Luke 10:25-41, from the Proper 10 (15)
Twenty-five-year-old Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez was a nobody. His daughter, Valeria, just shy of 2, was even more of a nobody. But they’re both famous now, although not necessarily by name. Their picture made news around the world in late June. It shows the two of them nestled close, her tiny arm around his neck, his shirt stretched over her as a makeshift carrier, and both of them face down in the muddy Rio Grande river, dead.
That morning, Ramirez, followed by his wife, had plunged into the river with Valeria on the Mexico side of the border across from Brownsville, Texas, in the hope of reaching U.S. soil, surrendering to a Border Patrol agent, and requesting asylum. Like so many others, the young El Salvadoran family had found the wait to seek asylum at an official entry port impossibly long. Despite the strong current, Ramirez got Valeria safely across and turned back for his wife, who was still in the river. But Valeria panicked as her father swam away and jumped in after him. Ramirez’s wife struggled back to the Mexican side, but the river swept Ramirez and Valeria to their deaths.
Those of us who learned their names at all probably will soon forget them, much as we’ve forgotten the names Gurupreet Kaur and Alan Kurdi. The first name belonged to a 6-year-old Indian girl who died of heat stroke in the desert west of Lukeville, Arizona, earlier in June. She and her mother were hoping to join her father, who had been in the U.S. since 2013 and was waiting for a New York immigration court to decide the outcome of his asylum case. The second name belonged to a 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body, clad in a red shirt and blue shorts, was photographed on a Turkish beach in 2015 after he and several other refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Their namelessness makes it easier, I think, to invent our own names for them. Illegal aliens. Invaders. Bad hombres. Criminals. People, in other words, who got what they had coming to them rather than victims who got what we gave them, or at least allowed to be given to them.
The hapless victim in Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-41) is a nobody, too. He is just “a man” who was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers attacked him and left him half dead. Jesus makes him a nobody to make the point that he could be anybody, and that “anybody” is the answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor,” which the “teacher of the law” had asked after being told by Jesus that loving God and loving one’s neighbor summed up the whole of the commandments.
You know the story, of course. A passing priest sees the man but walks by without helping. Later, a Levite does the same. Only the third passerby, a Samaritan, stops to help. Commentators have offered all sorts of theories over the years about why the priest and Levite chose not to help. One common explanation is that both feared that touching a corpse would make them ritually unclean. But as Vanderbilt divinity professor Amy-Jill Levine points out, that explanation holds more anti-Semitism than water. Jewish law was clear: They should have helped the man if he was alive or buried the man if he was dead. They did neither. Levine thinks Martin Luther King Jr.’s explanation is probably the best one around: “It’s possible these men were afraid….,” she writes, quoting King. “And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’… But then the good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
King went on, Levine notes, to pose the same reversed question to himself regarding the sanitation workers who were on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. If he did not stop and go to Memphis to help, what would happen to them? King did go, of course, and fatefully. It was there that an assassin’s bullet took King’s life.
I am proud that King was a Christian, and that many of those who joined him in the fight for equality also were Christians. But I am deeply troubled by the lack of his spirit, and of Jesus’, in the ways I hear so many of my fellow Christians talk today about one of the great moral challenges of our time and the consequences for desperate nobodies like Ramirez, Kaur and Kurdi. I hear it said that such people deserve nothing from us. I hear it said that if they end up languishing in foul-smelling holding pens, sleeping on bare concrete floors, agonizing over separation from their loved ones, and even dying from too little water or too much, they should expect no less for breaking our laws and wanting for themselves even some of what we consider ours. I hear it said that we have no room for them, no resources to spare, no time to set aside our own problems and deal with theirs.
Levine observes that the lawyer’s question came with second, unspoken question baked in. “To ask ‘Who is my neighbor?’ is a polite way of asking, ‘Who is not my neighbor?’ or ‘Who does not deserve my love? ‘ or ‘Whose lack of food or shelter can I ignore?’ or ‘Whom I can hate?’ The answer Jesus gives is, ‘No one.’ Everyone deserves that love—local or alien, Jews or gentile—everyone.'”
Come to think of it, at least the priest and the Levite we revile had enough decency to leave the story’s poor mugging victim alone. Many of us seem to want to deepen his woes by walking over and giving him a swift kick in the ribs.
But there is yet another important twist to this gut-punching parable. Levine points out that the Jews listening to Jesus’ parable would have heard, “A priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan” much as Americans today might hear, “Larry, Moe, and Osama bin Laden.” The Jews of Jesus’ time and place considered Samaritans sworn enemies of all that was decent and good. A Samaritan was the last person on Earth the law teacher or anyone else within earshot of Jesus’ story would have expected to help the man, especially after both a priest and a Levite had taken a pass. Jesus capitalizes on the twist by finishing his response to the law teacher’s question with a question of his own.
“So, tell me,” Jesus says to the lawyer, “Since we’re talking about neighborliness, which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The lawyer despises Samaritans so much that he can’t bring himself to say, “The Samaritan.” The only response he can choke out through his hatred is, “The … one who had mercy on him.”
“Go and do likewise,” Jesus tells the lawyer.
I think Jesus is saying, here, that being considered neighborly, whether by others or by yourself, doesn’t matter one bit. Actually being neighborly, actually doing what neighborly people do, is what matters. We can call ourselves Christians all we want. We can drive around with “Jesus is Lord” stickers on our cars, post inspirational memes on Facebook, make a show of praying over restaurant meals, be seen in church every Sunday, and more. But love is of God, John tells us in I John 4, and everyone who loves – not feels love, not thinks about love, not talks about love, but rather who actually does love – is born of God and knows God. As for those who feel, think about, and talk about love without actually doing it, well, God knows and loves them, but it doesn’t seem very likely that they know and love him.
