THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"APRIL FOOL"
Another Take on the Good Samaritan
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached April 2, 2000, at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
Ask someone what religion is about and somewhere early in the conversation they will mention the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is one of those interestingly fascinating and problematic notions. A poetess friend of mine, Ione Hill, whom I met when I was here in 1967, has a version of it that goes like this:
"Before you do unto others, et cetera,
you'd better be sure that they itch in the same places you do
or chances are you'll have another problem on your hands."
In the Christian heritage, the Golden Rule is best known from the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the most misunderstood parables of the whole New Testament. Herein we will set you right.
In the story, a lawyer comes to Jesus and says, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Making lawyers the brunt of jokes is not new, but this one was a religious lawyer. His specialty was the Old Testament law, the Jewish law. He was not a criminal or a civil lawyer but a Jewish law scholar. And Jesus turns to him and says, "Well, you've studied the law. What's it say?"
At the time of this exchange, claims were being made on Jesus' behalf that he was the legitimate pretender to the Davidic Jewish throne. The truce with the Romans at the time was tense. There had been numerous revolts. Crucifixions in those days were a dime a dozen. You could get the whole unpleasant sight most any day you wanted to outside of Jerusalem. Hanukkah, indeed, celebrates a revolt earlier much like what was feared by the Romans. The king, the Roman governor, and the religious authorities had, as they say, "an arrangement." Limited religious freedom was given in return for no more revolt. Jesus' following was seen as a threat to that arrangement by all three of them. But it was tense; and all of that would end just 40 years later with the destruction of the temple and most of Jerusalem.
They said he was a messiah. These days, "messiah" has become a standard code word in Christian theology. In Jesus' day, this notion of messiah was up for grabs. Some said the Jewish messiah would be a temporal Jewish king who would return freedom and independence to Jerusalem, to Judah if not to all Israel. Or, the messiah was a combination religious and temporal ruler that would restore both nation and religion to purity. Or, he was a semi-divine, God-appointed if not heavenly-born miraculous leader who would launch the end of the world and call history to a close, inaugurating the reign of Jewish world leadership. Or, he was a religious leader who would make Israel and Jerusalem become a light to the nations, teaching them right relationship to God.
Now, several of these images of messiah-ship involved the potential martyrdom of the messiah. None of them involved the substitutionary or sacramental saviordom of the later Pauline tradition; but whatever Jesus was or thought he was or others thought he was, he was indeed seen by all three factions of Jerusalem as a potential threat to that fragile peace. So the religious authorities sent people to publicly ask him trick questions. They hoped he would say something that would be grounds for jailing him, if not executing him, before this movement got out of hand and they had another major revolt on their hands.
Hence the lawyer's question. But Jesus turns it back on him. Jesus said, "You're the lawyer. What does it say?" The lawyer says, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength and thy neighbor as thyself." It was a standard Sunday School answer. Part of it comes from Deuteronomy, and part of it from Leviticus. Even though it's the correct answer, if Jesus added anything to it or took anything away, he would be in trouble. So Jesus says to him, "You have said it. Do this and you will live," neatly ducking the whole issue.
Still looking for an angle, an opportunity to get him to say too much or too little, the lawyer asks, as they say, a follow-up question. The lawyer says, "Who is my neighbor?"
Now, this is not a moral but a political question. The lawyer is still waiting to pounce. If Jesus says anything contrary to Jewish law, then he is fomenting a revolt and can be arrested and maybe killed. If he says anything that suggests that the king or the Romans are the enemy, that is, outside the pale as neighbor, he is a rebel and can be arrested and possibly executed. Jewish law had extended neighbor status to the stranger within the gates; not just the family, clan, fellow Jew, etc., but to the stranger. It says in Leviticus that you are expected to treat the stranger in your midst just as if they were a native. All of the moral law applied to them. If Jesus extends it to the enemy to stay out of political trouble, he violates religious law. If he does not extend it to the enemy, if he stays within Jewish law, he is in trouble with the king and Romans. That would imply that it is okay to fight, kill, resist, cheat, etc., the occupying forces. The lawyer thinks he's got Jesus in a beautiful "Catch 22." No matter which way he jumps, he's dead.
Jesus responds with the story of the good Samaritan. "Samaritan" has come to mean somebody who rescues somebody else when they don't have to. But in the original story, Jesus does not cast the story in terms of a Jew dealing with the question of "who is my neighbor and who has a right to expect my moral behavior?" Instead, he casts an enemy in the role of the hero of the story, for the Samaritans were the hated people to the north.
At King Solomon's death in the 10th century B.C.E., the nation split between the northern tribes and those in the south in the vicinity of Jerusalem. In 722 B.C.E., Mesopotamia conquered Israel and carried off many of the people of the northern kingdom. They were scattered to the wind and a lot more of those damn pagans were brought in and put in Israel. Some of the Samaritans in the northern kingdom were apostate Jews who didn't worship right, the way we did down here in Jerusalem. And some of them were pagans relocated to the northern kingdom, worshipping all the wrong gods anyway. But whichever they happened to be, Samaritans were always guaranteed to be "bad guys". They were the hated enemy, hated as only brothers can come to hate one another.
"If you think the brotherhood of man means peace,
Then you haven't heard of Cain and Abel,
Jacob and Esau, Osiris and Set
Or, for that matter, my brother Dan."
You all know the story of the Good Samaritan. The Jew is walking along, traveling, and falls among thieves. He is beaten near to death and robbed. Along comes a priest. That's the term that Luke uses. The Aramaic term actually refers to a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of the temple. Seeing this bloody mess on the side of the road, he steps to the other side and passes by. Later, a Levite comes by, one of those whose hereditary job it is to serve Yahweh in the temple in Jerusalem. Seeing the same bloody mess, he steps to the other side of the road and passes by. Later, a Samaritan comes by. Seeing the man, the Samaritan goes over to him, pours oil and wine on his wounds, picks him up, puts him on his beast of burden, takes him to the nearest hotel. Having seen that he is well treated, he tells the owner of the hotel, "I will come by again on my travels and pay you whatever additional is necessary to see to it this man is taken care of." And then Jesus turns to the smart-alecky young lawyer and says, "Who was neighbor to the man who fell amongst thieves?"
Now, what can the lawyer say? He's stuck. Notice that Jesus has slammed the Jewish authorities; he has extended the circle of neighbor to the enemy -- something Judaism never did and something that Christians chronically forget -- and he has taken the first steps on the road to Universalism. In effect, he says to the clever lawyer, "Gotcha!"
In his zeal to catch Jesus, the clever lawyer misses the much more interesting question that is hidden in the heart of the Sunday school answer. It contains a religious land mine, calculated to explode all formal religiousness, Christian and Jewish, and to transcend all political boundaries.
It's a land mine, indeed, that lies at the heart of every formal religious tradition on the face of the earth. Most of us, whatever our religious backgrounds, or lack of same, were treated to some variation of this issue hiding in the story of the good Samaritan. Listen to the Sunday School answer again. "Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, . . . and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." How do you do that? How do you do, in response to a commandment, that which can only be done spontaneously, uncalculatedly? "Thou shalt love." "Thou shalt believe." Every religion on the face of the earth specifies for us what and how we should behave, and here is the ultimate religious double-bind. If you do it to obey, and hence to get the goodies--whether those goodies mean going to heaven or being seen as one who is within the fold--it is neither love nor correct belief, but pretense. If you find yourself doing it freely, spontaneously, then who needs the trappings of religious commandments, creed and moral code?
What Jesus brings in this story is, if taken seriously, the end of religious piety, the end of religiosity, the end of religious authority, of creedal correctness and judgmental ethical moralizing. He said he came to fulfill the law. Indeed, he did what he said he came to do. He fulfilled the law in the only way it can be fulfilled and that is by transcending it.
The Christian church, of course, quickly turned all of this into parable and pious theologizing, constructing an edifice of doctrine, moralism and religious authority to interpret it all. But the land mine hidden in the pious Sunday School answer is still there.
Jesus also said that he who would, like the clever lawyer, seek to save his life shall lose it. He also said, "Judge not, for the judgment you make will be rendered back upon you." And to those of us who parade our piety publicly, he said, "Verily, they have already had their reward."
This is what Francis David understood 450 years ago in Transylvania when he and a small group of clergy, laymen and one king launched our heritage of radical religious freedom. The notion that, if God exists, God knows whether you are putting him on. And if God does not exist, that is the only sane way to live in the world.
This is what Channing understood in New England 150 years ago as he preached practical Christianity in the face of Calvinist authoritarianism.
This is what deBenneville and our Universalist heritage taught in the face of the obsession with drawing lines to include people OUT.
Authentic religion has to do with what you behave AS IF you believe; not what you say is true when asked, not what you wish were true, not even what you pretend to behave as if were true when you think somebody is watching, not even what your guilty conscience reviles you for not behaving AS IF were true. All of that is piety, religiosity; but it is not authentic religion. Religiosity can be turned into, and is typically turned into, a checklist to check off somebody else's behavior and beliefs.
Behaving consistently with what you say you believe doesn't make the behavior right or those beliefs true. It does make changing your beliefs and your behavior a whole lot easier, however. It is positively useful to stop saying you believe something you don't, in fact, behave as if you believed. That inconsistency keeps you off center, scrambles perception, intentions, attitudes, almost everything. On the other hand, you are a creature of habit and habits don't change overnight. They do change, however, and that is what authentic religion is about: about ideas that shape and transform the ways in which we live.
That same poet, Ione Hill, has it: "Noble ideas are good or bad according to whether they goose you into or out of fully living. Most are so damned noble they don't have any effect either way."
Mouthing the platitudes of the loud electronic preacher may easily be recognized as religiosity, but there are several breeds of liberal religiosity, as well. The "I overdosed on Jean Paul Sartre and life is what I choose to make it" syndrome can be as much religiosity as anything the born-again shyster used car salesman-type preacher ever attempted.
The "Secular Humanist" whose major religious interest is Christian-bashing is often a case of religiosity. I recall back in the >60's I was once invited to a Sexual Freedom League party. I went and I was absolutely fascinated; for these folk had taken standard-brand sexual morality, turned it exactly inside-out and remained just as tyrannized by it.
The Religious Liberal who wants the values of freedom and justice extolled, but never acted upon in the body politic of the real world, is caught in religiosity.
The church member or attendee who, unwilling to help keep that community alive and vital, comes -- seldom or often -- but treats the community as a public utility, is trapped in religiosity.
If you don't have too many of those latter kind, you can actually build a thriving institution dedicated to just that pretending. But that isn't authentic religion. And religiosity is religiosity whether the theology is Catholic, Buddhist, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Evangelical and Reformed Expiationism or Unitarian Universalist.
Religion is about the serious attempt to find the best and turn it into reality in a real, actually-lived life. It is therefore about trying and failing, about forgiving, about encouraging and being encouraged by one another. And it is about that land mine: that only what is real makes any difference and cannot be commanded. It can't, finally, even be taught. It can probably only be caught.
Finally, a last piece. This excursion into Biblical interpretation may help answer some of those who ask how Unitarian Universalists. view the Bible. We approach it with study and intelligence, letting it speak out of its own historical context, about how others have wrestled with the same human experiences with which we wrestle. Not as a compendium of answers to silence our questions, but as a prod to live those questions more deeply.
We believe this is not only a more honest response to the literature, but the only way to let its meaning and value unfold in our lives in the continuing dialogue with our own experience, which is what the spiritual quest is finally all about. We are not interested in stopping places, but in moments of personal and interpersonal creative transformation. And those require that we never stop paying attention.
So when you are tempted to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pause a moment, give it some thought first.