"Give a Man a Fish..."
July 15, 2007: 7th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org
Just then a lawyer stood
up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said,
"what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?"
He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your
mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And
Jesus said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and
you will live." But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus,
"And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied,
"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the
hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving
him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and
when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite,
when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him,
he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having
poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought
him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two
denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said,
'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever
more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor
to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said,
"The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him,
"Go and do likewise."
Sermon:
There's no real reason for
me to preach this morning. I mean, we all know the Parable of the Good
Samaritan. We've heard it a thousand times. We all know about the
hapless fellow who fell among thieves along the Jericho road, and how
a priest and a Levite, high pious men both, passed him by on the other
side, while a hated Samaritan carried him to an inn and cared for him...
yadda yadda yadda. And now, following Jesus' injunction to "love
our neighbors as ourselves," no matter how gross or unlovely or unlikely
that neighbor may be, we've got Good Samaritan hospitals, Good Samaritan
laws on the books, Good Samaritan RV parks. So, alright, Jesus, we get
it, we all get it.
Only what if we don't? What
if we don't get it? What if we've never heard this story before?
Think about it. Sure, there's Jesus, standing there in the middle
of Luke, chapter 10, telling us that the highest moral purpose in life
is to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all
our strength, and with all our mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves,
but why should we believe him? Who's Jesus to be bossing us around,
telling us what to do?
Well, he's the messiah, isn't
he? the savior, some say even the very son, the only begotten of God.
He's the whole point of the gospel, really. And as Christians, that
is, followers of the way of Christ, Jesus is the heart of our faith.
Some 2000 years later, he's still the reason\ we come together week
after week, to hear the stories and listen for his voice, to ask ourselves
"What did Jesus say? What would Jesus do?" So if Jesus tells us
to love God and our neighbor, we're bloody well going to believe him,
aren't we?
Only leave it to some lawyer
to louse it all up with his pesky questions—"Teacher, what must
I do to inherit eternal life?" And when Jesus gives him the answer,
even then he can't leave well enough alone. He has to go and split
hairs, to "justify himself"—before Jesus, no less! Small
wonder, then, that Jesus delivers him this slam-dunk smack-down of a
parable. Take that, you and your legalistic, pietistic buddies, all
you hypocritical priests and Levites and scribes and Pharisees, always
trying to drag Jesus down! You just don't get it, do you?
Ah, there's the rub. You
see, no, the poor guy doesn't get it, which is why he's
asking the question in the first place. It seems that Mr. Lawyer
here has been the victim of nearly two millennia of insider bias. The
community of Christian believers down through the ages has set him up
as the punching bag for Our Man Jesus Even the language of the passage
itself has been tweaked to make him look the fool. For instance, when
we hear that he is a lawyer, we're more likely to recall any number
of tasteless jokes than to see him for what he is, a religious scholar,
a dedicated seeker after holiness in the Jewish tradition. In the same
way, we hear his desire to "justify himself" with very modern ears,
thinking he must want to rationalize his behavior and absolve himself
from blame. Yet, as commentator Richard Swanson notes in his book,
Provoking the Gospel of Luke, "In Jewish contexts, the word is
best translated as 'be strictly observant.' The observance in this
case is Torah observance, which is to say that the person who is
dikaios (that is, just or righteous) aims her whole life so that
it adds up to a witness to the stable and orderly love of God" (p.
162, Pilgrim Press, 2006).
Then there's the kicker,
that word, "test," as in "Just then a lawyer stood up to test
Jesus." It's rendered "test" here in the New Revised Standard
Version, but in other translations, it's "put to the test" or
even "tempt." Now there's a loaded word. So, essentially,
we've been told that what we have here is a snaky little attorney
trying to entangle Jesus in a semantic legal game. "Well, that depends
on what your definition of 'is' is..." But of course, Jesus, our
hero, isn't having any of it. Without even breaking a sweat, Our Lord
turns the trap back on the tempter, forcing him to answer his own questions
and eat his own words. "Which of these three, do you think, was a
neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" Jesus
asks. "The one who showed him mercy?" "Then go and do likewise."
Oh, snap! That's going to leave a mark! Go Jesus! Go Jesus!
Go Jesus!
Yes, okay, so that's one
interpretation. But it's not a very flattering portrait of Jesus,
sort of savior as smart-alecky know-it-all. It also strikes me as pretty
unfair. I mean, we know Jesus is always right, but then we have
the benefit of nearly 2000 years of hindsight, right? This poor shmoe
is encountering Jesus for the very first time, and to him, Jesus seems
just another itinerant preacher up from the sticks, claiming intimate
knowledge of the Almighty. As a faithful Jew and a Biblical scholar,
no less, it's his duty to test Jesus, to put him through his paces
to determine whether what he's got to say is helpful or harmful.
So he engages Jesus in a little
rabbinic back-and-forth to test his mettle. First, a lob, designed to
weed out the obvious spiritual quacks: "Teacher, what must one do
to inherit eternal life? What does God really want? What makes for the
good life?" Jesus sends it back over the net with ease: "What is
written in the law? After all, God has given us Torah to answer just
this question. How do you read?" Our lawyer friend is intrigued
with his new conversation partner, and decides to continue, quoting
familiar words from Deuteronomy—"You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might"
(6:5)—the "great commandment" still inscribed on the doorposts
of observant Jewish homes, and Leviticus—"You shall love your neighbor
as yourself" (19:18). To which Jesus replies, quite simply, "Yep,
that's it. Thanks for playing."
"Of course that's easy
to say," the lawyer thinks, "but things get a lot more complicated
in real life." So he pushes on, pushing back a bit on this new teacher
, "But, rabbi, just who is my neighbor?" which is just the opening
Jesus needs to lay out his vision of radical neighborliness. "A man
was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and when he was attacked by
thieves, it wasn't the priest who stopped to help him, or the devout
Levite, but a Samaritan...?"—a Samaritan, like those who
refused to receive my own disciples just a few verses ago; a Samaritan,
like those whose inhospitality toward Jewish pilgrims just a few years
before the writing of Luke's Gospel resulted in such terrible mutual
bloodshed that the unrest had to be put down with mass crucifixions
at the hands of imperial Rome (according to the historian Josephus in
his Antiquities of the Jews, XX.6.1 118).
"You mean one of
those Samaritans? Oh, you have no idea how complicated it is, and
how simple. Which of these, do you think, was a neighbor to the man?"
And then the lawyer gets it. Which one was a real neighbor? "The
one who showed him mercy." "Yes, my friend, go and do likewise.
Ground your life in that and make it your goal, for on such understanding
is built the eternal life, the life of God's kingdom, of God's purpose
on earth as it is in heaven."
Despite what we may have been
told in the past, despite what we may have assumed, what Luke gives
us in this passage this morning isn't a boxing match, where Kid Christ
takes on all comers with his divine right hook. This is an argument
in the best sense of the word, a holy conversation between two lovers
of God's law, designed to poke and prod, pull and push one another
into greater understanding of just what it means to "love the Lord."
Even Jesus, whom we do acknowledge as rabbi, even savior, doesn't
just hand the man the answers—nor does he shove them down his throat.
Jesus is a better teacher than that. He engages this new conversation
partner, draws him out. He takes his questions seriously, perhaps more
seriously even than he originally intends. Most of all, Jesus makes
the man do the work himself. Notice that Luke puts all the right answers
in the lawyer's mouth, not Jesus'.
So when we hear this lawyer
confronting Jesus in today's reading, we can ill-afford to demonize
him and dismiss him as an opponent of God. Jesus certainly didn't.
And if Jesus didn't, then we certainly have no right to mock anyone's
questions—or their answers, for that matter. Argue, yes—argue hard.
But not mock. After all, we understand that whatever pieces of the truth
we've managed to discover have come to us as a result of hard work,
yes, but also a long process of trial and error, hit and miss, good
timing, better luck, and a whole lot of God's good grace. Nor should
we presume to judge anyone else's motivations. Just because someone
disagrees with us, even vehemently, doesn't necessarily mean they
don't have the best of intentions, that they're not trying their
best to discern what they, too, must do to inherit eternal life. They
can be wrong and faithful at the same time, and have been. So can we,
and so have we.
There's an old proverb: "Give
a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you
feed him for a lifetime." The faith Jesus shares with us operates
on a similar principle, as we see in our passage today. It might go
something like "Give someone the right answer and you make them correct.
Teach someone to ask the right questions and you make them faithful."
That is our goal here, as followers of Jesus. We don't come together
simply to learn the right answers by rote, to swallow one slippery fish
after another, like a pack of seals. We come here to learn how to fish
for ourselves, following Jesus' instruction. As his students, we hope
to become better, more faithful people, people who ask the right questions
and don't flinch from uncomfortable answers, people who do justice,
love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Humbly, because nothing we
talk about here Sunday after Sunday is self-evident, nothing is obvious.
Just because it's good news doesn't mean it's easy. Ideas that
sound simple on the surface, like "Love God and your neighbor,"
or "welcome the stranger" or "judge not, lest you be judged"
are in fact incredibly complicated. And we can't fall back on "The
Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." No, we are all
learners here, lifelong learners, and in this classroom, there are no
short fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice, no easy rote answers. Our
whole life, as individuals and constellations of intersecting communities—it's
all one long essay question, full of twists and turns, compare and contrast,
and what ifs? At the end of the day, we all ought to be very thankful
that our teacher grades on a curve, a very graceful curve indeed. Come,
let us go and do likewise.