http://www.chapel.duke.edu/sermons/012295.htm



                          den barmhjertige samaritaner



How Does the Story End?



Text: Luke 10:25-37.



Ron Allen has said, "A familiar text is sometimes

like a visit with an old cousin: we may not expect

to learn much that is new, exciting, or challenging

(Contemporary Biblical Interpretation for

Preaching, Judson Press, Valley Forge, Penna.,

1984, p. 22). And is any parable more familiar, and

therefore less engaging, that the parable of the

Good Samaritan.



Our task will be that of opening up this beloved

old story to new congregational insight. I like the

way that Bernard Brandon Scott puts it:



"Our task is like that of restoring paintings that

over the ages have darkened and lost their original

luster and coloration. Just as the restoration of

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel has generated

controversy in the art world between those who see

the project as restoring the painting's

authenticity, its original colors, and those who

see it as a travesty, so the restoration of the

parables generates controversy. The removal of

patina may reveal colors and shapes we are

unaccustomed to seeing in our favorite images"

(Hear Then The Parable, Fortress, Philadelphia,

1989, p. 19).



That's what we will be attempting to do today.

Through a literary analysis of this parable,

walking through the various moves in the story, we

shall attempt to gain new insight.



"[The Good Samaritan is] a simple story, and even

so, with all our sophistication in science and

technology, we hark back to it. We can remember it

and retell it. We see examples in our daily lives

that bring it to our minds. It is taught by

religious institutions, along with all the subtle

doctrines and theologies we cannot remember. It is

reinforced in the secular media through television

stories and literary narratives that build on its

simple outline. Jim Casey in The Grapes of Wrath is

the Good Samaritan. So is the Lone Ranger. Mother

Teresa in the dusty streets of Calcutta and Albert

Schweitzer on the muddy trails of Africa are too.

The Good Samaritan is the legendary figure who

helps someone else along the road. The story is one

of those ancient myths that embodies the deepest

meanings in our culture. It learning it and

reshaping it we define what it means to be

compassionate.



-- Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for

Others and Helping Ourselves, Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 1991, pp. 160-161.



___________________________________________



In my survey 49 percent of the people interviewed

said they would be able to tell the story of the

Good Samaritan if asked to do so, 45 percent said

they would not be able to, and 6 percent were

unsure whether they could tell it or not. Among

those who attended religious services every week,

the proportion who thought they could tell the

story rose 69 percent...only 35 percent of those in

their twenties or thirties thought they could tell

the story, compared with 55 percent of those in

their fifties or older.



-- Wuthnow, p. 161.



_______________________________



"You cannot tell people what to do, you can only

tell them parables."



-- W. H. Auden



______________________________



Recently, a convenience store in our area was

robbed. The entire robbery was captured on the

store's security cameras. A stick up man entered

the store just after midnight. He pointed a gun a

the woman behind the counter, a mother who had just

put her two children to bed for the night a couple

of hours ago. She complied immediately with his

demand for cash. She handed to him everything she

had in the cash register.



Then (we saw the whole thing on the camera) he

calmly looked at the cash, looked back at her, and

shot her through the chest. She died before the

police got there. The stick up man is still at

large.  Random cruelty, pointless death, all on a

summer night in North Carolina.



And when I saw it; it turned away. I flipped the

remote channel selector and, within a few minutes,

I no could no longer see the sight of the stickup

man, calmly killing a young mother on a summer

night.



______________________



PRAYER:



Lord, give us eyes to see, hands to help. Save us

from the temptation to pass by on the other side

when we are confronted with the needs of others.

Remind us of our considerable gifts for service

toward others. Recollect in our minds how we were

needy, we were hurting, we were without hope and

you reached out to us. Help us to help others as

you so extravagantly helped us. Amen.



_________________________________________



"He went to him and bandaged his wounds,...he put

him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and

took care of him."



It's a story about violence. That's how the story

begins, with a rather random act of violence. We

don't know the man's name who was beaten, robbed,

stripped, left half dead in the ditch. He is simply

one of those anonymous victims which are heaped up

on the sidelines of the Evening News.  It is a

story we have heard before, a story to which you

and I are all too comfortably adjusted.



Careful listeners to the story will note that Jesus

doesn't explicitly say that the robbers actually

robbed the man, though that is a safe assumption.

Jesus says that they "stripped" him. And if any of

you have ever been the victim of some act of

violence, you could testify that is exactly how it

feels.  You feel stripped, violated, your dignity

and humanity peeled away, exposed. Stripped.



And we are told that the man lies stripped, in the

ditch, "half dead." His story has not yet ended,

though it is at least half ended. Last year two

thousand New Yorkers ended their lives story at the

hands of fellow New Yorkers. Over three hundred New

York cab drivers took their last ride last year,

victims of some act of random violence. So we are

justified in thinking that this is probably the end

of the road, the last word in the story of the man

who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell

among thieves.



Of course, this is a parable and, in parables, the

unexpected usually always happens. It is a

narrative set up, a literary device meant to make

us ask, "What now? What will become of the poor,

bleeding man in the ditch?"



"Now by chance a priest was going down that

road...." Jesus says that this man was headed down

the same road to Jericho "by chance." He wasn't

there as an act of God or something, he was just

there "by chance." Randomly walking down the road.

The man lying in the ditch has had all of his

options stripped from him. Nothing he can do of his

own accord can enable him to keep his story going.

He lies there helpless, half-dead. The man coming

down the road therefore bears all of the burden of

responsibility for whether or not the man in the

ditch shall live or die.



"And when he saw him,...." Yes, he sees him. There

is that split second, perhaps, when he secretly

wishes that he had not seen the bloody sight in the

ditch. But no, he saw. And...."he passed on the

other side." And all potentialities, possibilities

end as he not only passes by the pitiful sight in

the ditch, he "passes by on the other side." His

own journey is continued, "on the other side" of

the road. Now, he not only has passed by the

wounded man, he now walks "on the other side."



Please don't read into the story (though you

probably already are) reasons why the man passed by

on the other side. Jesus is silent on any possible

reasons. As a priest, he could fear ritual

defilement with a corpse. Perhaps he was a rigorous

religious ritualist. Perhaps it was fear. Those who

beat the man in the ditch might be lying in wait to

beat him as well. But note that Jesus says nothing

of such reasons. A bloody body in a ditch is a

revolting sight. Have you ever come upon someone

after a bloody accident? It's ugly.



Jesus says nothing of his reasons for avoidance.

Interestingly though, we don't have to be too

creative as listeners to supply our own list of

reasons, for they are our reasons, reasons each of

us has used on similar occasions. Is there anyone

here who has not averted the eyes, not passed by on

the other side for a host of perfectly

understandable, good reasons?



And by such reasons, whatever the reason, evil

continues its way in the story, persists in

insisting on having the last word in the man's

life, for the last real action in the story, the

last recorded initiative was that of the robbers

who beat, and who stripped and who left the man

half dead. Evil rules. A man passes on by on the

other side, having distanced himself from the

wounded victim, and now the man in the ditch is

surely a bit more than half dead, having lost much

blood by this time of the day, at this point in the

story.



Another person comes down the road and he passes by

on the other side. He also bears within his life

journey the possibility of intervention, the

potential to make a difference in the way this

story is moving. Yet, when he sees the wounded man,

he too passes by on the other side, he also passes

by.



And wouldn't we? What difference can one person

make? We do have to live, don't we. The fear of

contamination by death, the fear that the evil

forces which have nearly snuffed out the life of

this fellow traveler down the road to Jericho might

snuff out our lives as well. I have seen it in my

own congregation. Someone is fired from his job;

people avoid him, as if he had some kind of

communicable disease. They don't what to catch what

he has got. This is a powerful, irrational fear,

all the more powerful because of its irrationality.

We must survive, don't we? And isn't that the whole

point of our story, survival?



"But a third man, a Samaritan, as he journeyed,

came to where he was...." We've heard this story

twice before, what's the point of repeating it

again? Let the story end, the age old story of the

triumph of evil, the power of violence. Surprise.

"And when he saw him, he went to him."



Just as Jesus did not speculate about the motives

of the two people who passed by on the other side,

so now he refuses to speculate on why this third

traveler saw him, went to him, bound up his wounds.

He touches the victim, cleans and binds his wounds.

He set him on his own beast and took care of him.



The man who was brutally beaten was powerless to

continue his journey. He was powerless to continue

his story if it had not been for this Samaritan who

chose to intersect his life journey with that of

the wounded man. By his act, the man once stripped

of his dignity, his possessions, his future, is

able to live. "And the next day...."



The Samaritan takes money out of his pocket, the

equivalent of two days' wages, a large amount of

money indeed, and gives it to the innkeeper,

saying,"Take care of him; and whatever more you

spend, I will repay you when I come back." The

third man, the Samaritan, stops his own journey

when he sees the need. He risks, detours,

extravagantly responds to the needs of the man

bleeding in the ditch, becomes the voice of the

victim, the man in the ditch who never utters a

word.



I've always found it curious that God is nowhere to

be found in this story. No one quotes scripture,

Hebrew or Christian. The story begins in violence,

a man left in the ditch, beaten black and blue,

with the stench of death hovering about, vulture-

like ready to pounce, ready to end the story. We

wish Jesus had offered some reason for the

violence, pin it upon poverty, or poor education

among the bandits, or injustice. We'd always like a

reason for violence.



One of Margaret Atwood's characters in Surfacing

says that she reads detective novels constantly

because she finds them "cold comfort but comfort"

because in detective novels violence is given

reasons "death is logical, there's always a motive"

(p. 170).



But Jesus does not attribute motive to the robbers'

brutality and thus their violence raises the

specter of evil in its worst horror. Random,

senseless, inexplicable, violence. Jesus doesn't

say that the robbers might have been victims of

poverty, thus "explaining" their robbery. He

doesn't say they were abused as children, thus

"explaining" their adult violence. In its cold

blooded randomness, evil most horribly calls our

very existence into question. Little wonder we

grope for reasons, explanations, somebody, some

social force to pin it on. Then, finding none, we

hurry by on the other side.



And at the beginning, with the man lying in the

ditch, passed by by the "there but for the grace of

God go I" crowd, we expect that will be the end of

the story.



We are content to call this the expected, normal

end of the story. We Americans have learned

stoically to accept violence such violence. But the

teller of the tale is Jesus, not stoic Marcus

Aurelius. So surprise, a third man came down the

road and the story continued, and we heard tell the

possibility that death might not be the end of the

story, that evil just might not have the final

word.



Two men came down the road and assumed that

violence, death had the last word, could not be

modified through their activity. By avoiding the

man in the ditch, refusing to stop, they conferred

absolute power upon the present evil, raised the

status quo, almighty violence and death to sacral

status. What can anybody do?



Has death, violence made it impossible for us to

live the story? What can anybody do?



The third man is not much of a philosopher,

psychologist, sociologist. He is a knee jerk

activist. He sees, he stops, he goes, he binds, he

cares, he gives. He refuses to bow to the power

which has so disempowered the beaten man. Evil is

real, bloody, there, but it is, by this story of

Jesus, denied final possibility.



We aren't told whether or not the man recovered.

Perhaps that is irrelevant to the story. Nothing in

the story leads us to believe that the third man

who stopped, who cared, who gave was motivated by

some allegiance to a successful ending. If the poor

man did not recover, would that in any way detract

from the power, the intrusive power of the third

man to change the course of the story, to wrench

possibility out of the power of destruction and

death? If the poor man never regained health, we

still would end the story in wonderment at the

decisive, effusive action of the third man.



Death is not logical. Victims of similar acts of

random violence may recover, may go on down the

road after their recovery, though they travel now

with scars. As a woman who was raped told me, "You

get up, you stand up, you go on, but you still cry

sometimes."



There is no Pollyanna reassurance here that

everything will turn out alright in the end. Evil

is real, but it is not the ultimate reality. So I

ask you a question, a question which I believe is

raised by the story: What is real? Does destruction

have the last word in our world? Or is life let

loose? Walking down many roads in life, each of us

must make a decision about that question. Who shall

name the world for us? What is real? Not to decide,

to look the other way, to pass over to the other

side, is to decide.



The third man stops and cares as a free, untethered

expression of life, of a deep, clinch-fisted

unwillingness to let death have the last word in

the story. He is rich and he wants to give.



His riches, the fullness of his life overcomes the

natural, normal human reaction to turn away, to

step to the other side, to relent to the evil that

presses in upon the story.



We can read the story otherwise. It's meaning is

thick. We can read it as illustration that the man

in the ditch is the helpless victim of meaningless

violence and therefore life is meaningless,

therefore the wise person does everything possible

to turn aside from the meaningless, to stay firmly

on the other side of suffering with our burglar

alarms, our insurance, our advanced degrees, our

dispassionate philosophical explanations for why

bad things happen to good people. Two people who

come down the road, the majority of average

Americans, live their lives in just that way. They

are free to pass by. And we do pass by.



It is the minority, one in three, the third man who

is free, rich, gifted, overflowingly confident in

his own ability to make a difference in the way the

story is going.



No doubt, the majority ask, "What difference does

that make?" So what?



In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitry has been

arrested, wrongly, for the murder of his father,

and has been exposed to an exhausting, humiliating

ordeal of being cross-examined by officials who

hold him, and everything he believes in, in

contempt. After interrogation, Dmitry falls asleep

and while he is sleeping some unknown person slips

a pillow under his head. Dmitry fastens upon this

gratuitous kindness from an anonymous stranger as

determinative for understanding his situation.

While sleeping, he dreams about the predicament of

others, of starving children, and his heart yearns

for their suffering to end.



One might ask, why did Dmitry select the simple act

of someone putting a pillow under his head to focus

upon rather than his being unjustly accused as

pivotal for the formation of his world-attitude,

his stance toward reality? The situation seems to

dictate that he understand himself as a victim,



It makes all the difference how you read reality,

how you write yourself into the story of what's

going on in the world...



(I am heavily indebted for the interpretation and

the approach of this sermon to James Breech's

stunning interpretation of the parable of the Good

Samaritan which is found in pp. 158-183 of his

book, The Silence of Jesus, The Authentic Voice of

the Historical Man, Fortress Press, Philadelphia,

PA, 1987.)