we replaced ‘Samaritan’ with ‘white trash’, or ‘colored man’, or ‘liberal’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘democrat’ or ‘republican’ or ‘tree hugger’, ‘feminazis’, … how many other labels can we come up with in the next 30 seconds? I suspect we could come up with more than (I hope) we would be comfortable with realizing we knew, and some that we wouldn’t even consciously think of as labels would probably come to mind later.

What Jesus was doing in his telling of the parable to this lawyer who wanted to make himself feel good, was this: however much you disagree with someone … never forget that the someone is a PERSON, an INDIVIDUAL, and as such, someone just as worthy of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice as you or I. Don’t be surprised if that person whom you’d just as soon spit on as look at turns out to be your savior.

So here we are. It’s our communion Sunday. This is the time when we are all invited to the table by not me, not the deacons, not the church council or any other part of the church besides the head of the church himself, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Who was the neighbor in the parable?

The one who showed mercy.

Who has shown us mercy far beyond what we could hope to receive?

The Lord Jesus Christ.

He is here with us, sitting next to us, telling us the story over and over again.

God loves us, Christ died for us. Thanks be to God.

(communion)