Compassion in the Story

While leading a discipleship class for an aspiring Mennonite congregation whose members come from Pentecostal backgrounds, I have revisited in recent weeks the parables of Jesus. Each Wednesday evening, we study one story Jesus told and glean from it one characteristic of a disciple, a person who has decided to “take up the cross and follow Jesus” (Mk. 8:34). This week our text was Luke 10:25-37, the so-called parable of “the Good Samaritan”, set in its narrative context, and our characteristic was compassion.

The narrative context for this parable, of course, is Jesus' dialogue with a lawyer who has “stood up to test Jesus” (v. 25). After Jesus has turned the lawyer's initial question-- “What must I do to inherit eternal life”--back to him, the lawyer responds with a combination of texts from the Law, Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and will all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (v. 27). Though the lawyer has “stood up”, literally exalted himself, in order to “test”, tempt, bait Jesus, Jesus merely commends his answer: “Rightly you have answered; do this, and you will live” (v. 28). Even still, though Jesus has not repaid the lawyer in kind, according to the lawyer's own ill-will, the lawyer is not diverted from his proud course. “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?' ”(v. 29)

Indeed, the lawyer's question is drenched in “selfish ambition and vain conceit” (Php. 2:3), in the love of self for its own sake rather than for the love of God and neighbor. “Who is my neighbor?” is not here a question with honest intent, as if an answer to it would satisfy any longing in the lawyer to fill up that which was lacking in his capacity to love. No, indeed; this is the question, not of one who would love neighbor, but of one who would seek to define the neighbor so as not to love him. “Who is my neighbor?” is not, like the lawyer's earlier quotation, now the “right answer”--and Jesus cannot treat it as such. This one he will not answer; but he will tell a story.

The story Jesus tells, of course, has four main characters: first, “a person who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” who “fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half-dead”; second, “a priest”; third, “a Levite”; fourth, “a Samaritan” (vv. 30-33). The first and the last of these—the “half-dead” man and the Samaritan—are the neighbors in the text, those whose interaction illustrates the meaning of neighborliness. Indeed, their relationship, cast in sharp relief against the second and third characters in the story, defines the way of being a neighbor without identifying a neighbor according to any other requirement than her common humanity. The “person who fell into the hands of robbers”, that is, is not—as the priest and Levite perhaps presumed—a corpse which will defile the one who approaches it (Lev. 21:10-11); he is, rather, “half-dead”, lying naked, bleeding on the roadside, his life still within. But in order not to die, he needs someone, contra the priest and Levite, not to “pass by on the other side” but to “come near him”, “to bandage his wounds,” to “care for him” (vv. 31-34). He needs someone to love him as that someone would love himself. He needs a neighbor.

After he had told the story, Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” (v. 37) As the lawyer's question to Jesus concerning the neighbor elicited the story, so Jesus' question to the lawyer now—and only now—leads again to “the right answer”: “The one who showed him mercy” (v. 37). The question is not, as the lawyer had wanted it, “And who is my neighbor?”; the question is, “Who was a neighbor?”, that is, who “showed mercy” to the person “who fell into the hands of robbers.” The question cannot be answered by the priest and the Levite who “pass by”, or the Pharisee who “stands by himself” in contempt of others (Lk. 18:9-14). The answer is found in the Samaritan, rather anyone—regardless of color, sex, age, status, or religion—who “hears the words of [Jesus] and acts on them” (Matt. 7:24). The neighbor is known to us only within the story, when we follow Jesus in compassion for one another within a violent world.