Who Bears Grace to Us?
Sermon by James W. Crawford
November 1, 1998
Jesus presses always to the heart of a matter. When one of his disciples angles to be a special case because of extra effort and presumed goodness Jesus insists God makes no special cases. Everyone at every time, in any circumstance, is a candidate for the grace of God.
When religious types question him about hanging around with men and women marginalized as society's scum, men and women damned by the religious and social establishment, Jesus insists Divine vigilance and compassion zeroes in first of all on these so-called rejects.
But seldom does Jesus make a point so well as when a supremely credentialed seminary graduate in Biblical studies seeks to engage him in debate. This erudite, pedantic, shrewd protector of religious doctrine sets out to test the authority of our amateur from Galilee. "Pardon me, Reverend," our graduate scholar says, "they tell me you're pretty smart. Question: How do I find meaning in life? Where lies true virtue? What's really important for those of us who want to live as God would have us live?"
The religious hack from up country, Jesus from Nazareth, responds quickly. He turns the question back on the questioner. (One commentator reminds us of Woody Allen's classic rendition of this gambit: The inquirer asks, "Why does a rabbi always answer a question with a question?" After a long pause the rabbi answers, "Why shouldn't a rabbi always answer a question with a question?") In any case, Jesus replies, "You know the answer to the question, 'What makes life worthwhile?' What does our tradition say? What do you read in the scriptures?" And our astute Bible scholar finds himself compelled to answer his own question: "You shall love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself."
"Bravo," says Jesus; "do that and you will find the joy and meaning you seek."
But our cunning, well-schooled antagonist will not let go. In front of everyone else, he is obviously asked an ostensibly simple-minded question. To his audience he appears a fool. To save face he challenges the "Galilean Reverend" one more time. "And just who qualifies as my neighbor?" he asks. "Whom do I include? Where do I draw the line? Where does God draw the line?"
Our Bible scholar, this high-powered, divinity-school degree-laden M.A., M.Div. Ph.D., D.D. now plunges into specifics. He seeks interpretation. He presses for speculation on boundaries, divisions, the lines and perimeters identifying each of us in some particular fashion. In a university town like Boston he is right at home. Indeed, he is being considered as a fellow at a prominent university and he needs grants to subsidize his research.
He hits on a smashing idea. Why not a three day conference on "The Millennial Prospects of Neighborliness on the World Wide Web?" He will invite a telecommunications specialist to lecture on "Building Intimate Neighborhoods with Teraflop Speed While Surfing Alone on the Virtual Boulevards of Cyberspace." He will corral a seminary professor for the symposium, with a dissertation outlining "The Concept of Neighbor as Practiced among the Pre-Amphyctionic Tribes of Canaan, with special Emphasis on the Tribes of Issachar and Zebulun." There will be a paper, of course, on the unique perceptions women bring to the matter of cosmic neighborliness (written by a man, of course, to assure objectivity). And finally, someone will submit her Ph.D. thesis after interviewing 141 statistically chosen Back Bay, South End and Beacon Hill residents evaluating their levels of satisfaction with on-street parking possibilities, correlated with the depth of their neighborly feelings toward meter people. All of this, of course, to be assembled into a volume published by the University Press of New England, providing another citation in one's march toward tenure; which one wins, of course, by beating the devil out of--what?--one's neighbor!
It is this kind of dialogue our Bible scholar seeks: "Let's play with logic; let's dabble in nuances; let's pursue in depth this matter of just who my neighbor is." By which he really means, "Just who my neighbor is not."
And Jesus? Watch out! No bull session for him. No debate, no deliberation, no analysis of just who is and who is not a neighbor; no schematics, no classification of who is in and who is out. Jesus tells a story--to the Bible scholar, I suspect, a bitter insult. He wants to parse verbs, juggle jots and tittles. But Jesus tells a story that goes something like this.
A young man assigned to deliver the voting materials prepared by the Rev. Pat Robertson to the Churches of the Back Bay, in anticipation of Tuesday's elections, leaves one of our churches and heads for the Copley Subway Station. As he approaches the kiosk at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston a gang of teenagers, surrounds him on their skateboards, desperate for a Halloween fix; they mug him, snatch his wallet, beat him up, stab him several times and leave him for dead at the base of Max Kaiserman's closed-up newsstand. A U.C.C. minister, pastor of the church not 20 feet away, makes his way onto Dartmouth Street, sees the victim, is already late for a meeting with a Boston Interfaith Organization dealing with the urban crisis, knows this to be a police matter and, anyway, is going down-town and sprints across Boylston Street to catch the Green Line Train, inbound. Next, a prominent Cantibridgian sociologist approaches the injured man. He is already late for a date at the Library--the audience waiting for him even now to discuss his new book on the deleterious influence of drugs on unemployed teenagers. And then, toward that beaten-up Christian Coalition member, with his literature spread on the sidewalk all around him, toward him there comes a gay person, an aficionado of the Boston Gay Men's Chorus, eagerly anticipating the evening performance. She stops, cradles the victim's head in her hands, daubs at one of his wounds with her handkerchief, hails a cab and directs it to Beth Israel Hospital. The hospital, of course, hesitates to consider the victim without his Blue Cross card, so our hero puts $100 in cash on the admissions desk, then hands over her Mastercard, pledging to stand for the victim's operating room expense, and promises to return the next day to negotiate the costs of his convalescence.
Then Jesus, good rabbi that he is, asks his question: "Who is neighbor to the one robbed, beaten and stabbed?" The one showing kindness," comes the reply. Go," says Jesus" and do as she did."
What is going on here? What is Jesus doing to that well-intentioned, thoroughly churched, solidly credentialed questioner? I will tell you what he is doing. Jesus rips into that scholar's pinched and pathetic perception of the human family. He blows the limits off human community. Jesus dynamites all the puny fortresses we erect to protect ourselves, our friends, our kind. You see, that Bible scholar wants to stake out boundaries in human relationships. He begs Jesus locate the outer limits of those he might call neighbor. "Who is my neighbor?" he asks. "Those who share my religion, my ethnic background, my culture, my politics, my sexual orientation? How far shall we go? Who is qualified?" And Jesus shreds the limits.
Shredded limits to our definitions of neighbor? How does Jesus do that in a story like this? Friends, we have become so used to understanding the Samaritan in this parable as "good" we have forgotten that when the Jew, Jesus, first tells the story to his Jewish audience the Samaritan is bad. Hear that? Bad! Samaritans live outside the pale. They are heretics, atheists. They eat differently. They pray differently. The speak a different language. They dress differently. They deserve contempt, hatred, brutality. They are enemy. When Jesus tells this story, a "good Samaritan" is an oxymoron. A "good" Samaritan? Absurd! What Jesus does in this story is to take the ultimate antithesis of that inquiring Biblical scholar, a Samaritan whose potential neighborliness makes that Bible scholar sick to his stomach, and Jesus presents the Samaritan as a mediator of kindness whose healing presence--whose grace, sacrifice and service--bridge the widest, deepest gulf then imaginable.
You see, those who first heard this story were blown away. Jesus dissolves the distinction between insider and outsider. He resolves the impossible by depicting a virulent enemy as a compassionate friend. He offers a perceived foe as true neighbor. Indeed, the outsider, the alien, the enemy becomes, in this story, the true savior.
Now what does that mean for you and me? What can we make of this brilliant parable? Oh, to be sure, we can take seriously our Lord's admonition to serve human need wherever and whenever we find it. The Samaritan's stopping by on the road, binding the wounds of the man in the ditch, caring for him beyond all expectation--to be sure, Jesus says, "Go and do likewise." He urges us to understand that no line separates a disciple of Christ from the breadth and depth of human need.
But more--much more. When that Samaritan stops, when that enemy succors the injured and derelict victim, when that outsider turns into the Savior, Jesus makes a point humbling us, opening us up, compelling us to alert ourselves to revelation from what we perceive to be threatening, malevolent sources. He is telling us our perceived enemies can save us. He is insisting outsiders bear truth we can embrace. He reminds us that rather than our being called to be "good Samaritans" we may be called to recognize ourselves as the victims in the ditch; we are insufficient until our neighbor breaks in, touches us, binds us, heals us. The parable serves an invitation not only to save others, but to be saved by others, even those appearing to be our enemies. It is a matter, finally, of "Who bears grace to whom?"
Can we understand that? Can we get a grip on what this means for us? Let me offer an illustration. I am going to read a passage from a wonderful reflection by Robert Coles, that wise spirit and intellect for all seasons. It is included in an essay from his Harvard Diary II, entitled, "A Testing from God?" In this essay Robert Coles tells of his mother and father and their regimen of walking to sustain their good health. One of their routines takes place every Friday as they prepare for afternoons at Symphony. They would walk their separate routes, taking their own time, to a pre-chosen restaurant, and then they might, from the restaurant, take a cab, or indeed walk to Symphony Hall. Coles tells us his father was a gabby type, who took long and circuitous routes from the Waterfront, talking and gossiping with folk along the way, wending his way to whatever restaurant they chose. His mother, self-effacing, a helper of strangers, a worker in soup kitchens, tutoror of children in need, generous and trusting, might take a shorter route, and leave a little later--in any case, they would meet first for lunch, then make their way to Symphony Hall.
On one particular blustery, cold, February day, following a six-inch snowfall, with ice from previous storms increasing the treachery for anyone venturing outside, they decided to walk to the restaurant. Coles' father went first, and set his route; his mother, a little hesitant, also set out, and finding the cold and the wind bracing, step by step on the dangerous and precarious sidewalks she pointed herself in the direction of their noon assignation. Then Coles continues:
The streets seemed empty, and she got a boost from that fact: others were intimidated by what was not in the least scary or inhibiting to her. She plowed on--one step, then another, careful each time not to slip, her eye on what was immediately ahead of her.
Suddenly she was conscious of her ears rather than her eyes. She slowed down, stopped watching, listened: steps behind her, fast moving steps. She moved her attention back to her eyes, but wanted them to look backward rather than forward. A turn of her neck. A fast glance: a man moving along behind her, catching up with her. Now her mind became agitated. She wondered what to do: keep walking; step into the street and hope a car would appear, so that she could try to flag it down; stop in her tracks and wait in hope that acquiescence--as she had heard once said--is the best policy? She decided to keep moving, but her heart was not in her decision. Her head, meanwhile, was conscious of her right hand, its contents: a pocketbook. "He's black," she kept saying to herself. "After he's gone, I'll go back home," she found herself thinking--and then, he was there, right next to her, just as they stood at the corner of the street.
For a second she searched the roads--but no traffic. No pedestrians nearby, either. Her hand released the pocketbook, just as the young man asked her if he might help her across the street. When he saw the black leather pocketbook on the ground, he picked it up and gave it to her. Her hand trembled as she took it; she managed to look in his eyes for a second; she tried even to smile, but her face's muscles wouldn't respond. She felt his hand on her left elbow, as he guided her across the street. For the first time during that walk, she pictured herself falling, landing on some ice, even losing consciousness. In a few seconds, though, she was on the sidewalk, and the young man had bid her goodbye with that expression she had noticed more and more people use, "Have a good day." She tried to say something similar. She tried to say "thank you." But now it was her voice that had turned unresponsive. She shuddered as she fought off a thought which nevertheless crossed her eighty-one year old mind: "Ought I have tried to give him something?" A second later she had pushed that question away, and replaced it with nothing.
She walked until she got to the subway, rather enjoyed the steep steps down, the ride to the station nearest the hotel where she knew her husband awaited her. On the train, her mind took her South, to warm weather and beaches she remembered from youthful trips. At lunch with her husband she was quiet, to the point where he wondered if she was "all right." The answer she gave him went like this: "I thought I was until today." He pursued the matter medically and got nowhere. She always had been a bit elliptical and moody at times, he reminded himself. He successfully diverted her with serious talk of financial matters.
"She later told me," writes Coles,
all during the Brahms' Requiem I thought of that young man. Then she added, "I prayed God didn't have time to notice me." When I asked her what she meant by that remark, she explained tersely, "I'm close to meeting Him and I'm sure this morning didn't improve my chances of staying near Him for very long."
As I tried to reassure her a bit, she stepped further off into mystical speculation: Had God tested her? As surely as He does with each of us all along? "Maybe," was my feeble reply.
Who bears grace to you? To me? Could it be a testing from God? Believe it!
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