Only Half Dead
Luke 10:25-37

July 15, 2007


It is sobering to realize how long ago this happened, but one day I picked up Phoumarin and his wife after his work to go for a medical appointment. They were living in the manse with us for a few months after arriving as refugees from Cambodia, fleeing from the atrocities of Pol Pot in the late 1970’s. I delivered a letter to Phoumarin which had arrived that day and he read it as we drove to the appointment.

It was good news, yet upsetting at the same time. Friends he and his wife had made in the refugee camp in Thailand had finally made it to the United States and had been settled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The husband had a job, the children were in school; it was wonderful. But, the problem was their sponsor. The sponsor was a Vietnamese family who had been settled earlier in the Harrisburg area. What’s the problem, I asked? His friends were angry because their sponsors were Vietnamese! At that time in 1982 or so, Vietnam had entered Cambodia, driven out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but had never left. Vietnam was the occupier of Cambodia, a constant military presence, and therefore the last kind of people you wanted sponsoring you to begin a new life in the New World.

I thought for a second. I knew Phoumarin and his wife had been converted to Christianity in the Thailand camp by a Southern Baptist missionary. I asked, “Have you ever heard of the Good Samaritan?” Phoumarin shook his head, No.

Sometimes we have read the Bible too much and sometimes too little. Whenever mention of the Good Samaritan arises it may not mean the person talking has read the Gospel or that he/she even knows the Good Samaritan is a character in the Bible. The “good Samaritan” metaphor has overwhelmed the original story so that most people think it is simply helping someone injured by the side of the road.

But it is not by the side of the road that the real story begins. It begins on the side of a teaching session Jesus was having with his disciples. A lawyer intrudes himself into the conversation desiring to put Jesus to the test. This was not a bow-tied lawyer at Queen’s Court, but a person who knew the laws of the Torah so well he probably thought he owned them. Moses may have written them, but he knew what they really meant. Jesus needed to be brought down a notch.

“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus, like many a crafty teacher, reversed the question, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” Actually, that was a risky counter question on the part of Jesus: he appealed to the lawyer’s pride and expertise. Heck, there were 632 laws in the Torah; the guy could have talked all day. Thank goodness, he played it straight and brief. “You shall love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Not only was this a classical answer; it was what Jesus himself had previously taught. This lawyer guy was pretty shrewd - he knew the best way to please the teacher is to regurgitate what the teacher had already taught.

You’ve hit the nail right on the head, Jesus replied, make a habit of it and you’ll live gloriously. The lawyer had played the game and given the correct answers, but now he gets down to the crux of this encounter, for he desires to justify himself. He wants Jesus to approve of the way he lives his life. “Who exactly is my neighbour?” Not a trivial question at that time; perhaps the question on many a devout Jew’s mind and lips as they struggled to survive under an occupying army and amidst hostile nations, none of whom could see the sense in Israel’s unique faith of a unique God of the Universe. So Israel had come to recognize only their fellow Jews as neighbours, people who thought like them, worshiped like them.

The lawyer wanted to know which “neighbours” he could cross off his list. Which people I have already treated contemptuously am I justified in treating this way because they are really not human in the way I am? If they do not believe and recognize the one Lord God, then they do not have a relationship with God and are therefore non-entities. They don’t count.

A parable begins in response, but just as we isolate the tale and forget the punch line, so also we don’t listen carefully enough.

Jesus starts off with a tale about “a man,” maybe “a certain man,” but anonymous nonetheless. That seems quite calculated for this lawyer had his long laundry list of those specific nationalities and ethnic groups and social classes he had already de-neighboured. Instead, Jesus was specific - he meant any man, any person, every person, everybody who was walking on that lonely ambush-ladened road down to the lowest city on the earth in Jericho. Everybody listening knew what was coming - the man was mugged and good.

The robbers stripped him and beat him badly and left him there by the side of the road bleeding half dead. Which half? I’d say it had to be that he was “only half dead,” which means that like the proverbial glass of water we talk about today he was also “half alive.” If the poor man was even conscious, he was lying there hoping against hope that someone would come along and redeem that half alive part of him.

But no, the priest and the Levite would rather have him dead, because by the mandate of purity laws they were not allowed to touch dead bodies, else they would be impure and would not be able to fulfill their duties for a week or more. Have you noticed that now Jesus is getting specific? These are the colleagues of the lawyer, fellow practitioners of the Torah. And in each case, the priest and the Levite saw the beaten man, so there had to be all those instantaneous weighing and deciding in their brains. They decided using all their theological education not to get involved.

Probably the next person to happen by did not hold a candle to his predecessors’ education. He was a Samaritan who when he saw the man did not labour mentally over the pluses and minuses, but had compassion. It wasn’t intellectual compassion, a certain kind of “caring” so popular today. People care about lots of things deeply, but there it remains. The Samaritan went over to the slumped figure, risking perhaps in the back of his mind that this was a trap of unscrupulous bandits to get more money. The Samaritan bound the wounds, pouring on oil and wine which elements ironically and probably intentionally are the elements the priest and Levite would utilize in worship in the Jerusalem Temple.

He put him on his beast - a foreshadowing of Jesus on Palm Sunday, half dead in anticipation of the crucifixion - and took him to an inn. Inns were not the Super 8 back then. An innkeeper was not the most scrupulous of characters, but the Samaritan trusted him with the injured man and with two denarii - two days wages - to take care of him until he returned and settled up.

It is the lawyer’s time to give a legal opinion on the case presented before him. Which of the three proved ‘neighbour’ to the man who fell among the robbers? Now the lawyer had to make the definition of the technical term neighbour. He got it right, “the one who showed mercy on him,” but you see he did not say “the Samaritan.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, to spit it out, that a Samaritan was a human being capable of more compassion and love than people who made their living at religion. What is a neighbour? To be a neighbour is a verb, not a noun of geographical proximity, it is how you act with compassion on those who are hurting.

I believe if we don’t allow ourselves to think and connive too much that there is a natural instinct in most of us to react with compassion when we see another person in immediate distress. Our compassion does not allow us to perceive colour or racial characteristics or symbols of the wrong religious faith; it’s only when you stop and start to think.

The lawyer must have been aghast at Jesus’ tale, and the first listeners to the Gospel would have been horrified. The Every Man going down to Jericho was assumed to be a Jew by most listeners. It’s a good thing he was half dead when the Samaritan picked him up and took care of him. If he had known it was a Samaritan the other half would have died. Or did it? Typical of Jesus’ parables you have to draw your conclusions on what happens to you when you find yourself helped by the last person on earth you want helping you. “Who is my neighbour?” is indeed the precise question you have to ask.

September 11, 2001, is turning out to be one of the mythical events of Biblical proportions in our culture. All sorts of stories circulate and in most cases are virtually not provable. One is of two men, both hurt by the collapse and debris in one of the World Trade Towers, leaning on one another and struggling their way out of the chaos until they reached safety outside. One was a devout Jew, the other a Palestinian Muslim, two people emblematic of the political and spiritual carnage that brought those towers and our modern world tumbling down. They leaned on one another, neighboured one another to life.

The lawyer has passed Jesus’ bar and has answered wisely despite himself. Jesus concludes, “Go and do likewise.” Go and be a Samaritan. Become the person you have pretended is hateful and you may just well become compassionate to every person.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan