What can you possibly add to a parable like this?
And yet there’s so much to say about this parable. Part of me wants to just sit down and let it speak for itself. But another part of me enjoys every time this comes up and the privilege of getting to think and say (yet something more) about it.
On reading the Parable of the Good Samaritan this time (this year), I got to thinking about dangerous roads. Because that’s one thing this parable is known for: the road Jesus sets it on, the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, which is (or was) one of the most treacherous in the world. Today if you travel it, it’s nicely paved, it’s got security checkpoints (which, I should note, makes it dangerous for some of the inhabitants of modern-day Israel and not others). But it’s not a road (today) you’d expect to travel and possibly not make it out alive. As it was in Jesus’ day.
Even as late as the 1950s when Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta traveled to the Holy Land--before the modern pavement that’s there today was laid--you could observe the danger of this road. It’s topography, for one; it stretches from the lowest point on the entire planet, the plane of Jericho, to the heights of Jerusalem, climbing over 3000 feet in just 17 miles. Along much of the way on both sides are steep cliffs of pocked limestone caves.
You can die of thirst on that road, or hunger, but more likely you’d be robbed by someone hiding in one of the limestone caves or around the next sharp turn.
It’d be like Dr. King, visiting the Holy Land, to notice the danger of this road--not just because he was familiar with Jesus’ parable about it, but also because he was a black man, in the Jim Crow south, and black men from the Jim Crow south had to study their roads in a way the rest of us do not. Is this one safe to travel? Will I be able to fill my car with gas or are all the gas stations on this route unfriendly to black drivers? And once you run out of gas on a southern road, you may not make it out alive. What about lodging? What about getting pulled over? Worst of all fears, what about white vigilante mobs?
A couple years ago a group of us pilgrims to the South--another group from St. James will be going this fall--got to travel the road from Selma to Montgomery. That was a dangerous road. Not any more, but (I swear) you can still feel its ghosts as you drive it. Viola Liuzzo was a mother of five watching the news from her home in Detroit about the Voting Rights March and, wanting to help, drove down to Alabama to shuttle and protect the marchers as they walked from Selma to Montgomery. She was killed on the road by three Klansmen.
Everyone who lives in this country should travel that road and meet its ghosts at least once.
When I was a kid, there was a dangerous road near our home--thankfully not too near. This was (very) rural Ohio. It was the road where the kids would meet up after school to settle disagreements--Overholzer Road. It’s a long flat road that cuts straight through a cornfield. The supporters of one faction would show up and drive in their cars from one end of the street, and supporters of the other guy would show up from the other end of the street until they met in the middle and the fighting would commence. I went to one, once, and got out of there pretty fast.
I rode my bike a lot in those fields growing up but always avoided that road. Everything about it felt sinister and unsafe.
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I wonder what all the reasons people traveled the road from Jericho to Jerusalem were. Visiting family and friends. Maybe priests and rabbis from Jerusalem tending to the Jewish community in Jericho. Certainly merchants, and farmers, carrying food and wares to the markets. That must have been scary. Pilgrims, coming up to Jerusalem to make sacrifices at the Temple or at festival time. They posted extra sentries at those times of year, but there’s nothing in this parable that suggests anything like a festival was going on.
I wonder what the man beat up and left for dead was doing on that road. Or the priest then the Levite, who passed him by. What errand was the Samaritan himself running?No one traveling that road was safe, at least not among these men in the parable.
Which brings us to an important insight about this story: there are times when helping others is a risky gambit, for your livelihood, your reputation, hopefully not also your life, but maybe some here will have (or have had) that experience at some point.
If you’re anyone who helps others on a regular-enough basis, you’ll encounter these times when helping someone comes at a personal cost.
You may be criticized, or teased. It may cost you financially. It may cost you a relationship. Your reputation, with some. You may be written off as gullible, naive, not aware of the way the world works.
My recollection from my illustrated children’s Bible growing up was that the Good Samaritan had on fancy robes, a big coin purse, a horse of his own--he was a man of luxury who had the luxury of helping someone else. He didn’t have to worry about his reputation, or whether he’d get out alive; he could just pay off anyone who threatened him. All that from one illustration. Definitely not the parable itself, though.
I think Jesus means us to understand that the risk was the same for all three of these men, the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan. And only one decided the risk was worth it.
As I always do when I preach this parable, I went back and re-read King’s sermon on it--significantly, preached the night before his assassination in Memphis. As I mentioned earlier, he picked up on the danger of the setting, the road. He was on a dangerous road that night, with that trip to Memphis.
One of the things that’s so powerful about the sermon was how he was living out the Samaritan’s example that very night, helping those abused sanitation workers when no one else would. Surely all this was on his mind as he put pen to paper to prepare what would be his last sermon.
And it’s the end of his reflection on this passage that’s so incredible.
The first two men, King says, walked by and asked: if I stop and help this man, what will happen to me?
The third man, the Samaritan, walked by and turned that question on its head: if I don’t stop to help this man, what will happen to him?
There’s risk in giving, in helping. Whether it's financial, personal, physical, a seeming small inconvenience or possibly your life--if not your actual, physical life, then maybe the life you knew, or the life you were comfortable with.
Three men passed by, only one asked: if I don’t stop to help, what will happen to him?
And so to conclude with Jesus’ own words to his audience that day (because what else can you say?): Go, and do likewise.