As we begin this season of Lent, our series for the weeks ahead invites us into new ways of considering our lives and our faith, not as either/or propositions but somewhere in the often complex, messy middle of things. We will read the stories of Jesus as he engages his listeners to consider their lives with new eyes as he turns things upside down. Each week is an invitation to reconsider how Jesus redefines or upends the labels and definitions his listeners have clung to and perhaps we also tightly cling to. We begin the series with what might be the most tender polarity: stranger and neighbor. There is no denying that we are all aware of the labels, beliefs, and assumptions that make us strangers to one another. Many of us are very familiar with these stories so it is always a challenge to hear them in new ways and open ourselves to new meanings for our lives in this time. And today, we encounter again one of the central teachings of Jesus as he shares this parable which begins and ends with the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and the answer is surprisingly, “the stranger.” Let us pray,
The Arab-American poet and author, Naomi Shihab Nye, shares a beautiful story about a chance encounter she had at the Albuquerque Airport Terminal. It speaks of the ways in which love is kind. She writes, “ after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”
Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”
I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”
We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.
And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought; This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
The Samaritan, whose place of worship and customs are different from the lawyer who questions Jesus, is both a stranger and a neighbor to the man who was beaten and left in a ditch.
In our world, many of our physical neighbors are strangers to us, and many of our neighbors—those closest to us—may feel like strangers in these divisive and sad times. How do we need to reconsider who we label as “stranger,” and who we embrace as friend.
We often ask this same question in different ways: “Who do I feel close to and who feels at a distance “Whom can I trust and whom should I fear?” Jesus seems less interested in answering who his neighbor is and instead describes what a neighbor does.
We’ve heard this story so often that it’s hard to remember that for those Jesus was speaking to, this was a pretty shocking story. We may imagine ourselves and want to be the Samaritan, but perhaps we might imagine how we might feel if we were the one beaten and left in a ditch. How might we feel if we looked up through swollen eyes and a throbbing headache only to realize that the person we least expect is standing above us, offering a hand?
Rev. Jeff Chu writes that “To love is what it takes to truly live.” In his last speech before being assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the story of the Good Samaritan. Dr. King had visited the Jericho Road in 1959. He saw its twists and felt its turns as it wound through the hills and sank into a valley outside Jerusalem. Along the way were so many potential hiding places for robbers to lie in wait, ready to ambush weary travelers. “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me” about the priest and the Levite, he said. “It’s possible those men were afraid.” Perhaps, he suggested, they fearfully asked themselves, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” The Good Samaritan, King said, “reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” Then he urged his listeners to imagine themselves on contemporary Jericho Roads. Could they— would they—ask that same question when they saw others struggling?
Rev. Jeff Chu, explains, “King’s speech offered a master class in wrestling with complexity. He empathized with the Levite and the priest—how utterly human to be fearful on the Jericho Road! He also praised the Samaritan’s “dangerous unselfishness.” Another layer to King’s complexity: Privately, he had misgivings about the story. “I of course like and respect the Good Samaritan, but I don’t want to be a Good Samaritan,” King told a friend. “I am tired of seeing
people battered and bruised and bloody. . . . I want to pave the Jericho Road, add street lights to the Jericho Road, make the Jericho Road safe for passage by everybody.”5
Here’s what we know: We’re all fellow travelers. Some might be more neighborly than others. But there are no strangers in this story. Vulnerability appears in several ways in this short passage: The Samaritan’s mercy, the humanity of the priest and the Levite, as well as the innkeeper’s trust; he takes a small down payment, believing that the man will return to pay the balance. And of course, the legal expert too has an important role; he asks a question to test Jesus but in his wonderful way, Jesus responds by engaging him in conversation. And, I think the challenge is for us to see ourselves in each of these complicated characters and to find some measure of compassion for each of them.
I imagine that Jesus tells this story as he understands so much about the complexity of being human. I trust that he offers to us the same measure of grace that he offered this legal expert, patiently and carefully seeking to remind us To love well is what it takes to truly live. The other important lesson here is one that I think all of us have come to understand. When we go out of our way to offer help to another person or when someone reaches out with an offer of assistance, we receive something very special. Such moments are tender and they are sacred and they help us to become more fully human and to connect again with the divine within ourselves and others.
Commentary on Luke 10:25-37 | by Rev. Jeff Chu