Go and Do Likewise

Isaiah 66:10-14; Psalm 66:1-9; Galatians 6:7-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

And Jesus asked the lawyer: “Which of these, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

It is said that Jesus asked 307 questions in the four gospels and that people asked Jesus 183 questions. I have not counted them myself, but that sounds about right. And out of the 183 questions Jesus is asked in the gospels, he directly answered only three.

The rest of the time, Jesus does what we see in the gospel passage today. “Teacher,” a lawyer asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus responds with a question. “What do you think the law teaches?” And the lawyer responds with the classic answer: Love God and love your neighbor.

(In Matthew and Mark, who do not include this story in their gospels, it is Jesus who is asked directly which is the greatest commandment, and this is actually one of the three questions directly Jesus answers: The first and greatest commandment is: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  A second question Jesus answers comes from Pilate: “So, then, are you a king?” And Jesus says yes. I’ll save the third one for later.)

But the lawyer already knows the answer – here in this story the lawyer tells Jesus what Jesus already teaches. And this is not a surprise. As Moses said in the first reading today, from Deuteronomy, the Law of God is not some complicated, mysterious thing that only some very special mystics can comprehend. The Law is simple, basic, easy to understand – hard to do, yes, but easy enough to understand. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

But the lawyer asks a second question, “Neighbor. Define ‘neighbor.” Who is my neighbor?” Who, exactly, do I have to love as much as I do myself, if I want to inherit eternal life? Which implies another question, doesn’t it: And who is not my neighbor? Who can I safely ignore? Whose needs don’t matter as much as my own?

Jesus could have given a direct answer to this question. But he doesn’t. He tells a story, a story we all know well. A man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho. You know the road, if you’re from Galilee you go that way every time you come home from Jerusalem. It’s famously a dangerous road, highway robbery happens there all the time. This man was one of the unlucky ones. The robbers took his money, took his clothes, left him half-dead in the gutter.

And before Jesus goes any further in the story, where do you think the lawyer and the listening crowd assume Jesus is going with this story? They all probably know this road, they’ve all been on it many times before, it’s probably easy for them to picture the scene. Perhaps some of the people listening have run into robbers there themselves. Or they have friends who have gotten robbed on that very road.

If I was telling the story here in Mount Vernon, I might have said, “Someone got into a bad car accident on the Beltway. They got cut off by some maniac, and the car flipped over and skidded off the road.” You can picture that, you can imagine that, you may well have seen it happen, perhaps it has even happened to you, or someone you know. And you know how easily it could happen to anyone.

It's very difficult, for me at least, to imagine getting set upon by highway robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. I’ve never been there. It’s easy for me to imagine getting into a car crash on the Beltway. And I imagine it was just as easy for the lawyer and the crowds listening to Jesus tell his story to imagine that they, themselves, could well be the person lying half-dead in the ditch.

Because, you see, when Jesus finishes his story, he doesn’t ask, “Which of these three thought the man who fell into the hands of robbers was a neighbor?” That is an easy question to answer – of course the person who shows compassion is the one who loves their neighbor. Go and do likewise.

But that’s not the question Jesus asks. Jesus asks, “Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” This way of asking the question asks the listener to imagine being the person in the ditch. When you have been the victim of a maniac driver on the Belway, when you are the one who has crashed and in need of help, who’s going to be a neighbor to you?

Well, if you did crash on the Beltway and needed help, who would you expect to come to your assistance? The police, probably. The fire department, an ambulance, trained professionals who know what to do and are ready for just this circumstance. Well, Jesus says, what if the police never came? What if the police from that poor school district in Texas were on duty that day? What if the ambulance was full with another patient on the way to the hospital and sped right by you?

And what if the person who finally did stop and help you was a person you were prepared to treat as a nobody? What if that person was an undocumented immigrant, or a trans person, or a Muslim terrorist, or had a MAGA bumper sticker on their truck? What if they were the sort of person who, when you saw them coming, your first thought was not, “Thank God, please get me out of here,” but “Oh no, they’ve come to finish me off.” That’s what a Samaritan would have meant to a first-century Jew. The last person in the world you would think of as a neighbor you’re prepared to love as you love yourself, and the last person in the world you’d expect to go out of their way to be helpful to you. What if that was the person who stopped and helped you?

It would have been easier if Jesus had directly answered the question, “Who do I have to treat as a neighbor?” We would like to see ourselves in this story as the compassionate and generous one, who rides in on a white horse to save the day. Our culture makes a hero of the good guy with a gun who saves the damsel in distress and everyone lives happily ever after. Except more often that not that isn’t how it works. Because we congratulate ourselves when we help people when it’s easy, and then we can rationalize the times when it’s too difficult or dangerous or inconvenient to help. More often it’s the person who knows what it is to be excluded, who knows how it feels to be left in the ditch while everyone shakes their head and walks by – more often it’s the person you least expect who turns out to be the one who is willing to take a risk to come to your aid. And how do you hate them after that?

The world becomes a different place when somebody disregards the expectations and starts treating everyone as people worthy of respect and compassion. Fortunately, this is what Jesus has already done. Jesus has come along and found us who have neglected his creation and who have found a million reasons to justify ignoring people he loves. He could well have walked by the people who crucified him, but he has chosen to tend our wounds and pay the price to see us safe and whole again.

He asks for no payment in return – but he invites us, if we wish to follow him, to go and do likewise. To not turn away from the humanity and the suffering of someone else, to treat even someone who would wish you ill as a neighbor whom you would willingly go out of your way to care for – that’s what defines us as a follower of Jesus. But it all starts by recognizing that this is not our doing, it’s just what he does for us. We’re just seeing what he does, and going to do likewise.