July
11, 2010 Des Moines
Luke 10:25-37
More
Than a Quiz
I remember my answer more than I remember the
question. We were playing a culinary
version of Jeopardy as a kind of final exam on the last day of the Culinary
Boot Camp. The four cooking teams were competing against each other, trying to
press the buzzer first. As I recall, the
question had to do with the cooking method that had something to do with
“jumping”. I blurted out “boiling.” Yes, it was in the form of a question. Our instructor-chef cocked his head with that
terrible professorial look of dismay and disappointment – as if wondering “what
could you possibly be thinking?” – and repeated my answer with disbelief: “boiling? Boiling?” I hadn’t felt that stupid since 4th
grade. The right answer, of course, is
“stir-fry”, the first cousin to “sauté” which literally means “to jump”. And somewhere in the back of my mind I do now
remember that lesson from earlier in the week, but at that very moment my mind
was somewhere else. When I thought about
cooking things jumping, all I could see was water boiling in a pot.
Suffice it to say that my team didn't
win the game. I used to be pretty good
on quizzes, but I have either gotten rusty or am simply getting old. In the interest of full disclosure I should
report that Lori's team was the eventual winner, so you will want
to give her her due. She is, after all, younger than me.
On the surface of things, a much more
consequential quiz appears to be the subject of the story guiding us this morning
– a reciprocal quiz, as it turns out. A
lawyer, according to the story, approaches Jesus with a question: “what must I do to inherit eternal
life?” After some quizzical give and
take and filling in the blanks, Jesus begins a story. “Once upon a time, a man fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped
him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” Maybe you have heard the story
before. It's sort of a strange way to
answer question, but we'll go with it.
When I was growing up, Ray Stevens
had a radio hit that was actually a remake of an old Coasters song from
1959 – which was actually a spin-off of an even older Gary Cooper movie called
“Along Came Jones”:
I
plopped down in my easy chair and turned on Channel 2
A bad gunslinger called Salty Sam was chasin' poor Sweet Sue
He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh,
"If you don't give me the deed to your ranch
I'll saw you all in half!"
And then he grabbed her (and then)
He tied her up (and then)
He turned on the bandsaw (and then, and then...!)
Chorus:
And then along came Jones
Tall thin Jones
Slow-walkin' Jones
Slow-talkin' Jones
Along came long, lean, lanky Jones
A hero. Everybody
loves a hero story. Superman. Batman.
The Lone Ranger. Luke Skywalker. Bilbo Baggins. Harry Potter.
Whether they are larger than life or refreshingly ordinary, we love our
heroes, and alternate between wishing one would swoop in and help us, and
imagining that we are one.
But it turns out that heroism is less an identity than an act.
A hero can turn out to be almost anyone. It is a firefighter carrying a wounded
office worker down the hundreds of steps of the crumbling World Trade
Center. It is a pilot safely landing a
wounded jet in the Hudson River. It is
a teenager taking the car keys away from a drunken friend and driving him – or
her – home. It's a traveler who
discovers a wounded victim in a roadside ditch on the Jericho Road, and stops
to help.
“Once upon a time,”
Jesus begins, “A man was going down from
Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him,
beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.”
In the grand theater of storytelling, Jesus’ listeners would
have already recognized a hero story in the making and sat back in wait for the
hero to arrive with whom they could identify.
The way the story is structured, everyone listening wants to ride in --
vicariously, at least -- to rescue the injured character. One by one they listen as the various
candidates are paraded across the stage; first the Priest who ultimately
performs disappointingly; ditto the Levite who finally measures no higher. To be sure, there are extenuating
circumstances – understandable reasons why they might have avoided the
opportunity to serve. But heroes are
never those who opt for legitimate reasons NOT to do something; heroes are
those who step out of the logical line and do something they weren't compelled
to do.
So, having been disappointed by the contenders behind
doors #1 and #2, who would Jesus reveal to be waiting behind door #3? They didn't have to wait too long to find
out. In the end, they might have
preferred the suspense; for the hero turned out not to be their favorite son
but their hated enemy. A Samaritan! If ever you were going to hunt for buried
treasure, never would you think to dig in this field. But there you have it.
The man in the ditch didn't have it any better. Imagine yourself waking up in a ditch after a
mugging, blinking your blurry eyes into focus on the form of someone leaning
over to help you, and seeing the face of the one person who most turns your
stomach. Who is it that you would least
like to receive help from? For the Jews,
it was the Samaritans.
“Which of these
three,” Jesus asked his questioner,
“do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the
robbers?”
“The one who showed him mercy,” the man responded. He couldn't even bring himself to say the
word; “Samaritan.”
“Well, then,” Jesus said to him,
“Go and act like him.”
The point, of course, was not the Samaritan’s ethnicity or
religious preferences. The point of the
story is not who the man was, but what the man did. The story was Jesus' way of answering a
question about neighborhood. “Who is my
neighbor,” his questioner had asked – the one he was bound to love, according
to the law, to the same extent that he loved himself, after God? Which is to say that maybe the real point of
the man’s question had had to do with figuring out who he didn't have to
love – who it might be that he could legitimately exclude.
There is a mechanical sort of feel to the questions raised
by the man in the story, and to the answers he proffered. “What
must I do to inherit eternal life?” The
conversation he began had all to do with rules -- regulations, guidelines; the
engineering study for getting from here to there; charting a course from earth
to heaven. And Jesus initially played
along. “What is written in the law? What do you
read there?”
But ultimately Jesus steered the question into murkier waters
– away from rules, and into the flesh and blood of relationships. “Once
upon a time…” he began, as if to say, “let’s get out of the workshop and
its diagrams and inventories and walk around the neighborhood.
You know how it is when someone has learned all the notes
of a song, but hasn’t quite managed to turn them into music? The rhythms are all correct, but not quite right. The tune is accurate, but more wooden than
melodic. Technically proficient, it is
not musically appealing. That's the sort
of feel I get from this man's questions; as though he is more focused on the
steps of a recipe than the dish those steps are ultimately intended to
produce.
What I think Jesus is trying to
communicate is that this isn't a standardized test measuring information
covered. More than a quiz, this is a
conversation about community – about how we live with one another.
I’ve told the story before about the “intro
to ministry” class I took in college designed for students considering the
ministry as a vocation, and the unit that semester in which we students had to
preach to one another. We went across
the street the church chapel where it felt more “churchy” than a classroom, and
after each homiletical offering would engage in what was intended to be constructive
“critique” but was more akin to various medical diagnostic procedures involving
hoses and enlarged openings. We were, to
say it more delicately, hard on each other.
One classmate's sermon we found to be especially awful and we were well
into the process of fulfilling our obligation to inform him of that fact, when
the professor gently silenced us with the observation that, for those who are
honestly listening for it, “even in the worst of sermons the voice of God can
be heard.” Which, of course, is sort of
the point.
Perhaps that is something of what
Jesus was trying to suggest – that even in what we might perceive to be the
worst of people around us, a neighbor can be found. Which is to say that there aren’t really
capes or cowls or masks that signal who to admire. There are no belts with silver bullets. There aren't even white and black hats. It's messier than all that.
In fact, it could well be that the
costumes, the uniforms, and the superficial labels just might obstruct our view
of all the neighbors who are accompanying us on this road that’s leading well
beyond Jericho, all the way to eternal life.
Which
of these, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of
the robbers?”
The man said, “The one who showed
him mercy.”
To which Jesus replied, “OK,
then. Any more questions?”