vaguely feel like the good samaritan is still a thing
Loving one another is a political act
The day after the presidential election…
I went to a church thing. this particular meeting is usually like a business meeting (yes, churches have those), but before this one we split into a couple of groups to discuss a story from the Bible, a very familiar one.
The good Samaritan….
You probably know this one, but you can read the whole thing here in Luke.
Somebody gets attacked by robbers while traveling. They left him, almost dead. A preacher type guy comes by and doesn’t stop. An even better, more well-known religious leader comes by and doesn’t stop either. Finally, the Samaritan person — a person from a completely different ethnicity and religious background stops and helps. Not only stops and helps, but pays for the guy’s medical care, even going out of his way to come back the next day, maybe even staying the night.
The person leading this discussion observed that the Samaritan, the hero of the story, would be a person that the man who was hurt would normally discriminate against. It would be like a Muslim refugee stopping to help a an American, after the two Christian people walked by. That’s the analogous situation.
It was inconvenient…
It was against what people were used to for the Samaritan to stop. Again, this guy is the hero to Jesus. Not the religious people. Not the people who knew the Old Testament inside and out. The Samaritan. The type of person we don’t expect to love others, was loving his neighbor. That’s the point.
I’m listening to all this and the weirdest part is this — I was thinking of this story before I even arrived. I was driving to this meeting, processing the election and this was the story that came into my head.
No joke— I tell my daughter the first part of the story everyday, the part that prompts Jesus to tell the story. It goes like this from Luke 10:25–29 (NIV):
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Verse 27 is really well known to the people at the time. It was from Deuteronomy, something they should teach their families. But by the time it’s repeated back to Jesus, it’s misconstrued. They didn’t know who to love or in what way.
So Jesus gives a crazy example.
A really radical one. One that, ultimately, is impossible for us to live up to. That’s because Jesus is talking about himself.
He’s the one stopping. The compassionate one. The unexpected one. The The one that’s inconvenienced. We’re the neighbor.
Loving our neighbor feels impossible.
Love for one another compels us to try. It also feels impossible that Jesus would do it, too. It feels impossible that he would do it for us. But he did.
This is why politics and Christianity are so hard to reconcile. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not red/blue, D/R. Loving your neighbor doesn’t have profits attached to it. Yet it affects our discourse, our actions, our responsibility.
