“Strangers and Neighbours: The Good Stranger”

Scripture – Luke 10:25-37

Sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Graeme Wilson

Sunday, October 13, 2024

I heard the story a while back about a 98-year-old Mother Superior from Ireland who was dying. The nuns gathered around her bed, trying to make her last earthly moments comfortable. They gave her some warm milk to drink, but she refused. Finally, one of the nuns took the glass back to the kitchen. Remembering a bottle of Jamieson’s Irish whiskey received as a gift the previous Christmas, she opened the bottle and poured a generous amount into the warm milk.

Back at Mother Superior’s bed, she held the glass to her lips. Mother drank a little, then a little more, and before they knew it, she had drunk the whole glass down to the last drop. “Mother Superior,” the nuns asked with great earnestness. “Please share your wisdom with us before you die.” She raised her head up off the pillow and said, “Don’t sell that cow!”

It also reminds me of the story of the long-winded Scottish Minister who said that he was going to preach on the “milk of human kindness.” To which one long-suffering farmer in the congregation responded, “Can we have condensed milk, please?!”

At one level, the wise preacher on the Parable of the Good Samaritan would do well to heed the words of the long-suffering farmer and preach “condensed milk.” The parable is so well known, its lessons so clear and timeless, that perhaps it might just be best to read the parable out loud and say “Amen.” Why try to explicate a parable, a story, that speaks so clearly for itself?

But familiarity with the story, and the lessons, of the Parable of the Good Samaritan does not entitle us to become lazy or blasé in our thinking about it. Instead, that familiarity should enable and empower us to dig deeper – to mine those timeless truths – and to embed them in our everyday living and thinking.

When the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr was Ordained into his first ministerial post as a young man, he preached “the great truths of the gospel” over his first four weeks in the pulpit. When the fifth week came along, and all the “great truths” had been preached, he was at a loss as to what to preach on next. Then it came to him … you keep on preaching the “great truths of the gospel”!

This is equally true of the Parable of the Good Samaritan …

Familiarity does not mean we have exhausted the “great truths” of this parable – rather we keep on harvesting its riches.

So, what might this timeless parable have to say to us today?

• “Who is my neighbour?” is a central question in our world today, and especially in our respective countries. How do we consider, how do we treat, the “other” in our society? The immigrant, legal or illegal? The lost, the last, and the least?
• The story deals with issues around blood purity – sound familiar?
• The robbers took what they wanted by force – they took what was not theirs. Think of the illegal Russian invasion into Ukraine.
• The Samaritan, the outsider, was the one who showed unconditional “risky” care to the man attacked by robbers. It turns out that the stranger in a strange land, the Samaritan, is the one who is the true neighbour.
• Perhaps the Parable of the Good Samaritan is also the Parable of the Good Stranger.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of the deeper details of this story …

Jericho is the lowest city on earth, at around 240 metres or 780 feet below sea level. Jerusalem is about 400 metres, 1,300 feet above sea level, and so as you travel the 20 miles from Jerusalem to Jericho you go down and down through a desert. You might expect the desert to be vast open expanses of sand, with the occasional cactus; but in fact, there are many small hills, and the road twists and turns, with not much of a view ahead, or to either side.

The obvious question this immediately raises is … why would any sensible person set out to walk along such a road on their own? It was astonishingly obvious that anyone walking that way alone was highly likely to be attacked and robbed, and that would have been equally obvious to Jesus and to everyone hearing him tell this story.

When we read this story, we naturally critique the Priest and the Levite for not stopping to help the man set upon by robbers – ostensibly due to purity laws. And yet, if we are being honest, we can also see exactly why they passed by on the other side. It was the only sensible thing to do. It would have been madness to stop in a place like that, for what appeared to be a dead body on the ground.

Bodies on the ground in that desert would be a warning never to stop, but to get through there as quickly as possible, because if there were bodies around … there were almost certainly robbers. And anyone who was foolish enough to stop would probably be the next dead body. This means that those hearing Jesus tell this story would have thought that the Samaritan was quite mad. Why did he stop? Why would you do that and put yourself at such risk? Why be so foolish?

But there is a sting in the tail for the hearers of this parable. Jesus asks the question, “Who was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” Those listening to the story would have been taken aback, because they suddenly found themselves having to think about it from a totally different perspective.

First, the neighbour turned out to be a despised neighbouring Samaritan … almost the lowest of the low, the unholiest of the unholy … perhaps only exceeded by the Gentiles. But secondly, what Jesus was suggesting is that the really foolish and risky thing to do was actually the right thing to do, and only one person, the hated Samaritan, was foolish enough to do it. Foolish enough to risk to care.

So, in one simple question, Jesus turns the accepted wisdom of the world upside down. Sensible can no longer be assumed to be always right, and foolish can no longer assumed to be always wrong. In our time, and place, and culture, we tend to assume that the sensible option is the right thing to do and so I suspect most of us find this interpretation of the story quite a challenge.

You might recognise that from elsewhere in the Bible. Perhaps Paul had this in mind when he wrote in 1 Corinthians Chapter 1 that, “The folly of God is wiser than human wisdom …”

The lawyer who comes to Jesus wants a complicated answer to a simple question about how to inherit eternal life. He wants to understand who is neighbour is, in terms of human wisdom. He knows the simple, Godly, answer from Deuteronomy and he quotes the “Shema,” as every Jew would do. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” That is the simple Godly, answer, “love God and love your neighbour,” and yet the lawyer wants more … he wants human wisdom too. And when he asks, “And who is my neighbour?” Jesus replies by telling him the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”

The Samaritans were regarded as being inferior – they were from the north – they had the “wrong” worship, the “wrong” theology and the “wrong” behaviour. And yet for the wounded man in the story, it is the Samaritan who turns out to be his neighbour, rather than the Priest and the Levite from his own land, and his own religion.

The moral of this parable is that choosing God means choosing people. Choosing God means choosing anyone who needs you. The Good Samaritan, the Good Stranger, risked everything for another stranger, and God calls us to reach out to all kinds of people … and not just to people like us.

Yes, there are people who do not act like they are our neighbours, or indeed the neighbours of anyone else. People whom we find almost impossible to love. That’s the way it is in the world around us.

But we are not of the world. We are of God – and we are called to live differently – to think differently – to do differently. We are called to be neighbours to those who are not our neighbours – to love those who do not necessarily love us – to give to others who may not ever give back to us.

And yes, travelling the risky Jericho road may not always be the humanly sensible route, but it is also the risky road along which we might encounter the stranger – the neighbour we’ve yet to meet.

It is the risky road along which we might discover what it means to truly love God, and to truly love our neighbor.

Amen.