I want to look at a story we all know so well I’m anticipating you’re all going to sigh and despair when I tell you what it is. It’s one of the best known stories in the world, and probably in the top two best-known parables Jesus told. It’s usually, if perhaps mistakenly, known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I want to read this parable with you four times. The first time I’m going to see what it tells us about who Jesus was talking to. The second time I want to see what it tells us about who Jesus was and is. The third time I want to look at the ways we think we know this story so well that we don’t actually read it closely at all and maybe miss what the story is really about. And finally I want to read the story as I think it asks to be read by you and me today, right here and right now.
(1) Now I’m going to start by exploring what this story tells us about who Jesus was talking to.
“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.” Who is this man? Let’s play with that question and this description a little further. I wonder who that man really is. I wonder who could be in Jesus’ mind when he says the words, “stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.”
Let me tell you another familiar story. Once Israel was great. David was king. The territory of the nation was expanding. It was becoming a truly great nation. David’s son Solomon built a magnificent temple. Israel had never been so certain that God was on its side and all was well with the world. But after Solomon the kingdom split. The northern kingdom was invaded and destroyed by in the eighth century by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom was besieged and ransacked in the sixth century by the Chaldeans, and its ruling elite carted off to Babylon.
Listen to these words again. “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.” Who is this man? This man is Israel. Israel had fallen into the hands of robbers, and was stripped, beaten, and left half dead. Jesus is telling Israel’s story back to it. But here’s the crucial part. The Bible was written in Babylon. The Old Testament was written because the Jews discovered, to their amazement, that God was closer to them in Babylon than they’d ever known in the Promised Land. That’s the revelation on which the whole Bible rests. God meets us when we’re in the gutter. The gutter is where God is most at home.
With the very first line of this story Jesus puts his finger on the great dividing-line of the society of his time. Is Israel still in exile or not? Israel is in the gutter, stripped, beaten, and half dead. Everything Jesus says is pointing this out, and saying that now is the time when God is truly sending redemption, bringing the exile to an end, inaugurating the era of freedom and justice that Israel could scarcely dream of in Babylon and had never experienced since. Now is the time, says Jesus. And here comes your saviour, trotting down the road toward you. But be careful, be watchful, be alert: there’s a few people coming down the road; make sure you can tell them apart.
(2) Now for our second reading of the story. This time the issue is, who is Jesus? Listen carefully to the later part of the parable. ‘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.”’ We’ve already established that Israel has more than passing resemblance to the wounded man. But it’s also more than plausible to interpret the man on a more directly personal level. Like many people, then and now, the wounded man experiences unprovoked assault, battery and robbery, leaving him in a desperate physical, psychological and economic plight. Then he experiences both emotional and practical neglect, as the priest and the Levite withhold not only compassion and tenderness but also medication, transport, and financial help.
Now look at what the Samaritan does. The Samaritan is travelling. He’s not a mountain rescue helicopter; he’s not a police squad car; he’s a person with a life and purpose of his own, irrespective of the goings-on on the Jericho road. But once both he and the man in the gutter realise how desperate the man’s situation is, look what happens. He comes to the wounded and dying man. He has tremendous compassion. He offers him practical assistance. He offers the man healing in the present and the hope of more for the future. Then, and mark this, he goes into the city at considerable risk to himself to secure the man’s well-being. And the story ends with him promising to return to complete the work of salvation he has begun. The Samaritan shows love and compassion that the authorities of his day had not shown, cares for the wounded man in body, mind and spirit, and offers safe lodging and promises more to come. It seems pretty clear that offering these details, Jesus is describing himself. The Samaritan does all the things Jesus does, or is going to do. He comes to us; he has compassion for us; he helps us; he heals us; he carries us; he goes into the city for us; he brings us to a place of safety; he promises to return. It’s a gospel in miniature.
(3) So let’s now read the story a third time. Jesus is the Samaritan. But wait a minute – I thought we were supposed to be the Samaritan. Look at the shape of the story, maybe more closely than you ever have before. Think about who Samaritans were. Samaritans were despised, hated and ostracised by Jews. Remember, the person in the story who is despised, hated and ostracized is not the one lying beaten and robbed by the side of the road. The despised, hated and ostracised person is the one who does the helping – the one who brings salvation. You’d expect the Samaritan to be the one in the gutter. Then we could be the big-hearted passer-by, magnanimously reaching out to the one the world turns its back on. But that’s not the way the story works.
Here’s the crucial point. Assuming we are the Samaritan blinds us to the heart of the gospel. The heart of the gospel is that when we were in the gutter, God lifted us up in Jesus and brought us home. When we were down and out and humiliated and rejected and foolish and failing and scorned and despised, Jesus touched us and heard us and forgave us and restored us and reconciled us and healed us and gave us life with him forever. The fundamental gospel is that we’ve failed to save ourselves and are incapable of saving others but that Jesus saves us anyway.
So yes, Jesus is the Samaritan. Jesus is the one we despised and rejected and condemned and crucified. Jesus is the one who sets us on our feet again and binds up our wounds and bears us as his burden when we cannot carry our own loads. Jesus is the one who takes us to a place of greater safety and makes a home for us where we were strangers and promises to return when the time for reckoning is finally come. Jesus is the Samaritan.
But we are not the Samaritan. The parable of the Good Samaritan is not a salutary tale promoting noblesse oblige. We don’t need Jesus for that. We can do that perfectly well for ourselves. That’s not Christianity. That’s enlightened self-interest. It’s not wrong; but it’s not what Jesus is telling us.
(4) So, to our fourth reading of the parable. How does it ask to be read by you and me today, right here and right now? If we’re not the Samaritan, and we’re obviously not called to imitate the priest and the Levite, who are we?
We are the man by the side of the road. We’re the one who is stripped, we are the one who is bruised, we are the one who is half-dead. This is how we begin to reflect on questions of compassion and good deeds and social justice. We are the needy ones. We long for relationship, we long for forgiveness, we long for reconciliation, we long for eternal life. And we’d be happy to accept these things from the priest or the Levite. These are people who seem like ourselves, people from our own social background. They have security. They have social esteem. They have resources. But the story is telling us those people can’t help us. They can’t give us what we so desperately need.
Why do I say we’re in the gutter? Take me, for example. I’m a Westerner, and I benefit from a global system of trade that keeps the majority of the world’s population in poverty. I’m an educated white resident of one the world’s leading economic giants, and I benefit from a social system that privileges me and my dependents in almost every conceivable way, at the expense of other cultural and ethnic groups. Until recently I was living in a country that props up numerous tyrants abroad and whose militarism costs the lives of civilians around the world every day. I’m a man, and participate in a gender system that has perennially denied women full flourishing and, in most cases, still does. I’m a twenty-first century citizen of the developed world, and I take for granted that my country and my generation gets to gobble up the vast majority of the world’s non-renewable resources even though it’s other countries and other generations that will likely bear the consequences; and I can’t imagine things any other way.
I could go on, but already you can see that on judgement day, I’m going to be in big trouble. I may not have to shoulder the blame for causing these and other circumstances, but I’m certainly going to be asked what I’ve done to rectify them. And you know that my answer is going to be, “Pathetically little.” And your list may not be identical to mine, but I fear that for many of you, your answer may be uncomfortably similar to mine: “Pathetically little.”
This list isn’t designed to make you or me feel guilty. This list is designed to remind you and me of one simple thing on which our reading of this parable – and perhaps our whole salvation – depends. We are in desperate trouble. We are the man by the side of the road. The lawyer asked Jesus ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ That doesn’t sound like the question of a man who knows he’s in desperate trouble. That sounds like the question of a man who just needs to get straight where his legitimate responsibilities lie and where his sense of guilt need not linger. But Jesus tells a story that shows the lawyer and us that we’re all in desperate trouble.
And yet, see the good news. The answer to our problems is, miraculously, ambling down the road towards us. But, hold on, this person is the very last person we could imagine being any help to us. This person is a stranger. This person is an enemy. This person is more offensive to us than the robbers who’ve just stripped us and left us half dead. This is a person we assume is out to get us. This is a person we look down upon. This is a person we’ve never in our lives eaten a meal with, let alone touched. This is a person we wouldn’t dream of living next to. This is a person who claims to worship the same God but whose religion we despise and whose race we regard as inferior. This is a man whose identity, Samaritan, is one we can’t say without spitting. This is the victim of every single one of our sins.
Everything in us resists the idea that we could have anything to receive from this person. Sure, if the roles were reversed, maybe we could bring ourselves to see them as an object of charity, and perhaps in time they would come to be grateful for our generosity and come to see us as their benefactor. Yet we can’t bear the idea that we might find ourselves begging them for our very life. But this is our moment of conversion. For this is the form Jesus chooses to take when he comes to save us. We’re the man lying in the gutter by the side of the road to Jericho, and there’s a figure coming towards us, and through our bewildered, bruised, and bloodshot eyes, we see the figure draw closer, and we realise that we can’t live without Jesus. And the form in which Jesus comes to us is as this despised stranger.
Can we do it? Can we bring ourselves to realize we’re the man by the road? Everything in us wants to hold on to the idea that we’re the benefactor – who might get it wrong, like the priest and Levite – but can still get it right, like the Samaritan. But we need a complete change of heart to begin to realize we’re as desperate and needy as the man in the gutter. Only then will we find God saves us and gives us everything we need through the person whom our society, our economy, our culture, and even some of our churches have taught us to patronise, feel guilty about, ignore, or even despise. Can you imagine the person you most despise being your salvation? Can you imagine even wanting to be touched by such a person?
Now you can see why I regard this parable as crucial for opening our eyes to the nature of community engagement. We can’t relate to our neighbourhoods unless we look in our hearts and recognise that we ourselves are desperately needy for relationship, for healing, for forgiveness, for reconciliation, for eternal life. And Jesus comes to meet us in that need. But the form Jesus takes to meet our need is that of the person we despise and hate and ostracise. This is the moment of our conversion – not just that we see our need of Jesus, but that we’re willing to embrace him in the form in which he comes to us. We’re prepared to receive the healing and forgiveness and eternal life that comes through the person we couldn’t believe had anything to give us. To do community ministry we need to experience this same conversion. My prayer is that today might be such a day of conversion for you.
Only when we’ve experienced this conversion can we hear Jesus’ words, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Go, and continue to see the face of Jesus in the despised and rejected of the world. You’re not their benefactor. You’re not the answer to their prayer. They’re the answer to yours. You’re searching for a salvation that only they can bring. Don’t assume others will see Jesus’ face in you: go, and expect to see Jesus’ face in them. Let your interaction with the weak and the disadvantaged and the oppressed of the earth come not from a sense of guilt or obligation or pity. Let it come from a recognition of your own desperate plight, and then from gratitude, from joy, from an overflowing delight that you’ve been met by Christ in the one from whom you never could believe you had anything to receive, and an expectation that you’re going to spend the rest of your life looking to similar people with the firm expectation of meeting Christ in them.
Let me summarise the principles of community engagement as we’ve seen them in this parable.
- God is most fully made known in times of exile, abandonment, desolation, despair, isolation. God was most fully present to us in the dying Christ on the cross. If we want to meet Jesus, we need to put ourselves in the presence of those who look like him in his crucified state. If we’re not sure what that means, Jesus gives us a checklist: the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner. Community engagement is fundamentally about putting ourselves in the presence of such people.
- Jesus is the Samaritan. In other words, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner are not first and foremost objects of our pity. They are bringers of our salvation. We don’t see in them what they lack, we look for what they have. Like the Samaritan, they have exactly what we need to be saved. If the man in the gutter had refused help from the Samaritan, he’d have died in no time. If we refuse to see the angels God sends us as the sources of our salvation, we too will starve and suffer and die. God sends us everything we need. If we refuse it because we don’t like the form in which God sends it to us, whose fault is that?
- We are not the benefactor, bestowing our bounty upon the poor and needy. We are the needy – we cannot be saved unless we receive the Samaritan’s gifts. Everything in us wants to construe community engagement as a transaction in which we have faith and resources and generosity, and the stranger has need and scarcity and at least occasionally humble gratitude. But that’s not how it works. That’s where we need conversion. We are in the gutter. We engage our community in order that our community will save us – not the other way around. Lord deliver us from our pride and pomposity and self-satisfied complacency and arrogant presumption.
- We do community ministry because we long to meet Jesus, and Jesus comes to us in the abundance we find in our neighbourhood. The Samaritan in the story has abundant gifts to give. When we look at a community so often all we see is its deficit, its lack, its emptiness. But what brings a neighbourhood to life is not the pouring-in of external resources. What galvanises a community is the drawing-out of gifts, the eliciting from the shy, the neglected, the rejected and the suppressed the remarkable gifts of creativity, kindness, ingenuity, resourcefulness and grace. To begin by saying, ‘What can I give?’ is insulting, because it assumes I am the person of abundance and you are the neighbourhood of scarcity. Instead, engagement begins by sensing its own neediness and appreciating the privilege of being in a neighbourhood that has so much to offer to that neediness.
- The importance of the story of the man and the Samaritan doesn’t lie in the man’s problems being fixed. It lies in the picture it gives us of the way God works. Community engagement is not about fixing problems. It doesn’t start with a problem – or, if it does, the problem lies with ourselves, rather than with the person or place in whom we perceive scarcity. We don’t engage with a person or neighbourhood because we are trying to solve their problem – we do so because we want to receive the wealth of wisdom, humanity and grace that God has to give us through them. We are not the source of their salvation: they are the source of ours. If we talk about their problems, we make sure we are attending to the ones they name and identify, rather than ones we perceive or imagine. Our every effort is to enjoy their being, and share our own, rather than change their reality assuming a script we have imposed from elsewhere.
So how do we actually do community ministry? This is what I always say to clergy. When a person comes to see a priest, they sit down, they explore in subtle ways how much they trust their interlocutor, and when all goes well they tell a story and with the pastor they find a new or better way to locate that story within a wider story of themselves, the world, the church, and God. And when that point is reached, the priest has a choice. He or she can slap their thighs, and say, ‘Well, nice talking, time to head off to the youth group, and I’m sure you’ve got things to do…’, thus bringing the conversation to a polite end. Or, he or she can say, slowly and gently, ‘Was there anything else?’ I believe it’s no exaggeration to say that on this choice hangs a whole ministry. If the priest takes the first option, and heads off to the youth group, he or she is saying all is basically well with the world, and life can be fitted into a routine. If the priest takes the second option, he or she will never be bored. Overwhelmed, possibly: but there’ll never be a need to scratch around for the new mission idea or a bold justice agenda, because it’ll be provided free of charge. You don’t have to go looking for opportunities to engage with your community: you just have to be present, be attentive, and assume you have a lot to receive.
I want to finish by issuing a challenge. It’s a challenge that I regard as the perfect preparation for community engagement, because it embodies in microcosm everything I believe about what such engagement means and involves. I want to invite you to have a conversation with someone over the next few days – maybe with someone you know and love; better still with someone from a different place in society to yourself. Here are the four parts of the conversation I’d like to encourage you to have.
Tell me about the ways in which you’re rich.
Tell me about the ways in which you’re poor.
Let me tell you about the ways in which I’m poor.
Let me tell you about the ways in which I’m rich.
That’s it. So maybe the conversation might go something like this. You’d say, ‘Tell me about the ways in which you are rich.’ And your friend might say, ‘I appreciate the way you see me for what I am and not just for what I’m not. My childhood was difficult, but I feel rich in the number and variety of people my parents brought into my life. My education wasn’t very successful on paper, but I feel rich in the way I learned to read people and look into their hearts. I’ve never had much money, but I have a wealth of friends and there’s always been someone who’s stepped out of the shadows to help me when I couldn’t manage everything myself.’
And then maybe you’d say, ‘Tell me about how the ways in which you are poor.’ And your friend might say, ‘You’re probably expecting me to talk about how I can’t pay the rent and can’t find a job. But the real way I feel poor is when I see a person who’s a lot worse off than me and I feel powerless to help them. The real times I feel poor are when I think of my daughter who died when she was just two and I was just 19 and I miss her with more sadness than I have in my whole heart.’
And then maybe you’d say, ‘May I tell you about the ways in which I am poor?’ And your friend might say, ‘Please do. I’d never thought of you, or someone like you, as poor.’ And you might say, ‘I felt like my parents really just wanted boys. All my life I’ve struggled with envy. I’ve always hated my brother, even though anyone would think we were the best of friends, and I’ve never been able to trust that the love I’ve had wasn’t just about to be snatched away from me. I wonder if I’ve ever trusted anyone enough to show them who I really am.
‘But I’m also rich. I can listen, or read, or even be silent and pray, for hours. And I can paint anything and make it laugh and dance and spring to life. I find it hard to talk to and trust people, but I share my heart through my paintbrush.’
When the two of you have shared your wealth and your poverty with one another in this way, you may want to leave it there. But you may choose to go a little further.
Your friend may say to you, ‘You’ve told me about how you’re rich. Let me tell you about how you’re rich. You’re rich because you don’t have to spend every waking moment of your day earning money so you’ve got time to do beautiful things and walk with people who’re in trouble. And let me tell you how you’re poor. You’re poor because you’ve never found a way to love your brother. You’re poor because you don’t have enough people like me around you to tell you the truth about yourself.’
And then, ever so tentatively, you may find the courage to say to your friend, ‘You’ve told me about how you’re rich. Let me tell you about how you’re rich. You’re rich because every child you ever meet loves you. You’re rich because you’ve already been through the worst that life can bring so you live without fear. But you’re also poor. You’re poor because you’re deeply hungry to do something really useful to others but you can’t find a way to do it.’
Poverty is a mask we put on a person to cover up their real wealth. And wealth is a disguise we put on a person to hide their profound poverty. Those we call the rich are the ones in whom we choose to see the wealth but are more reluctant to see the deep poverty. Those we call the poor are the ones in whom we choose to see the hunger but are slower to see the profound riches.
Recall the words of Mary’s Magnificat: ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.’ God takes that in each of us that is rich, and sees through it to our poverty. And God takes our poverty, and sees past it to our deeper riches.
And every day we come before God and enact these words. We think of our neighbour and our world, and we think about the ways they are rich. And we call that praise. We think of our neighbor in their poverty, and we call that intercession. We think of ourselves in our poverty, and we call that confession. We think of ourselves in our riches, and we call that thanksgiving. These are the four parts of prayer. Praise, intercession, confession, thanksgiving. The riches of the world, the poverty of the world, the poverty of ourselves, the riches of ourselves.
Have that conversation with someone this week. Make it the time you discover another’s poverty and another’s wealth, and redefine your own wealth and your own poverty. Have that sacred conversation with another person this week.
But have that conversation with God every day. For that’s what prayer is. Prayer is when we see God’s wealth and God’s poverty, and bring to God our poverty and our wealth, and our neighbour’s too. That’s how you can turn a courageous intimate conversation into a daily act of renewal. That’s how you can practice the spirit of community engagement, by realising that in the stranger you’re looking into the face of God.