Delivered Sunday, June 24, 2018, at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington, Virginia
Text: Luke 10:25-37
My taste in movies is sometimes called a bit odd. I find myself drawn to conflict movies, movies like “In the Name of the Father,” “The War Within,” “Paradise Now,” and “Shake Hands with the Devil.” I like to pretend I like documentaries, but really, I just like the idea of liking documentaries. When it actually comes down to it, rarely can I get all the way through one. As a result, I have mixed feelings about the recent release of a documentary about one of the most significant American theologians of the last century, a theologian who dealt substantially with the question asked of Jesus by a first-century Jewish lawyer in today’s text, “Who is my neighbor?”
Fred Rogers, of course, famously altered the question, and it’s his reformulation, which he asked at the beginning of each of nearly 1,000 episodes of his show that serves as the title of this documentary: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” For roughly 40 years, including syndication, children and adults could turn on a television and become part of Fred Roger’s congregation for half an hour. If any of you are confused by use of “theologian” to refer to Mister Rogers, and “congregation” to refer to his viewers, this may be a good time to let you know that Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian Minister, ordained in 1963 not to a congregation, but to his ministry in children’s television.
The documentary is not the only way in which Mister Rogers has recently been honored. In March, the US Postal Service released a stamp featuring Mister Rogers and one of his puppets, King Friday XIII, and, it’s recently been announced that a biopic about Mister Rogers will be released in October of next year. The timing of this flurry of attention to Mr. Rogers seems calibrated to coincide with the 90th year after his birth and 15th after his death, which is, I suppose, a good enough reason, but I also wonder if there is a larger purpose to the timing.
It is, after all, hard to think of any recent figure as universally respected as Fred Rogers. When Mister Rogers asked children and adults if they would be his neighbor, millions answered, emphatically, “yes,” because it’s Mister Rogers, because of course, you wanted to be his friend, because whether it was over half an hour or over 30 years, we saw, day in and day out, that he would be there putting in the work.
This surety is something that we have also applied to the unnamed figure who gives us the common title to this parable, the Good Samaritan. This parable is now so well-known that “Good Samaritan” is both a cliché and one of the more common hospital names. We even have “Good Samaritan” laws created to protect civilian first-responders. As this has happened, we have entirely lost sight of the surprise of this passage: when we hear it now, we think, of course, the Samaritan is going to help, that’s what Samaritans do.
As a result, it becomes too easy for us to miss the message.
We hear the story and think “of course the Samaritan is good,” losing sight of the fact that, even just linguistically, if it was that obvious that Samaritan’s were good, the title of this parable would just be “The Samaritan.” And, often, I think we fail to wonder why Jesus chose a Samaritan and not, for example, a Roman.
When I was studying Conflict Analysis and Resolution down the road at George Mason, much of my focus was on the formation of group identity. One concept that recurred so often as to become nearly axiomatic was that some of the most violent conflicts can occur between some of the most similar groups. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the closer two groups are, the more there is a threat of losing membership through transfer to the other group. This is obviously true with geographic distance, but it is also true of ideological difference. As a result, closely related groups will come to define themselves against each other. Judith mentioned this during Holy Week, noting that portions of the Gospel of John have been used to justify Christian anti-Semitism. John’s Gospel lends itself to those interpretations because it was written around the time that the distinctions between the Jewish and Christian communities were becoming clear.
Daniel Boyarin, a noted Jewish Talmudic scholar, and professor at Berkeley wrote The Jewish Gospels, published in 2012, which considers this idea more fully. In a forward, Jack Miles offers this parable: fraternal twin boys, Benjamin and Joshua. Ben is an athlete, and Josh a singer-songwriter. The brothers, who have shared a bedroom since they were toddlers, know more about each other than anyone else, including the fact that athlete Ben can sing beautifully, and that musician Josh can still beat Ben in 1 on 1 basketball, but, over time, what they know about each other matters less than the received knowledge from their extended family: Ben is the athlete, Josh is the singer, and that’s that. By degrees, the brothers succumb to the family definition, until Ben forgets that he can sing and Josh stops showing up to watch his brother’s football games.
As these two brothers, on their own and with outside help have come to define their identities in contrast to each other, so can groups. Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels presents an account of how that process of reciprocal identity formation created the groups we now call “Jewish” and “Christian.” Internationally, we see this all the time in the formation of new nations, most recently in South Sudan: so long as South Sudan was fighting for independence from Sudan, their shared identity as South Sudanese mattered most, but once independence was achieved, new factions formed to vie for power. In the history of this country, this is what George Washington was talking about when he warned against partisan politics in his farewell address.
The situation of the Jews and Samaritans in the inter-testamental period, up to and including the first century A.D. is such a story.
The reason for this animosity goes back deep into history, at least to the Babylonian Captivity, when Jerusalem was destroyed and the Judean elite were taken captive to Babylon for some 50 years. This group of Judean elites and their followers are the descendants, or at least the antecedents, of both modern and first century Jews. This history of the Samaritans a bit murkier, and because of constraints of time, this is vast oversimplification, but they claim to be, with as much justification as is reasonably possible, the descendants of those who were left behind: mostly the peasants the Babylonians still needed to work the land they had just conquered, people who had a very different experience of the exilic period than those to whom Jeremiah wrote “seek the welfare of [Babylon].” In contrast to the exilic and post-exilic accounts found in the Hebrew Bible and our Old Testament, the Samaritans responded to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the loss of political and many religious leaders by rebuilding as best they could, including, eventually, a new Temple at Mt. Gerizim, near modern-day Nablus. Samaritans further claim that this, not Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, is the site of the first Temple destroyed by the Babylonians. The Samaritans, today, in the first century, after, and during the exile, and possibly even dating back to the separation of the Northern and Southern kingdoms consider themselves to be the real practitioners of the religion of the ancient Israelites, and view Judaism as a set of beliefs corrupted by Babylonian and other foreign influence.
In contrast, the Jews consider the Samaritans to be the ones corrupted by foreign influence—notably intermarriage with those sent into the land by the Assyrians. I think then, that we can at least understand that the Samaritans would not have been thrilled when the exiles returned and asserted local dominance with the backing of a Persian army, nor would the Jews have been pleased to finally return after 50 years to find a religious community that was so similar, but rejected even the most minor differences as the result of external corruption. The tensions between the Samaritans and Jews grew for centuries, until, finally, one of the Hasmonean Kings (sometimes known as the Maccabees) destroyed the Samaritan Temple around 160 BCE.
I think that some of the most brutal conflicts occur between closely related communities because the pain of betrayal from someone we once considered close is so much worse, and that may be why just 9 paragraphs prior to this parable, in Luke 9:51-56, James and John asked Jesus if they could call down fire from heaven to smite a Samaritan village. Samaritans were held in such low regard by James and John that their solution to a Samaritan village not welcoming them is the same as Ripley’s solution to the alien-infested colony in the movie Aliens, though it does echo the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah for the same lack of hospitality.
When we think about first century Jews and Samaritans, we should think of the Protestant-Catholic wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, of Troubles in Northern Ireland, of the Civil War in South Sudan, or even of the American Civil War.
We should think about the fact that when Jesus was tasked with coming up with a figure this Jewish lawyer would have considered least likely to stop and help a Jew, Jesus did not suggest a Roman. We should consider that when Jesus finished the story by repeating the question he had been asked, “who is the man’s neighbor.” The lawyer is so surprised that he can’t even say it, instead of “The Samaritan” the lawyer says “The one who showed him mercy.”
If we strip everything away and just have the question “Who is my neighbor?” and the answer “The one who shows you mercy.” we have a very neat theological point which already expands on the versions of this story from the other synoptic gospels, Matthew and Mark. Those gospels also share the great commandments: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself, though in both of those texts it is Jesus who says them, while in Luke it is offered in response to Jesus’ question, and neither text then offers to define neighbor.
Why would Luke include more? And, the question to which I keep circling back, why a Samaritan and not a Roman?
Is it because Jesus knew that sometimes it’s easier to see the shared humanity, the image of God in the one who is further removed than it is in someone close to hand? Is it because it was easier for Jesus’ first-century Jewish audience to consider walking two miles with a Roman soldier than the possibility that a Samaritan would help an injured person on the road?
Who is it hardest for you to imagine helping? Who is it hardest for you to imagine offering your help?
That person is your neighbor.