What Made The Samaritan Good?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

May 12, 1996

Luke 10:25-37

What made the Samaritan good? Why, from amid those folk making their way from Jerusalem to Jericho, did this lone figure stop, bathe the wounds of the traveler mugged and left half dead in the ditch, take him to an inn, pay for his shelter, and promise to subsidize any further medical needs? I want to speculate, as churches recognize on this day what is known as the festival of the Christian home. I want to speculate that what enables this Samaritan to do what he did and to go down through history as one of its most compelling figures--almost as if he is real and not simply the subject of one of our Lord's parables--I want to speculate that what made the Samaritan good lay in the foundation he received from his home. Family values slip off many a tongue these days. And I wonder if what occurred on that desolate Jericho road does not provide one lesson anyway, for all of us, on where family values might find themselves rooted.

I

In the first place, I think the goodness of that Samaritan probably originates in a home committed to recognizing the reality, the presence, the overarching sovereignty and grace of the living God. And I would think, as well, his goodness emerges from regular participation in a religious community expressing this profound commitment. In short, he went to church and Sunday school.

Why? What did he get out of it? How might this attendance have helped him to be good? Well, how about just the learning of the basic vocabulary of faith, for instance? Grace. Love. Peace. Hope. We cannot get enough of this, and that Samaritan, as a child, no doubt, found himself soaked in it.

I have often wondered if we do as well in our town time. On the one hand, I cannot say we in the churches do a great job at teaching this vocabulary of faith, but, on the other hand, I am not sure a lot of us pursue the learning with the diligence we invest in learning the foundational vocabulary of other pursuits. Like the Internet, for instance. Or the defensive statistics of the Red Sox. Or the rules of bridge, or the labels in our clothes, or the jargon of the stock market, or the shoppers' haven that is chic today. We have a grip on everything but the roots and concepts of our faith.

I am reminded of the new minister who, making the rounds of his congregation, finally makes it to the Sunday School. He decides to ask a few questions to test the knowledge of the students. He asks one little boy, "Who made the walls of Jericho fall down?" Now everybody in this congregation, of course, knows it was Joshua who "fit the battle of Jericho." But this little boy answers the minister's question, "Who made the walls of Jericho fall down?" The little boy answers, "It wasn't me, and that's for sure."

 The minister turns to the somewhat embarrassed teacher. "So what do you think of that answer?" he asks.

"Well," she says, "Tommy's a good boy. He doesn't tell lies. If he said he didn't do it, I believe him."

The minister, stunned by this answer, thinks the church Council ought to know of this appalling condition in the church school. He is prepared to use it as illustration number one demonstrating the need for more heavy duty education programming. So he reports the incident to the Council. The Council considers this matter and in due course they send their deliberations to the minister. "We see no point in making an issue of this incident," says the Council. "It will be best simply to repair the walls. We are prepared to pay the cost and charge it up to vandalism."

Oh, how we need to ground ourselves biblically! Children. Adults. All of us. Like that little Samaritan.

And regular participation in the life of the Christian community helps us with ethical priorities as well. I suspect the home of the good Samaritan took that seriously too. Those who lived with him knew that children observe and learn from even the most trivial of occasions. We carry those lessons, as did the Samaritan, into our adult lives.

A mentor of mine, for instance, tells of going to a certain church to speak. During the morning the host pastor offered an apology for the scant attendance in church school. A rain shower had passed through at 9:00 a.m. and few children were in attendance at 9:30. "On a rainy day like this," said the host, "fifty percent of our children stay at home." And then my friend goes on to imagine the conversation in one of those homes.

Jimmy--let's call him Jimmy--Jimmy calls out when he sees the first drop of rain, "Mom, it's raining. Do I have to go to Sunday school?" Mom consults with dad, who has not yet arisen: "I don't think Jimmy should go, do you? It's such a nasty day, and you've not even gotten his breakfast ready. If he does go, you'll have to take him." That insures the old man's negative response and Jimmy stays home with TV and Garfield.

Now, having been both a child as well as a parent myself--and I don't want to claim too much; I think my mother and Linda can tell more horror stories about this than I--in any case, I know how difficult it is to get ready for Sunday school. It can be murder, or close to it. But suppose this scene occurs again on Monday morning. Our little Jimmy, remembering the scene from yesterday, calls out, "Mom, it's raining. Do I have to go to School?" (You can see it coming.)

 "Go to school," his mother replies incredulously, dashing out the door for her 7:30 meeting, "why of course you have to go to school! What are you thinking about?!" And the old man's voice chimes in from amid the box scores of the Knicks and the Bulls, "Hey, buddy, no excuses. Rain or shine, you're in school. As the saying goes, 'The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.' So get a move on!"

Routine. So what? No doubt they will be back next week. Question: What did Jimmy learn from this "routine" experience? Perhaps four lessons. 1. He learned a trivial excuse could get him out of Sunday school. 2. He learned the same excuse would not get him out of day school. 3. He learned his family believed day school to be more important than church school. 4. He learned that reading, writing and arithmetic are more important than learning about God, Jesus and life.

I cannot guarantee the Samaritan grew up going to Sabbath school every week and participating in the religious life of his people. But I will bet his home took it seriously, made it important, put it at the top of their priorities. It played a major part in making him good.

II

A second lesson the Samaritan must have learned both in his Sabbath school, as well as in his home, had to do with every one of us being a child of God. What made the Samaritan good rested in his conviction that no one lay outside the grace and concern of the living God.

We do not need to speculate about that conviction in the Samaritan's case. We know he held it. For in his time he was unique. His action in caring for that wounded Jew turned the world and its way of perceiving and doing things upside down. Why? Because, you see, Samaritans and Jews were religious and ethnic enemies. They were like Serbs and Bosnians, Syrians and Israelis. They feared and hated each other. Jews and Samaritans held each other in contempt. Each people believed it possessed the one true religion. Each believed its soil blessed, its blood sacred. When this narrative was told, the listeners believed the one who should be in the ditch, mugged, bleeding, near death was the Samaritan. Every Jewish hearer of Jesus' story hoped and expected the evil Samaritan would end up wounded, crushed and dead. Then the priest and the Levite would have an excuse to pass him by. Seeing a hated Samaritan, probably an illegal immigrant to boot, beat up and left for dead would be simply a matter of good riddance. Indeed, they believed the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan.

But that is not the case in this incident. The shoe is on the other foot. It is the Jew who is in the ditch and it is the hated Samaritan stops to heal him. This Samaritan, thisgood Samaritan is the enemy, the outsider, the one treated with contempt. What he sees in the ditch, bleeding, unconscious, left for dead, what the hated Samaritan sees is not an enemy whose death spells good riddance, but--and here is the point--a neighbor, a friend, a child of God. The Samaritan does not ask his race, he knows it and bears the Jew in his arms anyway. The Samaritan does not flinch at the man's religion; it does not matter. He does not speculate about the injured man's sexual orientation, it is of no account. He does not question the man's nationality, his ethnic roots, what flag he salutes; they are irrelevant. What counts here is a human being, a child of God in desperate need. No barrier too high, no wall so impenetrable, no identity so vital it stands in the way of the crucial, the deepest, most precious of all our identities: that we are children of God, men and women regardless of our address, gender, nation, race, or religion, brothers and sisters offered the grace and love of Christ; no one of us outside the range of Divine love; no one beyond the empathy of the Divine heart; no one wounded without causing pain in the depths of the Divine breast.

I think the Samaritan believed that, and I don't know where he got it, unless it came first of all, from home.

III

Participation in a strong religious community, a faith convinced each of us is a child of God, and yes, a third emphasis in that youthful Samaritan's home must have lain in an emphasis on caring. Yes, caring. When the Samaritan saw the suffering man in the ditch his commitment to human beings compelled him to service.

Now it is true, of course, homes do not always make the difference. Good people have come from terrible homes, and terrible people have come from good homes. But in general, I would say a good home can fashion a good person. And you and I know tragic homes can breed tragic and injured adults.

I read an article the other day by C.L Sulzberger about a certain father, a drunken cobbler named Vissarion Djugashvili and the impact he made not only on his own family, but on the 20th century as well. As Sulzberger writes, the fact that Vissarion Djugashvili beat his little son Iosif constantly and cruelly certainly produced a significant effect on the youngster's subsequent life and therefore upon the history of Russia and the world. Being beaten was both painful and humiliating, as little Iosef discovered, and later in his own adulthood, with a new name, Josef Stalin, he relished subjecting his opponents to this double punishment of pain and humiliation. "Beat, beat, and once again beat," Stalin prodded prosecutors time and again. "Constant and undeserved dreadful beating in his youth," writes Sulzberger, "had given the heartless dictator a very special reverence for this form of brutality, partly because of his own victimization and partly because his father Vissarion had similarly tortured Iosef's mother, whom the boy clearly loved and respected."

I tend to believe the cruel and brutal home and childhood of Joseph Stalin, haunts us this very day.

And just as Stalin's childhood drove him to cruelty--millions of people tyrannized, brutalized, murdered--so I tend to believe a childhood exposed to caring and service can also shape and nurture a life of caring and service, like that of the Samaritan.

One of the prophets and major caregivers of our time is Marian Wright Edelman, the President of the Children's Defense Fund. Read her autobiographical reflections and she tells you she was brought up in a staunchly Christian home. She speaks vividly of many things provided in that home. She insists "that the measure of our worth lies inside our heads and hearts, and not outside in our possessions or on our backs." She remembers as an eight year old going to help her brother Harry clean the bed and bedsores of a sick and poor woman, learning "what even the smallest helping hands and kindness could mean to a person in need." I gained from my parents, she writes, "the legacy of service. My siblings and I learned that extra intellectual and material gifts brought with them the privilege and responsibility of sharing with others less fortunate. In sum, we learned that service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time."

What a home! I wonder if this prayer of Marion Wright Edelman is similar to a prayer a young Samaritan heard on the lips of his mother some 2000 years ago:

Oh god, help us try to do the right thing and leave the results to You. Help us to plant and water and nourish as many seeds of hope and love and care as we can, even if we do not see them flower or will not know what harvest they will yield. Help us like Job to be able to say, "I have always acted justly and fairly. I was eyes for the blind and feet for the lame. I was like a father and mother to the poor and took the side of strangers in trouble. I destroyed the power of cruel men and rescued their victims."…

O Lord, help me to be honest
so my children will learn honesty.
 Help me to be kind
so my children will learn kindness.
Help me to be faithful
so my children will learn faith.
 Help me to love
so my children will be loving.

If anyone might make a child good, it would be a mother in a home like that.

And so we close. We see a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan all walking the road from Jerusalem to Jericho one day long years ago. Each comes upon exactly the same scene. Two of the three see a problem to be avoided. One of them, the Samaritan, recognizes an opportunity to be seized. He has been known ever since as "The good Samaritan." We do not know for sure what made that Samaritan good. But this morning, I'll wager, we can discover it in his home.