Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Deuteronomy 30:9-14 The word is very near to you--in your mouth and in your heart.
Psalm 25 Ad te, Domine, levavi
Colossians 1:1-14 Rescued and transferred
Luke 10:25-37 You have given the right answer; do this and you will live.

Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Amos 7:7-17 A prophecy of prostitution, pillage, and parceling out the land Psalm 82 Deus stetit
or as BCP, above.

In 1907 Wallace Stevens threw away his Bible and announced, "I'm glad the silly thing is gone." But he couldn't throw the Biblical allusions out of his poems, so Susanna and the elders stay with "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and we stay, too, to watch "the red eyed elders watching" and in his poem "Sunday Morning" we can "pass with dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine." The poets walk with us through the Bible of our own days, and give us new midrashim to correct our astigmatism. So e. e. cummings hung onto his Bible, and by the gospel for today was inspired to write "a man who had fallen among thieves." If it is read aloud, you can't tell that he doesn't use capital letters (but only once, as a caesura) and doesn't punctuate at all. .

  
   a man who had fallen among thieves
   lay by the roadside on his back
   dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
   wearing a round jeer for a hat

    fate per a somewhat more than less
    emancipated evening
    had in return for consciousness
   endowed him with a changeless grin

    whereon a dozen staunch and leal
    citizens did graze at pause
    then fired by hyperactive zeal
    sought newer pastures or because

     swaddled with a frozen brook
     of pinkest vomit out of eyes
     which noticed nobody he looked
     as if he did not care to rise

     one hand did nothing on the vest
     its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
     while the mute trouserfly confessed
     a button solemnly inert.

      Brushing from whom the stiffened puke  
      i put him into all my arms
      and staggered banged with terror through
      a million billion trillion stars

Here the questioner is a lawyer, a Bible teacher really, not a "juris doctor," to be fair to your favorite attorney, who probably would not ask such a question of a rabbi. or even of a vicar. And would hope at least not to get such an expansive answer. The lawyer is someone who assumes at once that he knows more about Torah and Talmud than does Jesus, the probably illiterate itinerant Galilean artisan turned healer, whose repertory is folktale and parable, who learns in ecstasy and transfiguration, and teaches in signs, communal meals, and uses saliva, breath, and touch to heal the sick. Luke impugns the motive of the lawyer, and tells us that his question was self-serving, "desiring to justify himself." But it's a question that intrudes itself into all our religion. We ponder it in our "meditation", which Fritz Perls described as "neither shit nor get off the pot." The lawyer is meditating on the word "neighbor," which he asked Jesus to define for him, not to know the answer (for he knew that, he was sure) but to "justify himself." He could tell Jesus the history of the hermeneutic of "Neighbor" from the time of Leviticus 19:18--"You shall not hate in your heart any one of your kin. . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Did it mean "fellow Israelite" and thereby exclude the sojourner, the alien, the stranger? The consistent teaching of all the oldest commentaries was that the word meant only a fellow religionist, a Jew. Some texts came to include the GER, the alien, but this may have depended upon whether the GER had become a proselyte, a convert to Israel. So the lawyer knows he is going to be able to WHUP this itinerant rabbi "up side his head" in this argument. Notice that Jesus does not make the Victim a Samaritan, to compound his victimhood. We don't know who the "certain man" is, where he's from, or even if he is a Jew. But he too could be a priest or a Levite, on his way back from service in the Temple--this is, remember, hostile territory for the orthodox. Or he could have been a fellow Samaritan. Jesus said the victim was stripped, so identifying clothing could not signal to the travellers who he is, what class of compassion he merited.. Without their clothes on, priests and deacons look pretty much like other people, only moreso.

The story Jesus told is remembered as being about only one of the Losers he mentioned that day: the Heretic from Samaria. There were lots of losers lined up to Lose Their Way on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho that day in Jesus' tale. The one who fell among thieves, plus the losers who stripped and beat him, leaving him half dead, and then the various travellers who came his way. "Now by chance a priest was going down that road," Jesus says. Not by God's providence, not constrained by compassion or commissioned by charity, but only "by chance." Priests aren't much esteemed nowadays, either for status or power, and except in rarified venues, not for their net disposable income. It's way down on the list to be a clergymammal now, and while it is true that clergy get more esteem than lawyers, they are lower than physicians in the polls. In spite of their staggering fees, doctors have lots of respect. Not love, always, but esteem, yes, for in capitalism the esteem and the cream rise to the top and clog our arteries.. In Jesus' time priests were in the cream--they had good incomes, real status in society, and one of them practically ran the country--the High Priest, closely associated with the monarch or the tetrarch. He was practically the Supreme Court Chief Justice in status, appointed like our own by the oligarchy to serve itself.

So when Jesus says, "by chance a priest" he was sending up a signal to the upstanding lawyer who was standing up to talk. He's saying, "Get this: someone you respect was going down the highway." We immediately are alerted to dislike the Priest when we hear that "he passed by on the other side." But Jesus' lawyer friend would likely not have been surprised or dismayed at this, for it would have been expected that a Priest would not likely have stopped. Because priests were bad men? No, but because they were good men. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a bad neighborhood, a dangerous place to be, and no good person would tarry on the way. What if the recumbent unknown is a corpse, lying there in the ditch? The Priest would really be in trouble, especially if he were going in the other direction, on the way up to Jerusalem for his twice-yearly turn of service in the Temple. He would be a Loser if he even touched the victim and then found he had turned up his toes dead; it would make the Priest ritually unclean, and it would have meant precious days of wasted time to perform all the rites necessary to purify oneself after such pollution. No reason to take a chance on this Loser. Probably just drunk anyway.

I remember being that Priest. One day in Union Park in Chicago a generation ago I saw such a man--he was lying face down on the curbside, and had no shirt nor shoes; he or or someone else had pulled his pants down and left his backside exposed "to the vulgar gaze of the rude and scoffing multitude." Pedestrians glared and literally passed by on the other side. Traffic slowed and drivers grinned. I saw a police car cruising across the Park, and thought to myself, "They'll take care of this." And passed by on the other side. What if he were dead? That would take a whole lot of time then, and would be a real mess. Better go ahead and get back to the vicarage and let the cops worry about the matter. So likewise the Levite passed by. Levites were second-class clergy. Moses had made them the official priests in Israel but Moses' brother Aaron had started his own priesthood and over the years Aaron's priests won privileges away from the Levites and then made them second class clergy. We call them deacons now. But at one time the deacons of Rome were called Cardinal Deacons, and the most important of them was the Archdeacon. They got to choose the Pope, and their successors, though mostly not deacons now, are still the "cardinals", the hinges that open doors, and shut them.

In the time of Jesus the Levites were servants of the clergy, with their own duties to perform. Few of them were very poor, either, and they had patronage jobs to hand out. They were not held in high esteem by the Priests, but they had klout. But each of the two types that Jesus imagined on the road were good citizens, good Jews, the best of Jews who knew their duty and did it. But they passed by, with rules to observe, promises to keep no doubt, with other fish to fry. No one could fault them for avoiding contamination. The lawyer so far in this story has had no surprises to alarm him, upset his religion or change his punto de vista.

Now comes the Samaritan.You need not be reminded perhaps of these schismatics, but you might not know that that there are some of them left even today there on Mount Gerizim, still sacrificing goats to Yahweh, (or for the photographer from National Geographic Magazine). In Jesus' time and for centuries before there was a rival Temple there, and the Jerusalem Jews detested them for it. "A piece of bread given by a Samaritan is more unclean than swine's flesh," said the Talmud. The Samaritans detested the Judahists just as heartily and it is said that they defiled the Temple in Jersalem by throwing human bones into it, about the time of Jesus' birth. Remember that the Samaritans would not help Jesus and his disciples find a night's lodging or a meal when they were on their way through their territory, and it so provoked the disciples that they wanted to call down fire from heaven upon them.

The Samaritan's religion had lost out, since David the King had decreed there would be only One Shrine in the Kingdom, and that one at Jerusalem. (Henotheism is often a companion to religion--the belief that only Our God matters. "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer" was Hitler's religion too.) Oddly, 'though the Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem are long gone, there is an active group of Zionist militants still working to sharpen the knives and stoke up the cookers there, in hopes of seizing Temple Mount and restoring animal sacrifice. And Mt. Gerizim is still in business, for a few hundred shepherds. But this Buen Samaritano in Luke's gospel was already in Jesus' time a Loser, a member of a hated sect. Who wanted his help, anyway? The lawyer would not even repeat the name "Samaritan" when asked "Which was neighbor?" but only squeaked out, "The one who showed mercy." And what an abundance of mercy! He "put him on his own animal," not a two-passenger stallion, as a Roman officer might have, but a humble burro, which was used more for luggage carrier than for a ride. Now the Samaritan himself would have to walk alongside, if he had not been doing so. He was provident to the feckless wanderer, and took him to an Inn for rest and care, and gave the innkeeper two denarii--a laborer's two days' wages-- in advance, with a promise to pay any further charges on his return trip. The Fathers taught that the parable was an allegory, in which St. Peter was the Innkeeper, to whom the good Jesus gave Two Sacraments to care for wounded humankind, the victim of the Devil's assaults. It is at least a story of such largesse. But it teaches that the Gospel of Compassion is more than First Aid, and requires the CPR of personal commitment to the rescue of human life.

The Mishna had taught that "one ought to be aggressive in heavenly matters" but "beware of all arrogance." Maimonides cites the Sages to claim that the seed of Abraham are of the blushing and compassionate, and they humbly blush as they engage in acts of mercy", headed for the garden of Eden. So the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would take the Buen Samaritano blushing homeward to paradise.

"The word is very near you," says the Second Helping of the Law (Deuter-onomy), "it is in your mouth (not just your ear) that you may talk it (not just hear it), in your heart and not in heaven nor beyond the sea, but right here in the Jericho road, that you may DO it. Just DO it. The life of the new age is not so far away, not so wild a dream. Jesus says hereby that there is no love of God that does not express itself in love of neighbor--but the Bible had always taught that. Jesus added no special rules. Jesus says if you look for definitions of "who is my neighbor?" all you have to do is look in your own book, your own life, look at the ones you meet on the road, look at the heretics.in your own hell. The Word is not away on Mount Sinai, or Mount Gerizim, not sealed up in the Ark, not closed in the Church's cult, not in the hands of lawyers, judges, or the clergy. It is Near you. Prayer and Pity are not responses to propriety or rubrics, but are responsive to need. Where do we find our neighbor? It won't always be on the road in filthy clothes bleeding and lying in its own puke. We may find a neighbor anywhere when another's slavery confronts our freedom, when another's sickness confronts our health, when another's poverty confronts our wealth, when another's ignorance confronts our education, in whatever situation calls to us for compassion and for sharing. Even when we have no abundance of health or wealth or wisdom to bestow, the gospel continues to be "one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread."

Paul writes from prison to the Colossians, gently chiding them for having followed fake teachers, who taught them a convenient synthesis of superstition and good religion. He wrote again and again and the Church "canonized" his writings, to remind us of the perennial gospel of freedom from all that--from legalism, and from superstition too. Paul says that God has delivered us hostages from the government of darkness and transferred us all with new passports to a new jurisdiction of freedom. The freedom to ignore our phobia of contamination from the Stranger, from the Victim, to rescue where we can, and restore where we are able, to always embrace solidarity, sharing, and samaritanism.

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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