Outcasts
Luke 10:25-37[1]
Growing up, I always felt a bit like a “misfit.” It seemed that I
was different from everybody else, and I struggled with where I fit in. In
fact, I carried that feeling with me into adulthood. I simply tried to do what
was right, I tried to do my best, I tried to be as straightforward and
transparent as possible. But it always seemed like I was a square peg trying to
fit into a round hole. Of course, I realize that many of us feel that way about
ourselves. We see others as “with it” or “all together” or “on track,” while we
think we fall short. Sometimes we may have even felt that way in our families.
Those challenges can lead us to think of ourselves as “outcasts.”
Of course, the reality is that the world is full of people who are
truly outcast. While not all societies have actual “caste” systems that rigidly
regulate relationships, I would say most of us have a functional equivalent. If
you don’t come from the right family, or if you didn’t go to the right school,
or if you don’t have a certain amount of education, or if you don’t make a high
enough salary, you are outside the group. If you doubt that we have this in our
culture, look at the entry requirements for some country clubs around the
nation. While we’d like to think that skin color no longer serves as one of
those criteria, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find people who exclude
others on that basis as well. Our world is full of outcasts.
I’m not sure many of us have ever drawn the connection between
outcasts and the Parable of the Good Samaritan. For us the parable has become
so commonplace that travelers even have a club named “The Good Sam Club,” whose
members pledge to stop and help someone who is broken down on the side of the
road. This would have made no sense to Jesus’ audience. In his day, there was
no such thing as a “good” Samaritan in the eyes of the Jewish people. Samaritans were the “unclean Samaritans,” the
“unwelcome Samaritans,” or the “hated Samaritans.”[2] A
Samaritan was the definitive outcast to the Jewish people of Jesus’ day.
That’s what would have made this parable so shocking to the people
Jesus originally told it. He was turning their world upside down. The Priest
and the Levite, who would have been honored religious leaders, come off not
looking so well. And the Samaritan, who would have been despised in the eyes of
Jesus’ audience, turns out to be the “hero.” More than that, he turns out to be
the one who shows them how to truly fulfill the command to “love your neighbor
as yourself”: by showing mercy!
It’s hard for us to imagine how shocking this parable must have
been when Jesus told it. His Jewish contemporaries would have expected him to
tell a parable about a particularly righteous Jewish person who showed mercy
toward a Samaritan. That person would have been viewed as exceptionally
compassionate, but the story would have left intact the Jewish people’s sense
of ethnic and religious superiority over the Samaritans. And it would also have
allowed us to walk away from the story with all of our prejudices intact,
comfortable in the assumption that we’re loving the “right” people.
But the parable of the Good Samaritan exposes a flaw that most of
us carry in our hearts. Although the scribe knows the Scriptures well enough to
give the right answer to his own question, it’s one thing to know what is right
and another thing altogether to do it! His question “who is my neighbor?”
betrays his desire to restrict the range of “love” to those whom he judged to
be “worthy” of that love. Unfortunately, we all fall short in this regard: we
are quick to love those who are “like us,” but we all have our own version of
who is an outcast, so different from us that we don’t believe the command to
love applies to them.
We might be able to hear this parable with our assumptions and
prejudices intact if it had taught us that we should love our neighbors,
including the “despised” outcasts like the Samaritans. But Jesus turns the
tables on us as well. The parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t teach us to go
out and help the outcasts! The outcast in Jesus’ parable is not the one in need
of help. The outcast is the one who truly practices the command to “love your
neighbor as yourself”! At the conclusion, Jesus tells this Scribe something he
probably found hard to swallow: to go and do as the outcast Samaritan has done!
The irony is that many of the people we relegate to the category
of “outcast” for whatever reason often have a better grasp of what it means to
love their neighbors than we do. Often they are generous, compassionate, kind,
and go out of their way to help someone in need. And they do it simply because
that’s what’s in their hearts. Many who go to what we consider “Third World”
countries come back with stories of how the people there enacted the love of their
neighbors in a way that affected them powerfully. In fact, some theologians
call it the “reverse mission”: when we who come from wealthy, “Christian”
nations go to serve those we consider to be “in need,” they challenge us with
the way in which they live out love, and mercy, and kindness. I think that in
order to love another, any other, as a neighbor, we have to first be able to
see ourselves in them, and see them in us. I think that’s the kind of change of
heart that Jesus was seeking with this parable. We love our neighbors when
we’re willing to see in every person the face of a neighbor, when we embrace in
them the Christ who said “I was an outcast.”
[1]
©Alan Brehm 2019. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 7/14/2019 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2]
Cf. Fred Craddock, Luke, 151: “This man who delayed his own journey,
expended great energy, risked danger to himself, spent two days’ wages with the
assurance of more, and promised to follow up on this activity was ceremonially
unclean, socially an outcast, and religiously a heretic.”
No comments:
Post a Comment