Brief synopsis of the readings: We begin in Deuteronomy with Moses reminding his people of their need to keep God’s commandments. Moses also tells them that God’s laws are not mysterious or remote. Everyone already knows the commands and needs only to carry them out. Luke’s Gospel begins with a legal scholar asking Jesus about the requirements for everlasting life and Jesus replied that he must love God completely and love his neighbor as himself. The scholar then asked: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. In this story a man is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho when he is beaten and robbed, and left half dead. First a priest and then a Levite pass him and do nothing. But then a Samaritan came upon him, provided first aid, and took the man to a local inn. The Samaritan gave the innkeeper money to provide for the man’s care. He then told the innkeeper that he would continue but would return and if the man’s care needed more money he would provide it. Jesus then asked the scholar who was the beaten man’s neighbor and the scholar responded with: “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus agreed and told him to do likewise.

When we think about the Good Samaritan we normally think about a good guy who did the right thing when he came upon a victim of robbery and assault and we’ve adopted this moniker. If you own a recreational vehicle you might belong to the “Good Sam Club” which provides discounts on your travel and roadside assistance if you break down. If you come upon a stranger in need of medical care you can provide help without worry that you will be sued if something goes wrong; laws protecting you are called Good Samaritan laws.

But Jews during the time of Jesus hated the Samaritans. They viewed Samaritans as holding illegitimate beliefs and many Jews would avoid Samaria when traveling. Jews, simply put, did not see the Samaritans as their neighbors and the Samaritans did not see Jews as their neighbors. So when the legal scholar asked Jesus to identify his neighbor it was a legitimate question. He asked, in a sense, where is the boundary outside of which someone is not my neighbor. He certainly never thought of Samaritans as neighbors.

And interestingly enough, the case could be made in the parable that the priest and the Levite did nothing wrong according to the law. When each came upon the beaten man they may not have known who he was or how he came to be there. They could have feared they would be giving aid to an enemy, or more likely they didn’t want to get involved with a stranger. I think we can all recall times when we saw someone in need of help but hesitated because we feared we’d end up in a situation we couldn’t easily get out of. We may have felt justified in our inaction by hoping someone else would step up or somehow the person got himself in that situation. All the priest and Levite (and we) need to do is justify that the person in front of us isn’t really our neighbor.

And so what can we say about this Samaritan? It’s easy to say he did the right thing at the right time but I think we can go deeper. He was a fellow traveler but something in him called him to reach out, to see this man as his neighbor. Perhaps it was simply compassion; he had enough wealth to pay the innkeeper for this stranger’s care.

But perhaps it was something more. Perhaps the Samaritan saw this as an opportunity to reach across a well understood divide. Perhaps he saw this as a way others could see Samaritans in a different light. He could easily have hidden behind the justification that likely no Jew would come to his aid if he were in that situation, so why should he?

I think this parable endures because the Samaritan went beyond the law and beyond what was expected of him. I think about the innkeeper and how he must have told the story, to say nothing of the beaten man. I think that neither the innkeeper nor the beaten man would stand by and listen to anyone criticize Samaritans because they saw a Samaritan in a whole new, and dare I say, Christ like light.

Many years ago when I was a church youth minister the diocese held a Youth Weekend at a local hotel. We were sent a list of rules for the weekend and it was demanded that I read them to the teenagers. I did that, but after I was done I put down the list and said this: “You know that it can be hard to find a hotel that will accommodate several hundred teenagers for the weekend, even if they’re from churches. All I ask of you this weekend is that you do what you can to dispel the prejudice against you.” I’m not sure I had an effect on this but I can proudly say that there were no incidents over the weekend and the same hotel welcomed us back the next year.

Like the Samaritan we can all recall times when people have treated us badly or ignored us because of who we were and it should make us angry. Whether it’s the color of our skin, our last name, our age, our orientation, and well, you get the picture. When that happens I think many of us decide to respond to the prejudice with one of our own. And oftentimes we can defend this by claiming we’re not breaking any law and the other person treated us badly so what do they expect?

But we can also look at the good we can do if we model better than is expected of us. If we receive poor service at a restaurant can we give a generous tip in the hopes that the server will see us in a new way? Can we go out of our way to hold open a door for someone who thinks of us as invisible?

There is still a small Samaritan community in Israel and there are still distinctions with the Jews. But they are no longer hated, and they fully participate in the nation of Israel. Maybe this is where that started.