Sermon

GOING DOWN TO JERICHO

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

July 15, 2007

Scripture: Amos 5:18-20; 8:9-10; 5:21-24 and Luke 10:25-37

Independence Day this year was not a normal one for those of us on the recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There was no picnic, no fireworks. The 4^th of July we were on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and the Dead Sea. Over the course of 17 miles we made our way down to The Salt Sea, which is the lowest point on the face of the earth at 1290 feet below sea level.

The road makes its way through a landscape so stark that you are reminded of the surface of the moon. The photograph by Greg Gable on the cover of today’s bulletin gives a glimpse of just how rugged the terrain was in Jesus’ day and is in the present moment. We saw a few of the glistening new settlements of Israelis planted like fortresses in the midst of the West Bank or Palestinian territory—symbols of the barriers that separate the peoples of the Holy Land. And we saw the makeshift shanties of Bedouins who still graze their animals on the barren slopes alongside the highway. Our guide, Ghassan, delighted in pointing out one encampment of Bedouins he had seen sporting a satellite dish!

Our trip to Jericho took only half an hour as we descended 3300 feet from the hilltops of Jerusalem. During this short bus ride we got a good sense of what the road might have been like in Jesus’ day as travelers made their way back and forth across the Jordan Valley. Travelers would have been faced with a hot, dusty journey along a narrow, winding road where robberies were common. By the way, when we went down to Jericho, the temperature at the Dead Sea was 116 degrees at mid-day!

Such is the backdrop to our lesson for the day—one being read in churches across the country that follow the common lectionary of readings from the Bible on a weekly basis. Let’s look closely, for the Parable of the Good Samaritan has enormous relevance for today and every day.

A lawyer stands up to test Jesus. Here I should note that in first century Palestine there was no separation of church and state as we know it. The laws from the Torah would have held for both synagogue and state. The lawyer knew what Jesus knew about the traditions of Judaism. We have to see him as a learned theologian, not as an outsider looking in.

His question is for the ages. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Out of all the teachings of the law and the prophets, what really matters the most? Jesus turns the question back to him. “What do you think?” The lawyer does well. He cites two pivotal verses, one from Deuteronomy (6:5) and the other from Leviticus (19:18).

The first is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind….” The heart represents our innermost being. When a friend says to us in a time of grief, “You have my heart,” we know what he means. The soul is our unique identity as a child of God. It is I in relationship to my Creator. I and Thou. Our strength is our power—it comes from the same word in Greek as dynamite. It represents all our resources, all we have. And our mind is our miraculous, God given ability to reason, to think and to pray, a gift that sets us apart as unique in all of creation as we know it.

The second verse the lawyer cites is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Here we should note what I would call inspired scriptural cherry-picking by the lawyer. There are many, many instances in the tradition of Jesus and the lawyer who questions him that have a very different twist. In fact, the general understanding of neighbor usually meant one’s fellow countryman. And even then it could well mean a countryman who agreed with your general outlook on life.

A visit to Qumran on the Dead Sea where the Essenes lived in the time of Jesus underscored the limits we often place on neighborliness. The Essenes were men who settled into a monastic life in the dessert to get away from the what they saw as the pollution of the ancient truths of Judaism. They divided the human family into the sons of light and the sons of darkness, with the Essenes being the sons of light and those who disagreed with them the sons of darkness who were headed for perdition.[i]

In Jesus’ time a similar rabbinical tradition allowed as how heretics, informers and renegades “should be pushed (into the ditch) and not pulled out.” Along with this idea was a popular saying that put it bluntly: “You have heard that God said, ‘You shall love your fellow countryman, but you need not love your enemy.’”

Faced with a such a wide range of options, the lawyer has chosen the right verses about loving God and neighbor, but as always one has to dig a bit deeper. With such a variety of understandings of the limits of neighborly love, how is one to “do this and live,” as Jesus instructs the lawyer. There has to be more to the story. Much, much more.

Jesus could have resorted to a platitude. “O, just love everybody.” But we know that such teaching rarely “takes.” This may explain why Jesus resorted to parables, down-to-earth, even troubling stories to convey his message about God and neighbor.

Today’s parable is so vivid that you could play it back to me with little effort. A man was making his way to Jericho. Robbers surprised him in one of the narrow passages, beat him, stripped him of his clothing, and left him beside the road to die. Along came two reputable religious leaders—a priest—we can imagine him leading worship—and a Levite, who in our terminology was a blend of custodian and trustee with responsibilities for overseeing the practical side of life in the synagogue. These two spiritual leaders passed on by.

Who knows why? Some have suggested that they were worried about religious prohibitions against touching a dead body. It’s more likely they were like us—cringing in the face of daily violence, thinking first and foremost about their own safety and well being.

Now comes the blockbuster. First, let me give you a little background on Samaritans. Samaria is the region to the north of Jerusalem and the village of Jifna where our group spent several nights in the homes of parishioners of our sister congregation, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. During the exile of Israelites in the 8^th century BC to modern day Syria, some of them intermarried with Assyrians. A group returned to the area around Mt. Gerizim and established an offshoot of Judaism that held that the temple in Jerusalem ought not be seen as the center of religious life, but rather Mt. Gerizim itself.

Jews and Samaritans were constantly at each others throats. Jews saw them as half-breeds to be despised. When Jesus was a child, a group of Samaritans entered the temple in Jerusalem and strewed it with dead bones, outraging the priests and Levites and everyone else. There’s no way Jesus would not have been aware of this.

All the way to the present day Samaritans have had a very tenuous life in the Holy Land. The Romans persecuted them, as did almost every other power in Palestine across the centuries. Today there are about 650 Samaritans left in the Holy Land, some living in a small village near Nablus and another group in the city of Holan near Tel Aviv on the coast. And by the way, they are one of the few communities left who speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

With this background we are now prepared for the shocker. A Kuti, as a Samaritan is called in Hebrew Scriptures, comes along the road and spies the beaten man, whom we have to assume is a Jew. He saw the victim, was moved with pity, and went to his aid. He bandaged his wounds, presumably using some of his own clothing. He applied wine as an antiseptic, and oil to keep the wounds soft. Then he gave the equivalent of two days wages to an innkeeper to cover the cost of caring for the stranger, telling the innkeeper to run a tab if this were not enough to cover the costs, and he would settle with him on his return trip. Notice how the text is laden with verbs: went, bandaged, poured, put, brought, repay…all deeds of mercy.

The lawyer’s mouth would have been hanging open by the time he heard Jesus’ final question: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer couldn’t bring himself to utter the dreaded word Kuti, a Samaritan. So he answered as best he could: “The…one…who showed him mercy.” Jesus’ next words ring down across the ages. “Go and do likewise.”

Today’s Old Testament lesson from Amos decries those who in a time of judgment and social chaos focus on the end times, the day of the Lord when everything will be set right by God. Amos lambastes his people, telling them that the day of Lord could well be a time of darkness, not cheery sunlight. It’s not enough to sit idly by, waiting to be saved.

I was reminded of our conversation in Haifa with Father Elias Chacour, the author of Blood Brothers who is now the Archbishop of the largest group of Christians in the Israel. He tells of a conversation with the chief rabbi in Israel. The rabbi asked him, “Father, Abuna, how can we agree if you say that the Messiah has come and we say that he hasn’t?” Chacour replied, “Let’s cooperate to solve our problems and if the Messiah comes, we can ask him if he has been here before.”

A long time ago Amos spoke with the passion of God about justice rolling down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Jesus, in his parable of the Good Samaritan, makes clear that it falls upon each of us to do the work of justice and righteousness in the time allotted to us. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan has to be at the core of any and every attempt to sort out our calling as followers of Jesus in today’s world. Like Jesus we live in a world rife with boundaries of every sort. Walls, fences, deeply-rooted animosities of every sort imaginable abound, both religious and political.

I have come back from the Holy Land shaken by the division and violence, but heartened by the men and women and young people of good will who “go and do” as the Good Samaritan did. A school run by Archbishop Chacour and the Melkite Church has more Moslem students in it than Christian, and Jewish students as well. Jewish groups protest the wall now dividing the Holy Land. In Bethlehem the Lutherans are focused on living what Jesus calls the abundant life under occupation, emphasizing a wellness clinic and the arts and music and a vibrant faith--things that make life worth living. Hope, their pastor Mitri Raheb says, is “something we do today”—there’s that verb again—go and do!

There are all sorts of implications for us here at home. One I will mention has to do with how Christians relate to one another in the sorely divided Church of which we are a part. Pope Benedict created a bit of a swirl this past week by reemphasizing his conviction that there is only one true church and that congregations like ours are not part of the authentic Body of Christ but are rather what he calls ecclesial communities that do not afford believers the means of salvation.

I’m sorry the Pope felt the need to reiterate this conviction prior to a Sunday when we have beloved guests with us for JJ’s baptism, friends whose roots are in the Catholic tradition. However, the timing may well be fortuitous, for our recent bonding with the Catholic Church in Jifna and the sacrament of baptism in which we are about to share should dispel any angst about the well-being of our community of faith.

It’s is good and right that the lesson for day is about transcending boundaries, about breaking down walls of hostility, about taking hold of the central truth of our life together: loving God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. If this is our steady drumbeat, I can’t imagine that Jesus would leave us bereft. Can you?