“Trouble on the Jericho Road”

Luke 10:25-37
July 22, 2007

St. Paul United Methodist Church, LR

Rev. John A. Fleming

I want to start this morning with a couple of stories. Both are true stories and both are from the headlines of our newspapers and news shows. Both have happened in 2007. To be honest with you, one horrifies me and the other inspires me.

I will take them in that order. I saw the one that horrified me on CNN while I was vacationing on the coast. Most news mediums carried the story that in Wichita, Kansas, at a convenience store, a woman lay on the floor, bleeding to death. Just outside she had been involved in a fatal stabbing. Somehow she made it inside the store for help. We know this because it was captured on a surveillance camera. Five shoppers, including one who stopped to take a picture of her with her cell phone, stepped over the woman. Finally after what seemed like forever, someone called 911. A suspect was arrested. Another turned himself in, but the real question the District Attorney is struggling with is whether or not the five shoppers can be charged for not helping her. There is a law in Kansas that says you must render aid, but it refers only to victims of automobile accidents. The story bothers me. I hope it bothers you, too. There were five people who were more concerned with shopping than helping.

The second story happened in January in New York City. This story inspires me. Maybe you have heard about Wesley Autry. He is a construction worker who was standing on a subway platform waiting with his two little girls on the train. There was another man on the platform. Suddenly he suffered what appears to be a seizure. He stumbled and then fell off the platform down to the subway tracks. It all happened as the headlights of a subway train were rapidly coming that way. Wesley Autry said that there was a voice inside of him that said, “Someone needs to help that man!” No one else was around, so he jumped down on the tracks. He hoped to pull the man out of harm’s way, but there was not enough time. So Wesley moved the man between the tracks, laid on top of him, and hoped for the best. The clearance between the tracks and the bottom of the subway car was twenty-one inches. He and the man took up exactly twenty and a half inches. Wesley says that the subway driver tried to stop the train, but couldn’t. Wesley says that he felt five cars whiz over the top of his head. He said to the man under him, “You don’t know me and I don’t know you, but you’ve got to be still!” And when it was all over, he called up to the platform and said, “Would someone please tell my two little girls that their daddy is all right?”

Wesley was interviewed by David Letterman and near the end of it, he said, “The only thing that happened to me is that my blue hat got dirty.” And now, for good reason, Wesley Autry is considered a hero. People are amazed at his bravery. I am amazed at his bravery. What he did was remarkable. What makes it greater is that he did not know the man he helped. All he saw was that the man needed his help. He moved with compassion.

The story, of course, made all of the newspapers. The newspapers called him things like The Subway Superman and The Harlem Hero. One of the newspapers described him in biblical terms. This was their headline: Good Samaritan Saves Man on Subway Tracks!”

Some of the questions people have been asking are these. Would you have done what Wesley Autry did? Would you have jumped down on the tracks? Would you have been a Good Samaritan that day?

Well that leads us to our scripture lesson for this morning. This is one of Jesus’ most familiar stories. We have all known it since our Sunday School days. Now, how we usually hear the story, what we usually do is to ask ourselves the question: “Am I willing, when the circumstances arise, to be a Good Samaritan to other people?” If I see someone lying in ditch somewhere or in trouble on the highway, would I risk it? Would I stop and help? Am I a Good Samaritan?

I might be wrong, but I have to wonder, is that really what Jesus is saying with this story? Let’s take another look. Let’s look a little deeper. You will remember how the story came to be. Jesus was heading towards Jerusalem and stopped in a village along the way. While he was there, he got in a debate of sorts with an expert in religious law. The Bible calls him a lawyer, but don’t understand the term in terms of what we call a lawyer today. This lawyer was supposed to know God’s laws inside and out. He was there to test Jesus. He was there to trap Jesus. He was hoping that he could get Jesus to say something that would incriminate him.

Here the lawyer asks. “Jesus, what do I need to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turned the question around. Jesus has a tendency to do that when he’s put on the spot. He asked the expert, “What does the law say?” The lawyer knew the answer and could quote it. He said, “Love God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind and also love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus must have said, “That’s it! You got it right.” I know he said, “Do that and you will live.” That did not seem to be enough for the lawyer. He needed a little more. He asked Jesus, “And who, exactly is my neighbor?”

That’s when Jesus tells this rip roaring tale about a man who was traveling down to Jericho from Jerusalem. Just outside of Jericho the terrain turned from green grasses to rocks.

Robbers and thieves were known to hide behind those rocks. If you were smart, you wouldn’t travel that road alone. It had that kind of a reputation. And so unfortunately Jesus telling the tale about someone being robbed there wasn’t all that shocking.

But, as it turns out, two shocking things did happen. The first shock was that two people came by there that could have helped. In fact, they probably were expected to help. Both worked for the church. One was a priest and the other was a Levite, the priest’s right hand man. Both were religious people. Both of them saw the man, crossed the road and passed by on the other side. Do me a favor. Don’t be too hard on them. One commentator suggests that they thought the man lying there in the ditch was already dead. If they touched him, they would be considered ritually unclean and could not perform religious duties. The church service surely was about to start.

So there’s the shock, the religious people passed by. But a bigger shock is about to happen. Down the road, says Jesus, came a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans hated each other. A Samaritan was the last one who could be counted on to help. Jews and Samaritans don’t want to have anything to do with one another. In fact, not only would the injured man not expect any help from a Samaritan, he also wouldn’t want any help from a Samaritan. But it is this Samaritan, this despised and rejected Samaritan, who stopped to help. He took a risk. The robbers could still be around. He didn’t care about that. He was moved with compassion. He stopped to help. He put the man on his donkey. He took him to an Inn. He made sure that the man’s needs would be met. He paid for those needs.

And now Jesus asks this expert, this lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man beaten and left for dead?” I learned this, this week. The lawyer couldn’t even bring himself to mutter the word Samaritan and so he said, “The one who showed mercy.” Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”

Preachers, me included, have said, “You need to be like the Good Samaritan. Stop and help someone. Imitate him. Get going now. Go do that!” I can’t preach that now. There are two many problems with it. Let me offer two of them.

First, if this were just a simple moral tale about helping people, Jesus would have left out all that troubling stuff about the Samaritan. What he would have said was that three people saw the man lying there on the side of the road. The third one stopped to help. Be like him! Jesus didn’t say that. This is a parable. Parables always having something surprising and unexpected in them. Parables leave us with something to figure out and something with which to wrestle. In this story it is the fact that an unwanted, rejected Samaritan is the one who showed mercy to his enemy. That’s the problem.

The second problem is worse than the first one. If Jesus’ point was to be like the Samaritan then I would have to say that we can’t do it. That is what makes the story of the Subway Superman so compelling. Would you have done what he did? I’m not sure I could have.

I heard about a seminary class who was given the assignment, in class, of getting together a five minute talk on this parable. The trick was that they had to record it in a building across campus. They weren’t to spend any time writing, they were to run to the building because time was limited, to record their thoughts. They did not know it, but the professor had hired an actor to play the part of a man in distress. He was slumped in an alley, coughing, and suffering and bleeding (well, it was ketchup, but the students didn’t know that!). The students were on their way to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan. Would they be a Good Samaritan on the way to deliver their sermons? As it turns out none of them stopped to help. They rushed past him. After all, they only had a little time and their grade depended on the completion of the sermon.

Now don’t look down at the seminary students either. Simply knowing in our minds what the right thing to do is does not mean we can do it. We are afraid of helping others. We might get hurt. We are leery. It is much easier not to get involved.

If we’re going to be Good Samaritans, then it will mean more than a change of mind it will mean a change of heart. And that, really, is what this parable is about. Now I am sure of that.

A seminary professor once wondered what made some people generous and compassionate while others were not that way. He did some research and discovered that for the ones who showed compassion, something in the past had happened to them. Someone had acted compassionately with them. They had had some kind of an experience that changed both their lives and their actions.

As an example of that, the professor told about one of the cases. Jack was an emergency worker who had grown up in a tough family. He says that all his dad taught him was that he didn’t want to be like his dad. But something happened to Jack when he was a child. It changed his life and it changed his heart. He had to have surgery and was scared. He remembers a surgical nurse who was there, standing beside his bed, as the surgery was about to begin. The nurse knew the boy was scared and so he said to him, “I will be right here. I will not leave your side no matter what happens.” And he didn’t. The nurse was there when the boy awakened. He never forgot that day.

Years later, Jack, now a paramedic, was sent to a scene of a highway accident. A man was pinned under a car. Jack was trying to help him. Gasoline was dripping. Rescue workers knew it was risky, but they had to get the man out of there. They used power tools to cut him out. One spark would have blown the man and Jack to pieces. The driver was crying out, he was afraid of dying. And Jack remembered the nurse and did the same thing for the driver. He said to him, “I’ll be right here with you, no matter what happens.” Later the man told Jack he was crazy for doing that. Jack simply said, “I couldn’t leave you.”

Something happened to Jack that made him be a Good Samaritan. I am just wondering has that something happened to you? You cannot just stand on the sidelines and wonder what being good is all about. You can’t ponder there who your neighbor is. You see we are the ones lying in the ditch. We are the ones who need rescuing. And luckily someone has come along to help us. His name is Jesus. He, too, is despised and hated by many. He has come to save us, to speak tenderly to us, to lift us up, and to make sure our needs are met.

The real question this morning is not, “Who is my neighbor?” The real question this morning is, “Who has been a neighbor to me and am I willing to be a neighbor to someone else?”

Let us pray.

(I want to thank my father-in-law, John Simpkins for telling me that I should use the story about the Kansas woman in this sermon. I want to thank Rev. Thomas Long for the take on this passage and for two of the stories in it).