When You’re Down And Out: The Parable Of The Good Samaritan

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If you need a kidney transplant the average wait time for getting one is 4 ½ years. Often if you’re sick enough to need a transplant, you don’t have 4 ½ years to wait. You can go on dialysis but that carries its own health risks, making it harder to find a suitable kidney for a transplant. It can be a downward spiral. Of course, if you have a friend or family member who has a spare kidney and is willing to give it to you, you may be in luck. If their kidney is a match for your body, you could do the transplant right away. They can donate their kidney with little risk to themselves, a two-week recovery time, and boom: potentially save your life. People donate kidneys to people they love. People rarely, however, will donate their kidney to a stranger.

 

I wouldn’t. At least not a stranger who I knew nothing about — a stranger who, like the stranger in the Good Samaritan story, was anonymous. Lying by the side of the road. Would you? If someone came up to you and said, “Hey, that guy at the end of the subway car needs a kidney. Can he have yours?” If you’re like me, and I think in this respect you probably are, I think you would think, “Why should I? What’s my obligation to that particular guy at the end of the subway car that I should have an invasive medical procedure and turn my life upside down for him? Who is he to me?”

 

This is the last sermon in this year’s sermon series on the Parables of Jesus and I thought I’d finish with what I think of as the most challenging parable, although it’s usually positioned as the most innocuous one. The parable of the Good Samaritan is prefaced with an exchange between a lawyer and Jesus, in which the lawyer is asking what he has to do to inherit eternal life, meaning salvation.

Jesus asks him to recite what is written in the Torah on the topic and he answers that among other things, he knows he’s supposed to love his neighbor as himself. Jesus says, basically, “You got it. So go do that.” And then the lawyer famously asks, “And who is my neighbor?”

 

In reply, Jesus says this: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? [The lawyer] said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.'”

 

The lawyer’s question echoes: “Who is my neighbor?” The concept of a “neighbor” is very specific. If you think about it in its ordinary, non-theological usage, a neighbor is someone who doesn’t live with you but who doesn’t live far away; someone who lives very near you, maybe right next door or across the street. But it’s subjective. Two people who live in Brooklyn Heights might say, “we’re neighbors” even if they live half a mile apart. And two people who live on the opposite side of the tracks from one another, might not say they’re neighbors even if they are. And it’s the same with the spiritual question. Who is a neighbor? Who is a friend? Who is a stranger? Who is the other?

What’s the relevant proximity that we’re talking about here? It’s subjective. For the purposes of the spiritual law, who is considered to be my neighbor? That was the lawyer’s lawyerly question.

 

And Jesus doesn’t answer it. He tells a parable and at the end, he quizzes the lawyer (Jews are famous for answering a question with another question.) He asks, “Which of these three…” (meaning, the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan) “Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” In other words, which of these three made themselves a neighbor to the man in need? It’s almost like Jesus turned “neighboring” into a verb – which of these three “neighbored” themselves to the man? Which of them collapsed the distance between them, bringing himself and the man into a proximity and an intimacy where the law about loving your neighbor became activated?

 

The priest and the Levite clearly did not do this. It says they crossed to the other side of the street. They increased the distance between themselves and the man. They de-neighbored themselves. There are lots of theories as to why. It was against Jewish law for priests to touch a dead body. The text says that the guy was “half dead.” They might have worried that he was all the way dead and that touching him would render them impure to do the rituals that they were supposed to do in the temple. More likely, that was just an excuse – exactly the kind of legalistic, dogmatic rationalization that Jesus was mocking by telling this story in the first place.

 

More likely, the priest and the Levite were just scared. This road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notoriously dangerous. What if this was a trap and the guy was bluffing and there was someone waiting behind a rock to rob them and beat them up? Like the guy who wants a kidney on the subway, they didn’t know this guy. He was bloody, suffering, down and out, and, as we know, “nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” He was “other” to them. They did not see him as their neighbor and so they didn’t see him as their problem. They didn’t really see him at all. I think there’s something about this we can all relate to.

 

But there’s an even deeper fear here that I think we can relate to as well. The priest’s fear of being ritually contaminated by the dying man is really a primal fear of being contaminated with suffering. Someone who is truly “down and out” – someone homeless, sick, disabled, socially outcast, or just desperately lonely – can be scary. It’s like we don’t want to get any of that on us. Our deepest fear is becoming like them. We don’t want to believe that life can be so horrible. We don’t want to believe that it could happen to us. We don’t want to see our face in theirs. We don’t want to be their neighbor because that’s just too close. And so we cross the street.

 

Of course not all of us cross the street, and those of us who do, don’t do it every time. There are times I bet that each of us can remember when we acted less like the priest and more like the Samaritan and neighbored ourselves to someone in need. But in the parable, the Samaritan models a kind of superhuman, heroic neighboring. He doesn’t just give the guy a kind word or a band aid but he gets in there physically, caring for his wounds, picking him up, putting him on “his own animal,” taking him to an inn, caring for him there, giving the innkeeper more money to take care of him even longer and then promising to come back for him. It’s kind of over the top. He takes full responsibility for this stranger on the road – the equivalent of giving one’s kidney to the guy on the subway, which almost no one in real life actually does.

 

Why does he do it? The text says, “he was moved with pity.” Other translations say “compassion.” But some scholars say that the concepts of pity and compassion don’t quite do justice to the connotations of the original Greek word, which as far as I can tell is completely unpronounceable: splagchnizomai. This word refers to movement in one’s guts, deep-seated stirring. The noun form is one’s innards or entrails, inner organs, like, say, the kidney. It’s a physical, even gory word with connections to animal sacrifice. Later it was associated with strong impulses and emotions from deep within. So it was something physical and deep, inexplicable and unpronounceable, that moved the Samaritan to help this stranger on the side of the road. It was something within the Samaritan’s body that connected him with the body of the stranger and moved him to help in such a bodily way. It gave him a kind of enlightened consciousness. He would have given his kidney in a heartbeat.

 

In the real world of kidney transplants, this issue of the 4 ½ year waiting list and people donating to family but not strangers has gotten a lot of attention. Because an interesting dilemma pops up with some frequency: Let’s say you have kidney disease and you have a family member or friend who is a willing donor. But their kidney is not a match for you. And let’s say your neighbor also has kidney disease. And she also has a willing donor but that person’s kidney is not a match for her. But it just so happens that that person’s kidney would be a match for you. And your donor’s kidney would be a match for your neighbor. Wouldn’t it make sense, instead of both of you languishing for 4 ½ years, for the two donors to swap and each give their kidney to the person who can use it? Turns out people are much more willing to give their kidney to a stranger knowing that their loved one will also wind up with a kidney in the deal. I would. So now, programs have popped up that use algorithms devised by Nobel-Prize-winning economists that match donors and recipients in these “paired donation” initiatives.

 

Carry this logic forward and you would imagine (correctly) that there are now algorithms that can identify whole chains of donors and recipients, each giving their kidney or receiving a kidney from a someone other than their loved one, passing the gift down the line until everyone ends up with the right kidney. Extrapolate still further and you can imagine that the chain could get so long, it eventually would encompass everyone in the world who needs a kidney transplant. And if we all had the heightened consciousness of the Samaritan in the parable, we could dispense with the algorithms altogether and know that if we donate our kidney to anyone, somehow, somewhere down the line, in some form, it will come back to us. We could feel our gut-level, splagchnizomai, physical connection to all human beings – perhaps all living beings – and know that ultimately there are no strangers.

 

So Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question and he doesn’t do anything to answer the practical problem that we can’t do everything for everyone in the world. But he does teach us the important lesson that your neighbor – at least for the purposes of loving your neighbor as yourself – has nothing to do with proximity. It’s not about who is close to you, who is like you, who speaks your language, shares your values, your ethnicity, your species, or who doesn’t need you too much. In fact, the idea of neighbor is not a noun describing a state of being in proximity; it’s a verb describing a way of being in relationship. You can’t intellectualize it and parse it out like the lawyer was trying to do.

 

The teaching of loving one’s neighbor as oneself is about committing to neighboring ourselves to others. And when we commit to going through life neighboring ourselves to others, we open our guts (not just our hearts, but our animal guts) to that special unpronounceable feeling – that impulse to connect and to help without being able to see a clear legal or mathematical reason why we should. When we do this instead of crossing to the other side of the street, the boundaries between self and other, neighbor and stranger, can dissolve. And then, together, we can achieve what the lawyer really wanted at the beginning of the story: everlasting life. But it’s a collective salvation – one that none of us could ever achieve alone.