At a time when more than half of all Americans surveyed have trouble identifying Genesis as the first Book of the Bible, the story we hear today walks in like an old friend - it’s one that just about everybody knows! In fact, polls indicate that half of all Americans, Christian and otherwise, are pretty confident they can accurately tell this tale of the helpful stranger. Small wonder, this: after all, this story has given its name to countless hospitals and hospices and community centers. Why some states even have special statutes designed to protect those who try to help injured motorists. Know what they call them? “Good Samaritan Laws!”

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the original “Good Samaritan” story may be the most popular of all Jesus’ teachings in our day and time. After all, most folks hear this as Jesus’ little ditty about how we all need to be road-crossing do-gooders, quick to help stranded soccer moms and those whose cats are up trees. Why if everyone “went and did likewise” according to the moral example of the Good Samaritan, what a wonderful world we would have! Presumably then God would be pleased with us, since being nice is evidently what God expects from us, right?

Hmmm…we look around this room and do see some very nice people - in fact St. Mark’s has some of the very nicest in our community. We see people who, if first on the scene of an accident, would definitely stop and get involved: make a call to EMS (and some of you are EMS!), others who’d offer a word of comfort, care until help arrives. And if I went over to Kroger right now, I’d find still more ‘Good Samaritans’ like that. Sooo…either the little story Jesus told has successfully reshaped the world, or maybe it just wasn’t much of a challenge to hear it in the first place? No wonder then, that unlike the parables about the ‘Workers in the Vineyard’ or the ‘Unjust Judge,’ ‘the Good Samaritan’ has become so popular.

Ah, but there’s the rub: this is a parable, a very special kind of story. As we have noticed before, Jesus used parables like funhouse mirrors, to distort the world we think of as ‘normal’ in order to show us a strange place, an uncomfortable place, a world in which God’s Will is done here on earth, as it is in Heaven. So what if the “Parable of the Good Samaritan” has a twist, a kink in it, that Jesus hoped would adjust not how we act (a moral lesson), but how we see God at work in the world (a vision-changing experience, something that might change the world and us along with it)?

To get at this question, we might ask why Jesus told this story in the first place? We know why: an expert in the Law of Moses challenged him. What the man’s motives are, we don’t know, but he lobs Jesus a softball to see if he can hit: what do I have to do to inherit eternal life? What the man means is: what does the Law say we Hebrews need to do to get our rightful inheritance from God, to get what we deserve for being loyal to God’s law?

Jesus invites the man to answer his own question. The Law all boils down to two basic lessons: total devotion to God, loving with every aspect of your being (heart, soul, strength and mind), and loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Before we breeze on into the parable, we note that Jesus has been clashing with the Pharisees, among the most religious of all people, because they believe the Law can make a person righteous, put them into right relationship with God, by getting them to do right. Jesus knows that sin is so deeply rooted in the world that God gave the Law to us to illustrate our human predicament: we are not rightly related to a Holy, Perfect God. Jesus italicizes this dilemma, this crisis, by saying things like “be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” It’s plainly impossible for us to get right with God, and Jesus knows it. The Law has made this clear. But the Law, you see, wasn’t God’s fix for the problem it illustrated.

So Jesus has in some sense laid a trap for the legal expert. What must we do to claim our inheritance from God? Mister, we can’t do anything at all to claim it. Inheritances are for blood kin. And our relationship to a Holy God is broken by our sin, so God doesn’t owe us anything. That’s why the wages of sin are death. No relationship at all.

Not seeing the trap, the legal expert opts to split hairs. Aware that fulfilling the Law is not easy, that some accommodations have to be made, the man asks Jesus to define his terms: just who is my neighbor, exactly - this person to whom I have to show love? Any Jew, or a good, Law-abiding Jew? He’s now right where Jesus wants him. Then Jesus tells his parable about a Jewish man, desperately in need of help, who is not rescued by the God-fearing, Law-abiding people. The professional priest and the lay minister, the most religious and decent of all people, those most entitled to an inheritance from God – if there were such a thing as ‘getting a reward for being good’ – steer wide of this poor man, trying to avoid getting blood on them, and thereby complying with the letter of the Law.

So the story begins with how the best people of their day were unable to live up to God’s greatest command - that we show love. Then comes the twist. You’ve likely heard how Jews in those days despised those from the region of Samaria. For 700 years, from a Hebrew perspective Samaritans had been getting worse and worse: more racially impure, more morally bankrupt, more religiously corrupt with each generation. So deep was the hatred between them, that Jewish travelers shortcutting through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem had recently been beaten to death. Jesus’ introduction of a Samaritan who happened upon the wounded man in the story would have drawn gasps. Now, his hearers thought, the Samaritan is going to get off his donkey, go over and finish this poor guy off, once and for all!

But that’s not how Jesus tells it. I’ve heard preachers expound on how well the Samaritan showed love, how costly doing so was to his checkbook, all with the conclusion that we are supposed to ‘go and do likewise.’ And don’t get me wrong - I like the idea of devoted Christians caring for any and all who are in need. But here’s the thing: do you think the Hebrews listening to Jesus’ story could have put themselves in the position of someone they hated - hearing Jesus say, in effect, “go and be the total opposite of all you hold to be good. Become a rotten, filthy Samaritan who does good deeds for others!”? I don’t think that is what they heard - and I don’t think that what Jesus wanted them to hear.

I think Jesus deliberately chose to make the third man in his story a non-person precisely so that his hearers would NOT identify with that character, would not make the mistake of hearing this parable about God’s Kingdom as a neat, tidy little moral lesson about helping stranded motorists, fulfilling the Law and earning God’s love and salvation.

Jesus had something else in mind. Imagine that you are an ordinary person, busy with life, and suddenly fall victim to the evil that lurks around the corner. A robber got you. A layoff got you. Cancer or old age or depression fell on you. The cruelty of a loved one, or your own sense of inadequacy finally caught up with you. You are left stripped of any protection from the wind and the heat, left naked and defenseless, wounded and lying in a ditch. A normal person would pull herself up by her bootstraps and make a fresh start – and you’ve done that before - but this is not one of those times. This time you’re bleeding out, totally incapable of helping yourself. It’s bad.

The Law, which creates people who do their duty, is not going to help you. What you need is something totally unexpected, like a man who comes riding in on a donkey. Someone humble, not particularly qualified, someone you’d never expect much to come from - much less salvation and eternal life. The man stops, and gets bloody by helping you, doing the messy work of loving you. You don’t even notice that’s his blood, at first. You are overwhelmed with shame at what the man has done for you; you didn’t ask for it. You want to express gratitude, repay your debt and settle up with him. That’s the way we like it, in our world. But you can’t, because the man is from another world, and he’s has already gone out on the road ahead of you. There are so many broken and bleeding people lying in the ditches of our world, you see. And he loves every one of them, as much as he does you.

He saved you. How will you respond? He saved you. How will you respond? He saved you. How will you respond?

Love, love, love. As you have been loved. Amen.