The Good [__________]

A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California.

TW, racism: a historic account of violent language toward Indigenous people is quoted in this sermon.

I’d say the most common understanding of the moral of the story of this morning’s best-known parable is something like: be like the Good Samaritan. Help anyone you see who is in trouble or suffering, even at risk to your own health and safety, and even if it costs you a great deal.

It’s a worthy message. And. You can pretty much guarantee that when Jesus presents us with a parable, it is never as simple as, “the moral of the story is …” There is always more. And we can begin to see the “more” here when we consider the title this story was given after Jesus’ telling: “The Good Samaritan.”

Because we know that Jesus is talking to one of his own people here: this lawyer – this scholar of scripture, of the law of Moses. They share the same religion and culture. And in that culture, a Samaritan is decidedly other. Understood to be unclean, and backwards, and even dangerous.  

So, the most unexpected thing about this story, to Jesus’ listener that day, was not that the religious professionals would ignore a suffering person. Contemporary listeners would likely have been as unsurprised by that as listeners are today.

No, the most unexpected thing about this story was that a Samaritan was the hero.

On the treacherous and dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, it would be inconceivable to imagine the Samaritan as anything other than the perpetrator of violence; part of that unforgiving landscape.

So when reading this parable, instead of Good Samaritan, we might think, “Good Insert-Marginalized -Group-Here.” A group expected to be bad. Violent. Dangerous. Dirty. So that the notion of a “good” one is an exception. An anomaly. Or maybe even a joke.

In 1866, future-President Theodore Roosevelt gave a lecture in New York City, following his time on the so-called frontier in what was then known as the Dakota territory. In this lecture, he asserted that, “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian [is] the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every 10 are.”

Roosevelt was referencing a common American “proverbial racist invective,” often said to be coined by General Philip Sheridan. It goes like this:“the only Good Indian is a Dead Indian.”

Chilling and painful to our ears.

Our Parable’s title, never spoken by Jesus, starts to sound almost offensive. Almost like a slur. The Good Samaritan. The Good Indian. The Good … Immigrant.

As Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre, a Social Ethics and Latinx Studies scholar, has said:

“The story plays on the bigoted expectation of its first readers that all other Samaritans are bad. If we tried to recapture the force of Jesus’ story in terms of our own day, we might say that a white man was beaten up and left by the side of the road; that one by one, several clergy – all of them privileged white men – walked by and ignored their injured compatriot; and that then a “illegal alien” came along and took care of the injured person. So, contrary to racist expectations that all “illegal” immigrants, specifically those from south of the border, are dirty, lazy, and morally suspect, the story becomes the ‘Good Illegal.’”[i]  

Can you imagine the power of Jesus preaching this parable in this country today? Well, I am not sure we have to imagine it. Because, church, preaching this parable today is our job.

We have had and we do have and we will have powerful people — presidents and princes and pastors and priests — insist that those people, or those people, or those people are “Bad.” So bad that “the most vicious of [us] have more moral principle than the average of [them].” So bad that to imagine anything else would require a qualifier. The Good Samaritan. So bad that that they must be: arrested, imprisoned, displaced, starved, destroyed, made sick, cleansed. Erased.

And this morning Jesus suggests that when we hear a group of people being characterized that way, it’s a sure sign that they are the answer to the lawyer’s question:

“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asks. “the one you have been told is not,” Jesus answers.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is not – or at least not only – a simple call to charity and good works. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a push to the kind of liberation that might feel like total destruction, at first. Might feel like the pain of walls coming down. It is a challenge to understand the kind of love of neighbor the people of God are called to.

The kind of love of neighbor that might well ask us to tear down the most embedded structures in our hearts and minds. Walls that have been set in place between us and others. Walls our families and cultures and nations have insisted designate us neighbors from them.

But if we can accept the call to be healed by the Samaritan — disinfected with wine, and anointed with oil — we will be carried to the other side of those crushed walls. We will get the answer to the lawyer’s first question: “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” Because when Jesus speaks of eternal life, he speaks of living. Now. Not in some theoretical future. And living with true love of true neighbor is what transforms the treacherous road from Jerusalem to Jericho into the Realm of God. Where every child of God shows the love of neighbor to one another, and the true identity of every “other” — of every person ever qualified as the “unlikely Good” — is revealed as neighbor. And, as the hero of the story, all along.

“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asks. “the one you have been told is not,” Jesus answers.

[i] The Peoples’ Bible, p 1487