Everybody
Needs Good Neighbours
ON THIS TREACHEROUS climb down from Jerusalem to Jericho, on this rocky desert road, so went the story Jesus told (Luke 10.25-37), a man had been mugged and stripped. Street violence is nothing new.
There he lay semi-conscious, half dead. Of the people who passed him as he was lying there, too weak to groan, only one came to his aid. The stranger brought the kind of emergency treatment that was required: pouring on oil and wine, he bandaged up the wounds. Olive oil and wine were the medicines of the day, healing balm poured in to soothe and restore.
The Samaritan could represent to us practical care in action. There have always been religious enthusiasts ready to do away with the doctor: as if the Holy Spirit chooses to heal without the intervention of good medicine and proper care.
Of course we have to beware of making the doctor into a new ‘god’. This may be a danger in our age, when the meeting of so many needs seems to be focused on the medical practitioner. Medical science is so advanced that anything seems possible — and ought to be delivered!
For Paul, Luke was the ‘beloved physician’, or in a modern version ‘our dear friend Luke the doctor’ (Col 4.14). It is a healthy way for us to view the doctor, as a dear friend and a gift from God.
It was such a gift that the battered man needed, lying near to death in the gutter, in Luke’s own gospel story. He did not need a good sermon, nor prayer ministry. He needed love in action. He needed medical attention to get him back on his feet. He needed a hospital — the ‘tender loving care’ of good nursing at the inn. And he needed an 'ambulance' — the donkey who got him there.
In all kinds of ways we need to hold together prayer with practical action. Oil and wine were the Samaritan’s gift and we can say grace over our medicines. They are no less than good gifts of God’s creation to bring us his help.
Religious inability
The religious people do not get a good press in this story, as in other stories of Jesus. The priest had already given the mucky body a wide berth. Maybe he feared that if he stopped he would also be mugged. Maybe he wanted to avoid the actual defilement of touching the dead. Maybe he was squeamish like me.
We need to identify with this priest, because Jesus was talking about us and our inability as religious people to come near to others in pain. Our very religiosity may be a way of escaping messy realities.
But the Samaritan came ‘where the man was’. The shock of the story was that a Samaritan got closest to the man in his need. He came where he was.
Relationships between Jews and Samaritans were at an all-time low. Today we would have to illustrate the story from our own experiences of racial conflict. With which race or culture do you have most difficulty in living alongside? Then the word of Jesus is that it could be a person of that race who comes to illustrate the neighbourly love of God’s law to you.
This stranger, in coming right to where the man was, also illustrated the gospel. As we think at Christmas time of Jesus coming into our world we can see the Samaritan as a type of Christ himself. He mirrors the way God in Jesus stepped into the human situation and came precisely where we were.
In Jesus God became my neighbour. He came to where troubled humanity lay half dead in sin and sorrow. So that now there is no experience of human weakness, sickness, sin or failure where he cannot reach; where he does not come to where we are; where he does not pour in his healing oil and wine; where he does not raise us up and put us back on the road.
Loving action
What drove the Samaritan to action was something within him. When he came to where the man was he ‘had compassion’. The word used here (and elsewhere by Luke) is the remarkable Greek verb splanknizomai. It is a gut word which we might translate as ‘feeling wrenched in the stomach’.
Compassion is not some heady idealism. It is a physical experience, a wrenching of the gut, a seizing of the whole person. Compassion — feeling ‘with’ another — hurts, and it was that hurt which moved the Samaritan to act in loving care.
Healing ministry is much more about feeling the pain of the human condition than it is about some victorious triumphalism. It is much more about bending over each other in gut-wrenching agony than about miracle cures.
There is a greater miracle here in this story than the stage-managed miracles of the tele-evangelists. It is the miracle of two ‘neighbours’. ‘Neighbours should be there for one another . . . that’s when good neighbours become good friends!’ It rings out on a daily basis from the telly. Under the banality of the ‘soap’ lies a real quest. Who or what is a neighbour? It is precisely this question which provoked the telling of the parable.
These two culturally estranged men came together to be true neighbours. They illustrate how God in Christ comes to where we are. And they challenge us to be seized with his compassion.