A Long Walk Spoiled
Luke 10:25-37
July 15, 2001

Everybody knows the Good Samaritan. The parable told by Jesus is his most well-known, even more than the parable of the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son is well-known too, but it is church people who know that one. Everyone knows the Good Samaritan. After all, when have you heard of a Prodigal Son Hospital or of a legal statute which exempts from lawsuits well meaning Prodigal Sons who help crash victims?
If everybody knows of the Good Samaritan, does anybody really know it? Very few people have any idea what and where a Samaritan is, and since he is a good Samaritan, even fewer have any notion that he was a despised person or why.
The Samaritan in the parable is good, a superlatively good, though ordinary person. However, the adjective "good" carries the same kind of oxymoronic quality that it does in "Good Friday." The Good Samaritan is good only in the eyes of those of us who don't know what a Samaritan is.
We've heard this parable too much, or at least we think we have heard it too much. Let's begin all over again from a different angle. "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho...." A certain man, one of us, took a long walk from the cool heights of Jerusalem down to the inferno of Jericho. Others also took the same walk, and for all of them it was a long walk spoiled.
Actually, Mark Twain's quip about golf was, "a good walk spoiled." John Feinstein wrote a book in 1995 by the same name about the PGA men's tour. His wife asked him why, when he declared how much he loved the game, did he always return from the golf course in such a bad mood?
One should never try to take the details of Jesus' parables too seriously, but it is worthwhile to figure this one out. The walk from the highlands of Jerusalem at 2600 feet above sea level to Jericho, about 1000 feet below sea level, one of the lowest cities on the planet, was not a simple point to point. One walked from cool, lush green to arid and desolate regions. No one really wanted to live there except the brigands who would prey upon the vulnerable passers-by.
Why would someone walk from Jerusalem to Jericho? Travel in the ancient world was infrequently indulged in as it was slow, exhausting, expensive, and most of all dangerous. There might be the occasional wild animal which could do you in, but it was the human animals who would lie in wait for the unprotected traveler that one had to beware. No wonder all of our trite expressions regarding a safe journey have an ancient origin.
When Jesus began this parable by saying that a person had embarked on a long walk to Jericho, it was not like a benign 1950's tune "I was walking down the street." A sense of foreboding would fill the hearts of the listeners, especially when they heard this anonymous man was going right through the rough part of North Central Regina.
His long walk was spoiled and Jesus wastes no words to that effect. He is set upon, robbed, stripped of his clothing, beaten and left for dead. We don't know his name, nor do we know his purpose and goals. He has nothing now, and what he needs is mercy, grace, kindness - none of which he is in any position to bargain for. Victims rights advocates would demand a higher profile for this man who was robbed and beaten, but for Jesus his situation is taken for granted.
Also taken for granted is the innkeeper who will do the final share of medical care and healing for the man. We do not hear his voice, though we are assured he will be paid in full for his services after an advance of two days' wages. The innkeeper's days would be dominated by his caring for this man, and even if he were being paid his hospitality and kindness are part of God's economy.
What brings this story on to the edge of ludicrousness is that here is one man on a long foolish walk for no good reason, and he is followed by a caravan of other people, also just as foolish. Respectable people now: a priest and a Levite by chance are on a long walk passing along the same road.
Why the priest and Levite are here makes no sense, for they cannot be on business. They are tied to the Temple in Jerusalem and there are no branch offices in the suburbs. So there is a note of suspicion about why they are on the road to Jericho.
Neither one wants to have his long walk spoiled. It could always be a trap, though I would think the brigands would have had them long before they could even see clearly the beaten man by the side of the road. Of course, to stop and help this man would have drawn attention to their suspicious presence out here. Leave no trace you were ever here is the operating principle of the religious men. God's mercy does not apply in a place where you never were.
Along comes the Samaritan, who does spoil his walk for the sake of mercy. He does not appear to calculate his losses. He takes the risk of being attacked and injured by an incoherent and deranged man. Why, he even could contract AIDS - do you think he put on those rubber gloves? He lost all sorts of time on his journey, for not only did he transport the man on his own animal, but he stayed at the inn for a while taking care of this victim. He invested most of his available cash and committed himself to further financial obligations for who knows how long.
There was no common sense to what he did. It was motivated simply by mercy for the plight of another human being.
And just who was he? He is not a historical figure; there is no person that can be identified as him. No one can take an expedition up onto Mount Ararat and find the bones of the Good Samaritan next to Noah's Ark. He was a Samaritan, and for Jesus' listeners this was obscene, for no way could you call a Samaritan good.
For the Jewish listener and reader, a Samaritan was a pagan masquerading as a Jew. If I have listened properly, the equivalent today would be a Mormon, though good and Mormon hang together much more readily for us than good and Samaritan did then. The Samaritan is not a historical figure, but the eternal figure of the last person we would want helping us. Just this week it might be a Chilean, or for members of the Toronto Olympic bid committee, a member of the Beijing committee. In my youth, clearly the Samaritan would have been a godless Communist bent on destroying our free enterprise way of life and freedom - except that this good communist would have shown me mercy when I was desperately helpless and could offer nothing in return.
Once again, we want to do something about this parable. We want to be the Good Samaritan and help the helpless, and there is really nothing wrong about that. Nevertheless, the parable is not a prescription for our immediate action - it is a description of how God works. You and I are every character in the story at one time or another - we may even have been the robbers - but basically we are the man left for dead who has no needs now except for mercy.
Who gives us mercy in God's name? Here we are out on this desolate road where we don't belong, where our common sense has abandoned us, and the person who helps you is the person you have long ago decided has no business doing so. That is how God works. And that is when you know it is God working.
You see, if you do the job of the Good Samaritan there is always a little touch of self-righteousness that we have done God's work. But if you are the helpless recipient of God's grace through the hands of the worst person you know, can you possibly keep living and thinking the same way? You have neighbours you did not imagine.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan