"The Good Samaritan" - Vincent van Gogh
Saint Luke 10:25–37
It was the timing and the location.
The timing couldn’t have been worse.
Most of us had friends who we were planning to spend the day with. There was potato salad to make, barbeques to plan, and in general just whiling the hours, drinking beer, watching fireworks, and taking a well-deserved day off from the news. We may not have found out until the next morning that somewhere in Texas, flood waters had risen so fast that, it is said, at it’s peak the waters of the Guadalupe River at Kerrville, Texas were flowing so fast that they could have filled an Olympic size swimming pool in under a second.
The river height surged from less than 12 inches to more than 34 feet and considering that only “six inches of rapidly moving water can knock you off your feet”1 a disaster was in the making. We know now that right in the path of those rapidly rising waters was a place called Camp Mystic with about 700 children eagerly awaiting the beginning of a summer session.
The camp has a storied history in Texas. Former first lady Laura Bush was a counsellor at that camp that her daughter Jenna Bush Hager described on the Today Show as being “almost like a spiritual, beautiful place.” And she continued, “"I think as parents, we think about the horror of sending our kids to a place that's supposed to be — and is — healing and fun and joyful and all the things that kids deserve to have, and then something like this {happens}."2
That’s what made the news of this week so devastating. We’ve been to places like Camp Mystic. While the timing could not have been worse and the location could not have been worse because it happened at a place that all of us can relate to.
We know those places which is why when we realized the magnitude of what was happening we remembered that, for many of us in our lives, there were places like Camp Mystic. For some of us there was a Walcamp, or a Lutherdale, or a Lutheran Outdoor Ministry Centre, or the Twin Lakes Bible Camp, where we went or, in my case, sent against my will to eat somewhat questionable food, drink drinks that were affectionately referred to as “bug juice” for the protein content that was often floating around in them, and fight off mosquitoes the size of B-52s. Perhaps the only redeeming quality to the “outward bound” experiences where that is was the place where boys and girls who had the hots for each other learned how to sneak away from their camp counsellors to play “huggy-bear” and “smash mouth.”
Dr. Fred B. Craddock once wrote in a commentary on today’s Gospel, “Great care should be given in our culture to analogies to the Samaritan”3 and he is right but this week right along with the sadness is the hope that rescue workers, first responders, meal servers, were other good Samaritans who could only offer themselves and their hugs brought to the scene.
I don’t know but I can’t help but think that we owe a lot to the lawyer who approached Jesus out of the blue on that fine day and asked his question about who is or who isn’t my neighbour for he set Jesus up to “singlehandedly reshape the reputation of Samaritans, to now be associated with care and compassion for strangers.”4
Without this lawyer and his question, we wouldn’t have Good Samaritan Hospitals, Good Samaritan laws, and the idea that Samaritans are people we see every day who make it their business to... well ... do good.
And the really strange thing is that the lawyer didn’t start off talking about this life at all. His question pertained to the next. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”5
The lawyer knew the answer to this question. Every good Jew did. It was the great Shema that was memorized with the same gusto that we memorized Luther’s Small Catechism. “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.”6
“Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”7
Fortunately for us, the lawyer asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to and sets Jesus up to tell him and us a really great story.
It’s another one of those stories that we know by heart. We think we know it, but do we? We think we know who we are in it, but do we?
Of course, we are the Samaritan! We would help! We would be there! We have been there for friends who needed a hand! We’ll lend a hand even a neighbour whose name we’re not sure of. Was it Fred? Buddy? Olive? Mabel? Anyway, who knows! They needed help and I was there we say with our chest all puffed up.
But hey! We also live in a big city, and we know that most times to stop and help can be as benign as reaching into your pocket for a couple of bucks but there are other times – late at night on a dark and scary street – that maybe discretion is the better part of valour.
That’s the secret to understanding the two guys that pass by.
Don’t worry about all the other stuff you’ve heard about them in other sermons. Those were characterizations of Jewish life, and rules, and regulations designed by others to explain the priest and the Levites actions but have no basis in reality. In the words of the incredible Amy-Jill Levine, Professor of Jewish Studies and New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School we can come away from some interpretations we have heard with “the impression that the Jewish audience would find the eating of a ham sandwich damning, but would not care about a violent physical attack.”8
Dr. Martin Luther King got to the heart of the matter when he said in a sermon once:
I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that these men were afraid...And so the first question that the priest {and} the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”9
That’s the question that I believe is driving the searchers in Texas who even now are who risking life and limb in their recovery efforts. Not, what will happen to me in muddy, debris filled waters but what will happen to those families if their loved ones are never found? So, they search.
A bearded guy named Erik Muncy (who my totally uniformed, stereotyped guess is that he probably did not vote in the last presidential election the way I did) shakes his head while he searches.
The Christian Science Monitor told his story.
“These are people’s entire lives,” he says, resting a tattooed hand on the steering wheel. “People are literally throwing their whole homes away.”
He’s talking about the people now, not the possessions. He’s talking about the two friends who are helping him deliver supplies to flood victims, about the friends and relatives helping gut the flooded-out homes, about the emergency responders still picking their way through miles of mud, debris, and flattened cypress trees."
But, he adds, “All of this is Texas.”10
Somewhere along side of him, we are told by The Guardian.
A contingent of firefighters and first responders from Mexico arrived in Texas over the weekend to aid in search and rescue efforts.
“When it comes to firefighters, there’s no borders,” Ismael Aldaba, founder of Fundación 911, in Acuña, Mexico, told CNN on Tuesday. “There’s nothing that’ll avoid us from helping ... another family. It doesn’t matter where we’re at in the world. That’s the whole point of ... what we do.”11
They could have said, “They don’t want us in their country. “They are trying to deport some of our innocent people left and right. Why should we help them?” They could have said that, but they didn’t.
That’s what makes Jesus story and the stories I just told you so surprising. Dr. Amy-Jill Levine tells us:
{As} soon as the story mentions a priest and a Levite, everybody knows the third person will be an Israelite. It’s like going from Larry to Moe to Curly. The shock is that the third one is a Samaritan, and Samaritans were the enemy.”12
She points out that Jesus’ original audience might have thought, “I’d rather die than acknowledge that one from that group saved me.”13
Imagine a staunch MAGA member being pulled out of ditch by a Mexican firefighter. Imagine a good, solid, liberal being finding herself being rescued by some guy in a “Make America Great Again” hat. That’s the kind of stuff Jesus is talking about here.
And there is only one way to understand it.
It’s only if we see ourselves not as the uncaring ones, or even the Samaritan, but rather as the guy being beaten up by the side of the road.
Someday we might be that person.
He needed help and he accepted it from whoever it was offered because when your broken and bloodied and scared out of your wits you really don’t care who’s by your side. This is not a time for pop quizzes or theological purity tests. This is a time to accept the grace that is coming to you in whatever form it comes.
Those folks in Texas aren’t asking if you are a believer or a non-believer. They aren’t asking about marital status or care if you were gay or straight. They aren’t even asking if you were a Republican or a Democrat. If you need help, they’re giving it.
“‘Love your neighbor’ is not a metaphor. It’s a commandment to love the next person we encounter as much as, and as well as, we happen to love ourselves.”14
And who is my neighbour? That is, who is worthy of love and dignity? Who deserves compassion? Jesus says, “Everyone who needs it.”
________________
1. Stephen J. Beard et al., “See How the Texas Floods Unfolded and Why Camp Mystic Was in a Hazardous Location,” USA Today, July 11, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/07/11/texas-floods-guadalupe-river-camp-mystic/84509122007/.
2. KiMi Robinson, “Jenna Bush Hager Reveals Ties to Camp Mystic,” USA Today, July 9, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/07/08/jenna-bush-hager-camp-mystic-texas-floods/84513787007/.
3. Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary. (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990). 151.
4. Jennifer S. Wyant, “Commentary on Luke 10:25-37,” Working Preacher, June 8, 2025, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-15-3/commentary-on-luke-1025-37-6.
5. St. Luke 10:25. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)
6. St. Luke 10:27. (NRSV)
7. St. Luke 10:28. (NLT) [NLT= The New Living Translation. (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015)
8. Amy-Jill Levine and Maria Mayo, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2018), p. 77-115.
9. ibid.
10. Henry Gass, “‘this Is Texas.’ Amid Flood Despair, Locals Mobilize to Help.,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 2025, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2025/0708/texas-flash-flood-disaster-recovery
11. Cecelia Nowell, “Firefighters from Mexico Aid Texas Flood Search and Rescue: ‘There Are No Borders,’” The Guardian, July 8, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/mexico-firefighters-texas-flooding-search-rescue.
12. Amy Jill Levine, “Knowing and Preaching the Jewish Jesus,” The Christian Century, March 27, 2019, https://www.christiancentury.org/interviews/knowing-and-preaching-jewish-jesus?
13. Levine, Short Stories by Jesus. p. 104
14. Peter Marty, “Need Thy Neighbor,” The Christian Century, August 31, 2016, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-08/need-thy-neighbor?
No comments:
Post a Comment