Luke 11:5-8
The NRSV follows Luke’s apparent intention and puts under the heading of “The Lord’s Prayer” Luke’s anecdote of the friend at midnight along with the “Ask, seek, knock” and “Good gifts” aphorisms. Conventionally, these passages have been considered to be a treatise on prayer. If you pray as Jesus did, God will provide, just as you would if your next-door neighbor came to you to borrow a cup of sugar at some inconvenient time. You might resent the timing, but you would nevertheless provide the sugar out of pious duty. If you pray as Jesus did, God will answer, just as you would if your own child asked for an egg. You would not substitute a scorpion.
But suppose this series of sayings was not a related sequence at all? Taken as an independent quotation, out of Luke’s context, we can readily see that the “friend at midnight” was not about how God answers prayer; it was about hospitality. The 21st Century world has largely forgotten that “hospitality” was a matter of life and death to 1st Century people. Welcoming the stranger into your tribal enclave for a night, or until the stand storm ended was a matter of honor on both sides. The host asked no questions about whether the stranger was an innocent traveler or a fugitive from law. The guest did not rob or otherwise violate the sanctity of the host. This code assured some degree of safety for everyone in a dangerous world.
In addition, 1st Century Palestine was an “honor/shame” culture. In Luke’s story, the host taken by surprise by unexpected guests may have run the risk of “shame” for not being able to properly care for them, but far more likely is the “shame” the sleepy neighbor would have experienced if he had not responded. He and his family would have been socially ostracized. The Jesus Seminar scholars point out that the original Greek that Luke used in the last sentence of the story can be translated either as “you will get up and give the other whatever is needed because you’d be ashamed not to;” or “because the other is not ashamed to ask.” (The Five Gospels, p. 327-328). The surprised neighbor is not ashamed to ask for help in supplying hospitality to the unexpected guests.
We cannot know why Luke did what he did with this snippet of oral tradition. It seems to fit better with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke interprets the parable in terms of the law that says “love your neighbor as yourself.” A discussion about the unexpected need to help a neighbor seems to be a further illustration of the reliance of neighbors upon one another. The Good Samaritan unexpectedly extends hospitality beyond what a reluctant neighbor might be shamed into offering.
Citizens of these United States pride ourselves on the fact that we can rely on our neighbors for help in time of need. In fact, we are so proud of that fact that 20% of us think the government should have nothing to do with providing disaster relief , health care, education, or social security. But as the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast learned after Hurricane Katrina, relying on our neighbors is nothing more than a romantic notion. The hurricane happened in 2005. Assistance in recovery was not forthcoming from the federal government. Five years later, volunteer efforts on the part of corporations and non-profits have not been able to complete the task.
But what best illustrates the 21st Century failure to live up to Jesus’s 1st Century expectation of hospitality in Luke 11:5-9 is our treatment of immigrants – specifically, people who risk their lives to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Our friends on the Christian Right insist that we are a Christian nation, yet we offer travelers nothing and lock our doors against them. We refuse to allow them food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care. Even when the worst of humanitarian violations force the disintegration of “undocumented” immigrant families, we are unashamed.
The Elves who put together the Revised Common Lectionary do not get to Luke’s series on prayer until late July this year (Proper 12, Year C). The tradition has followed Luke’s lead and ignored the more likely (and troublesome) subject of hospitality. The accompanying Old Testament RCL readings are Hosea 1:2-10 and Genesis 18:20-32. The prophet Hosea is condemning the land and people of Israel for forsaking God. The story in Genesis is the preamble to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both readings support the idea of God’s judgment and God’s answer to persistent prayer. When God threatens to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham convinces God to spare the cities for the sake of 10 righteous men. What is never read if the Revised Common Lectionary is followed is Genesis 19:1-29. But it is the full story of what happened to Lot in Sodom that goes to the heart of Jesus’s teaching about the friend at midnight.
The two angels sent by God to search out 10 righteous men arrive in Sodom in the evening. Lot sees them, and greets them with respect, and invites them into his house to wash their feet and spend the night. The angels decline, saying they will be fine spending the night in the village square. But Lot insists. They come into his house, and Lot prepares a feast. But then, before they retire for the night, the men of the city surround Lot’s house and demand that he throw the guests out so that the men can “know them.” The intent of the village men is clear. When Lot reminds them that the visitors have “come under the shelter of my roof” and offers them his daughters instead, the men of the village are outraged. But they are not outraged because of the offer of the daughters. That is a historical-cultural artifact that turns the story into a feminist “text of terror,” and can easily distract 21st century minds from the point. The men of Sodom are outraged because “this fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge!” In other words, the immigrant has the nerve to shame the citizens for their failure to offer safe haven to the strangers. (If this were an academic paper, the next comment would be in a footnote: One has to wonder how the story of the destruction of Sodom became so well known, given that the Elves have skipped it altogether for purposes of Sunday morning preaching at least as long as the Common Lectionary has been in use. Surely such a story of violence and unexplained custom is hardly suitable for children's Sunday School lessons.)
The ancient rule of hospitality was broken at the risk not only of shame, but of one’s own future security. In a world dependent upon the most primitive of communications, once the word was out that your tribal lands or your household did not honor the rule, you could find yourself denied assistance or shelter. The angels warn Lot that because of this sin – this failure of the men of Sodom to follow the most basic rule for human survival – God is going to destroy the city. Lot had better leave with the angels and bring along sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone else that belongs to him.
Post-modern minds have drifted away from hospitality as an expression of distributive justice-compassion, where the stranger is given shelter – even feasted and entertained – for a night, with no questions asked. The post-modern form of the failure to honor the rule of hospitality plays out on a daily basis along the United States/Mexico border. It can also be clearly seen in the wall the Israelis constructed along the West Bank of the Jordan.
The ancient rule of hospitality still stands. God’s judgment – or the consequences for acting unjustly – does not apply only to people perceived as enemies. Throughout the Bible, God is just as likely to favor the enemy and condemn God’s own people because God cares only about justice-compassion. See, e.g., The Healing of Naaman, 2 Kings 5. We rightly reject the idea that God’s judgment for violating hospitality or ignoring God’s demand for justice takes the form of volcanos, hurricanes, or plagues. But we are mistaken if we think there is no judgment. God’s judgment in a post-modern world is expressed in political and environmental consequences. Politically, we now have the so-called Arizona “papers” law, which requires that Hispanics in Arizona now must carry proof of U.S. citizenship at all times or run the risk of arrest and deportation. Some may think that is no problem for citizens with blue eyes and blond hair. The implications of such naivety for human rights should be clear.
Environmentally, adding insult to injury in the Gulf of Mexico, now comes the mother of all oil leaks whose magnitude defies description. Again, government assistance is nowhere to be found; corporations are pointing fingers at one another; and class-action trial lawyers are on the prowl as BP offers pre-emptive $5,000 settlements to devastated families and businesses. Apparently all we can muster for our neighbors are internet campaigns to collect used pantyhose and dog hair.
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Showing posts with label Good Samaritan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good Samaritan. Show all posts
Friday, May 21, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Samaritans in the Ditch
Luke 10:25-37
The Revised Common Lectionary will not get to Luke’s retelling of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan until mid-summer. But this blog is discussing Luke/Acts in the sequence in which it was written. By unfortunate yet serendipitous chance, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is especially timely.
The story of the good Samaritan is probably one of the most loved and misunderstood parables that Jesus told. Nearly all of us identify with the Samaritan who stops to help a man who had been robbed and left for dead by the side of the road. There are probably hundreds of homeless shelters, feeding programs, and free clinics world-wide with the name “Samaritan” in them, but they miss the original point of the parable. See The Five Gospels, (Harper SanFrancisco, 1993) p. 324. For a couple thousand years, probably starting with Luke’s community, people who heard this story heard it as changing the idea of a neighbor from one who receives love (the man in the ditch) to one who gives love (the Samaritan).
Luke throws the parable off point when he uses the story to answer a legal expert who tries to test Jesus by asking, “what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers with his own question: “How do you read what is written in the Law?” The lawyer quotes the founding rule of Jewish covenantal life: “You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your energy, and with all your mind; and [you are to love] your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him he’s right. “Do this, and you will have life.” But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. He wants Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is. So Jesus tells the parable about the Samaritan. At the end of the story, Luke’s Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, in your opinion, acted like a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer answers, “the one who showed him compassion.” Jesus says, “Then go and do the same yourself.”
Luke was writing for Roman citizens – Gentiles, who accepted the Jewish God but not Jewish customs. If Luke’s readers were also among the educated and rich, the story would have been perfect for challenging the conscience without challenging Roman authority. Gentile readers, with no real idea about what Jewish custom or history was, would have been glad to blame the priest and the Levite for passing by callously on the other side because of “purity laws.” Like 21st Century Christians, who have heard the story since childhood, Luke’s 1st Century community would have had no idea what it would have meant to the Jewish man in the ditch to be saved by an enemy Samaritan. But Jesus’ original audience would have immediately seen the improbability of an enemy Samaritan helping a Jew. In 21st Century terms, receiving such assistance would be like accepting donations from Hammas to the fund for 9/11 victims. In Jesus’s original parable, roles are reversed, expectations exploded, and the playing field has been radically leveled.
Jesus’ contemporaries may have heard him tell the story at a banquet. After the main course has been cleared and the wine and fruit brought out, the political discussions begin, interspersed with jokes and aphorisms about the occupying Romans, godless Greek pagans, Arab traders, and local riff-raff such as the tax collectors, dishonest merchants, and of course, those dirty, shifty-eyed Samaritans, who live in the hills and probably worship the old Canaanite gods and goddesses in contravention of God’s law.
Into the raucous profanity Jesus tosses this gem: “Have you heard the one about the man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell into the hands of robbers? They stripped him and beat him up and left him for dead.”
“So what else is new?” the listeners gripe. “The Romans refuse to secure the road. We’re all at the mercy of bandits and murderers!”
“Well it just so happens,” Jesus goes on, “That a priest was going down that road. When he saw the man, he went out of his way to avoid him. In the same way, a Levite came to the place, took one look at him, and crossed the road to avoid him.”
“Probably thought he was dead. Unclean. Can’t touch him. It’s the law.”
“But this Samaritan who was traveling that way came to where he was and –”
“Hah! Picked what was left of his pockets, right?”
“– was moved to pity at the sight of him.”
Jesus has everyone’s full attention at this point, and escalates the preposterousness of the scene with every following phrase: “He went up to him and bandaged his wounds–”
[“huh?”]
“–poured olive oil and wine on them. Then he hoisted him up on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and looked after him.”
“Get out!”
“The next day, he took out two silver coins, which he gave to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Look after him, and on my way back, I’ll reimburse you for any extra expense you have had.”
The entire room falls out laughing.
It would be fun to remain a fly on the wall at this point and listen to the discussion among the listeners, who identified with the victim in the ditch, not with the people passing by. The question was not to whom am I a neighbor, but from whom can I expect help?
The following chilling, contemporary example reflects the parable from both points of view. First, a homeless man (Hugo Tale-Yax) came to the assistance of a woman being attacked. Assistance came to her from a very unexpected quarter of the human terrain. The rescuer was then stabbed by the woman’s attacker. Both the woman and the attacker fled in different directions. The homeless man lay in a pool of blood on the pavement for an hour and-a-half, while people passed by, looked at him, took cell phone photos of him, and turned him over to see if he was dead. No one came to his assistance. By the time somebody got around to calling 911, he was dead at the scene.
Taking the traditional reading of the parable, how much longer can we pass by on the other side? Taking the more disturbing meaning, what happens to us when we are tossed into the margins? From whom can we expect help? Apparently our fellow human beings are no more likely to come to our aid than are the institutions we thought we had created to help us. Law enforcement, FEMA, the U.S. Congress – all fail us. Even our 21st century equivalents of the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s parable – our institutional churches – look the other way when confronted with inhumane workplace conditions, unfair immigration laws, and war disguised as “preemptive strikes” against “enemies,” whom we are supposed to love.
Perhaps it has been more convenient for Christians to understand this parable as requiring selflessness on our part. We are to be as compassionate as the Samaritan, and therefore worthy of “salvation” from Hell in the next life. When the rich and socially-connected take care of charity cases, the need for expensive government safety nets is much less. And when the “less fortunate” are convinced that it is their duty as well to care for their own, even better.
Oppressed people often side with their oppressors as a matter of survival. The man in the ditch had to accept help from his enemy or die. On that very personal level, it is easy to see that refusing assistance would have been stupid But the stupidity is not so obvious when the choice for those in the ditch is to work for Walmart for minimum wage versus working overtime for unsafe mine operators while taking home upwards of $70,000 a year. Accusations of collaborating with injustice are easy to make. After all, we might be thinking, that "contemporary" incident mentioned above was nothing more than a criminal street fight.
But something else more radical than any of these scenarios is going on in this parable. The playing field has been leveled. The despised Samaritan is saving the equally despised victim of Roman oppression. In the contemporary example, the whole altercation happened in Queens, New York, among people of questionable reputation at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday.
Deeper yet, in the parable, both parties have surrendered to the reality of their individual humanity, and have acted from that common ground. The Samaritan has treated his enemy as a friend; the Jew has experienced his enemy as a savior.
Do we no longer recognize humanity in 21st Century America? How long must we lie in the ditch?
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Gaia Rising Website
The Revised Common Lectionary will not get to Luke’s retelling of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan until mid-summer. But this blog is discussing Luke/Acts in the sequence in which it was written. By unfortunate yet serendipitous chance, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is especially timely.
The story of the good Samaritan is probably one of the most loved and misunderstood parables that Jesus told. Nearly all of us identify with the Samaritan who stops to help a man who had been robbed and left for dead by the side of the road. There are probably hundreds of homeless shelters, feeding programs, and free clinics world-wide with the name “Samaritan” in them, but they miss the original point of the parable. See The Five Gospels, (Harper SanFrancisco, 1993) p. 324. For a couple thousand years, probably starting with Luke’s community, people who heard this story heard it as changing the idea of a neighbor from one who receives love (the man in the ditch) to one who gives love (the Samaritan).
Luke throws the parable off point when he uses the story to answer a legal expert who tries to test Jesus by asking, “what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers with his own question: “How do you read what is written in the Law?” The lawyer quotes the founding rule of Jewish covenantal life: “You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your energy, and with all your mind; and [you are to love] your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him he’s right. “Do this, and you will have life.” But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. He wants Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is. So Jesus tells the parable about the Samaritan. At the end of the story, Luke’s Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, in your opinion, acted like a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer answers, “the one who showed him compassion.” Jesus says, “Then go and do the same yourself.”
Luke was writing for Roman citizens – Gentiles, who accepted the Jewish God but not Jewish customs. If Luke’s readers were also among the educated and rich, the story would have been perfect for challenging the conscience without challenging Roman authority. Gentile readers, with no real idea about what Jewish custom or history was, would have been glad to blame the priest and the Levite for passing by callously on the other side because of “purity laws.” Like 21st Century Christians, who have heard the story since childhood, Luke’s 1st Century community would have had no idea what it would have meant to the Jewish man in the ditch to be saved by an enemy Samaritan. But Jesus’ original audience would have immediately seen the improbability of an enemy Samaritan helping a Jew. In 21st Century terms, receiving such assistance would be like accepting donations from Hammas to the fund for 9/11 victims. In Jesus’s original parable, roles are reversed, expectations exploded, and the playing field has been radically leveled.
Jesus’ contemporaries may have heard him tell the story at a banquet. After the main course has been cleared and the wine and fruit brought out, the political discussions begin, interspersed with jokes and aphorisms about the occupying Romans, godless Greek pagans, Arab traders, and local riff-raff such as the tax collectors, dishonest merchants, and of course, those dirty, shifty-eyed Samaritans, who live in the hills and probably worship the old Canaanite gods and goddesses in contravention of God’s law.
Into the raucous profanity Jesus tosses this gem: “Have you heard the one about the man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell into the hands of robbers? They stripped him and beat him up and left him for dead.”
“So what else is new?” the listeners gripe. “The Romans refuse to secure the road. We’re all at the mercy of bandits and murderers!”
“Well it just so happens,” Jesus goes on, “That a priest was going down that road. When he saw the man, he went out of his way to avoid him. In the same way, a Levite came to the place, took one look at him, and crossed the road to avoid him.”
“Probably thought he was dead. Unclean. Can’t touch him. It’s the law.”
“But this Samaritan who was traveling that way came to where he was and –”
“Hah! Picked what was left of his pockets, right?”
“– was moved to pity at the sight of him.”
Jesus has everyone’s full attention at this point, and escalates the preposterousness of the scene with every following phrase: “He went up to him and bandaged his wounds–”
[“huh?”]
“–poured olive oil and wine on them. Then he hoisted him up on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and looked after him.”
“Get out!”
“The next day, he took out two silver coins, which he gave to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Look after him, and on my way back, I’ll reimburse you for any extra expense you have had.”
The entire room falls out laughing.
It would be fun to remain a fly on the wall at this point and listen to the discussion among the listeners, who identified with the victim in the ditch, not with the people passing by. The question was not to whom am I a neighbor, but from whom can I expect help?
The following chilling, contemporary example reflects the parable from both points of view. First, a homeless man (Hugo Tale-Yax) came to the assistance of a woman being attacked. Assistance came to her from a very unexpected quarter of the human terrain. The rescuer was then stabbed by the woman’s attacker. Both the woman and the attacker fled in different directions. The homeless man lay in a pool of blood on the pavement for an hour and-a-half, while people passed by, looked at him, took cell phone photos of him, and turned him over to see if he was dead. No one came to his assistance. By the time somebody got around to calling 911, he was dead at the scene.
Taking the traditional reading of the parable, how much longer can we pass by on the other side? Taking the more disturbing meaning, what happens to us when we are tossed into the margins? From whom can we expect help? Apparently our fellow human beings are no more likely to come to our aid than are the institutions we thought we had created to help us. Law enforcement, FEMA, the U.S. Congress – all fail us. Even our 21st century equivalents of the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s parable – our institutional churches – look the other way when confronted with inhumane workplace conditions, unfair immigration laws, and war disguised as “preemptive strikes” against “enemies,” whom we are supposed to love.
Perhaps it has been more convenient for Christians to understand this parable as requiring selflessness on our part. We are to be as compassionate as the Samaritan, and therefore worthy of “salvation” from Hell in the next life. When the rich and socially-connected take care of charity cases, the need for expensive government safety nets is much less. And when the “less fortunate” are convinced that it is their duty as well to care for their own, even better.
Oppressed people often side with their oppressors as a matter of survival. The man in the ditch had to accept help from his enemy or die. On that very personal level, it is easy to see that refusing assistance would have been stupid But the stupidity is not so obvious when the choice for those in the ditch is to work for Walmart for minimum wage versus working overtime for unsafe mine operators while taking home upwards of $70,000 a year. Accusations of collaborating with injustice are easy to make. After all, we might be thinking, that "contemporary" incident mentioned above was nothing more than a criminal street fight.
But something else more radical than any of these scenarios is going on in this parable. The playing field has been leveled. The despised Samaritan is saving the equally despised victim of Roman oppression. In the contemporary example, the whole altercation happened in Queens, New York, among people of questionable reputation at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday.
Deeper yet, in the parable, both parties have surrendered to the reality of their individual humanity, and have acted from that common ground. The Samaritan has treated his enemy as a friend; the Jew has experienced his enemy as a savior.
Do we no longer recognize humanity in 21st Century America? How long must we lie in the ditch?
BLOG ARCHIVE
Gaia Rising Website
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