"More Than Spectators"
Responding to others' needs with compassion and mercy
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Text: Luke 10:30-37
It was a particularly distressing call. The woman on the other end of the line had a shaky voice and she was clearly distraught. I received the call just a few months before I left Ottawa to come to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church 10 years ago. She said,
Andrew, I need you to help me. Our son has left home. He has finished his Grade 11 exams and left a note on his bed saying that he is going to live in the streets and not to bother looking for him. I simply don't know where to begin to find him! I know you know people in street ministry and people involved in searches in the downtown core of Ottawa. Maybe, just maybe, you can find him for me. I'll understand if you can't, but I really need your help.
I drove out to her home in Kanata to pick up a photograph of him that I could show around and went on an eager search. My first stop took me to Rideau Street and into a well known hang-out for young people - an arcade. I showed the picture to the manager and asked, “Have you by any chance seen this young man?”
The manager said, “Oh yes, he's been in here a lot the last few days.”
Following another trail, I went to the McDonald's in the heart of the market to see if he was hanging out there. I showed the picture around to some of the people who worked selling French fries and cholesterol and asked them if they had seen the young man. A couple of them said, “Oh yeah, he's in here a lot.” But then the trail ran dry.
I went around to a number of places where I knew that kids who live on the street hung out and no one really wanted to say too much. They were frightened and wondered why I, as a minister, would be looking for him. Finally, someone contacted me. He said, “Andrew, we think we know where he is hanging out. It is in Mechanicsville.” This was just a couple of blocks from the church I was serving in a poor part of town. They said they understood he was in one of the homes down there.
I went down to the street, knocked on the doors of the homes and finally, I came to the place where he was. It was a hang-out for people who used crack. I went up the stairs and into a room, and there he was. For a young man who had just finished Grade 11, he looked like he had aged 30 years in the month we had been looking for him. He had been beaten, his eyes were swollen and he had lost a lot of weight. I said to him, “Do you know your parents are looking for you? Do you want me to tell them where you are?”
There was a look of fear in his eyes and he said, “No, but I don't mind if you stay in touch with me.”
I went to his parents in Kanata with the good news that I had found him. The father looked me straight in the eye and said, “Where is he? Wait until I get my hands on him! You have no idea of the pain he has caused his mother.” Not himself; the mother.
The mother asked, “How is he?”
I answered the second question, but certainly not the first. Questions reveal so much about the people who ask them; that is true for almost any question. One is often told that when dealing with reporters, particularly in the political realm, if someone asks you a question you don't want to answer you should simply say, “Actually, the real question is…” and seek to divert the question to the subject matter you want to discuss. Sometimes, they are trying to trick you with a question. Other times, questions are designed to reveal truth. That is why great philosophers like Socrates and Plato used questions to set up arguments in order to find answers.
Questions are powerful. So when a lawyer came up to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” there was much revealed in the question. Luke editorializes and suggests that the question was a deliberate attempt to trick Jesus. I am not so sure it was quite that poignant and strong, but clearly Jesus was aware that this man had a burning question on his heart. He did as a rabbi would do and pointed him to the law. He asked, “What does the law say and how do you interpret the law?”
The lawyer, knowing the shema of Israel, said, “It is to love the Lord with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, and love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Jesus replied, “You already know the answer to your question. You have said it rightly.”
The lawyer, still not convinced that he had got what he needed out of Jesus, asked a supplementary question, the one that stimulated this whole parable: “Who is my neighbour?”
I believe that what this particular lawyer wanted to know was something profoundly Jewish. It was about the “ha ”˜olam haba” - the life to come. He wanted to know where the boundaries were in terms of the life to come. Ultimately, he was asking “Who must I love in order to inherit this life?” He wanted to get Jesus to make a statement about expanding the boundaries, and Jesus did so by telling an incredible story about a beaten, robbed man lying on the side of the road. Two religious leaders walk on by and do not glance at him, but a Samaritan comes and cares for him, bandages his wounds, puts him in an inn and promises to return to pay the full cost.
What is there in this story for you and me? What is there in this question, “Who is my neighbour?” that helps us live a faithful life following Jesus Christ? Well, it teaches us supremely that our neighbour is the one who is in need. It is incredible that this beaten man on the side of the road, probably a Jew, who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho found his neighbour to be a Samaritan. The Samaritan was outside the covenant, outside of the classification that many people thought of as “neighbour.” But the Samaritan saw the man on the side of the road as his neighbour and when he did that, he was saved.
So often, we miss seeing the needs of our neighbours. Often, we see the world outside, but we don't see the people right next to us who need us. Often, we do not see the needs that are all around us; we become immune to the needs of our neighbours.
As I have said before, I like Winnie the Pooh stories. There is a wonderful moment when Winnie the Pooh is walking alongside a riverbank and he sees his donkey friend, Eeyore floating down the river on his back with his legs up in the air. He asks Eeyore, “Did you fall in?”
Eeyore, says, “Yes, I did. I have been very stupid!”
Winnie then says to him, “You know, in future, you should be more careful.”
Meanwhile, Eeyore continues to go down the river and starts to drown.
Winnie looks at him and asks, “Are you drowning?”
Eeyore looks up at him and says, “Yes, I am.”
After a long pause, Winnie says, “Well, can I help you?”
“Oh, that would be most kind,” Eeyore replies. “I am so sorry to be such a bother!”
Meanwhile, he is drowning. Winnie reaches down, pulls Eeyore out of the river and saves him. Then he tells him, “You really should be more careful.”
Eeyore says, “Yes, I am so sorry, I really am, to have been such a bother and such a nuisance!”
Winnie says, “It's okay, but you really should have asked me for help sooner.”
Is that not what happens with the world around us? You really should be smarter! You really should be better! You should figure it out. I hear this said about people on the streets so many times by hard-nosed people who say, “If only they would straighten up their lives!” Meanwhile, the needy are all around us. The problem is, we are sometimes immune to their needs or so self-absorbed, like Winnie the Pooh was about being right. He didn't recognize the need when it was right before his very eyes.
I think it is fair to say that most people, if you asked them, would say that they want to care for people. They don't like seeing people suffering; they want the world to be a better place. Bill Pannell of Fuller Seminary says, “Caring for people in need is not a rational matter. If it were a rational matter, would we not all, then, those of us that are reasonable, care for people?”
Is that not the big problem with the modern agenda and the rationalists' agenda? Even John Locke, in his concept of the reasonableness of Christianity, implied that if everyone was reasonable, they would all be Christian. And if everyone was Christian, all the needy would be taken care of.
No! Something else needs to happen. There needs to be a profound conversion. There needs to be a profound change so that we see the needs of those around us, not just through our own eyes, but through God's eyes. I love the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “If we could read the secret histories of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
In this story, the beaten man on the side of the road was seen as a neighbour by the Samaritan, the one who was supposed to be outside the covenant. He saw a need and he responded to it. Who is our neighbour? Our neighbour is the one who is in need.
But there is more. Our neighbour is the one who is beyond our boundaries. The fact that it was the Samaritan who stopped to help would have been shocking for the lawyer who asked the original question.
Why was this radical? Well, the great New Testament scholar, Bishop N. T. Wright suggests, and I think he is right:
The result was of course a challenge to the lawyer, not unlike Jesus' challenge to the rich young man: ”˜What must I do to inherit ha ”˜olam haba - the age to come?' The answer: Follow Jesus in finding a new and a radicalized version of Torah observance, loving Israel's covenant God, and loving him as Creator of all, and discovering as neighbours those who are beyond the borders of the chosen people. Those who follow Jesus in this way would be justified, that is, they would be vindicated when the covenant God acted climactically within history. ”˜Go,' said Jesus, ”˜and do likewise.'
The religious, those who were supposedly part of the covenant people, were the ones who walked by. But when Jesus tells the lawyer that the real neighbour was the Samaritan, the borders of what constitutes the covenant people are being extended.
Often, religion is a self-absorbed obsession with others who are of like-mind and like-spirit. We all like fellowship; we all like caring for one another; we like supporting people who are within our own ranks. But Jesus wanted to press us beyond that. He wanted to have “a radical conversion,” to use the phrase of N. T. Wright, and a radicalized concept.
He was also going beyond what one would call natural law. Natural law says that you care for someone with equity and an even hand, you pay right for right and wrong for wrong, and you keep the balance of justice. But in this story, there is a radical new element. The Samaritan didn't look at this man religiously; he didn't just look at this man who was beaten on the side of the road as someone who was to be given an even chance - he was extravagant. Jesus says at the very end of the parable, “The neighbour is the one who acted with mercy;” with eleos in Greek: A compassion that goes beyond the confines of religion and the law - an extravagance.
I love a story I read about a politician who had his photograph taken - a formal photograph to be put up in the House of Commons. After seeing the proof, he was mortified. He went up to the photographer and said, “This does not do me justice!”
The photographer replied, “Sir, you don't need justice with a face like yours, you need mercy!”
What Jesus was offering here was a sense of mercy, of God's overwhelming extravagance, compassion and love. Not just justice, but beyond justice. Not just religion, but beyond the boundaries of religion. Why? Because the one who told the story was the one who was bringing in the Kingdom that would draw all those created by God into the covenant of his grace.
I believe the only way you can really understand the story of the Good Samaritan is to see it in the light of the cross of Christ. The one who told the story gave a radically new sense of God's grace, love and compassion. To people who say we don't need Jesus or we don't require a faith in Jesus, I say you miss all the wonderful things that Jesus taught if you don't understand the one who said them. What Jesus was saying to this man who was asking a trick question was, “In my Kingdom, in the life that is to come because of me, the most important thing is showing mercy toward your neighbour.”
You are probably wondering what happened to the young man from Kanata. Did he finally come home? No. Why? Because he had been abused at home. What did he get out of all of this? A profound sense that there were people who were willing to go to great lengths to see how he was doing, to show him love and be concerned for him. He learned that the church and those who follow Christ were willing to go and look for him.
What happened to him? Years later, he graduated from Carleton University and found a life, a job and a home of his own. He did so because somebody - his mother - wanted to know how he was doing.
That is how God is with us. God wants to know how we are doing. God wants to touch those who see beyond the pale. God wants to reach out to the world he loves so much. He wants us to see that world through his eyes - not as spectators, but as those who are engaged in the work of the cross of Jesus, our Lord. Amen.