US Christian religiosity exceeds any developed country. So if that is the case, we might expect that American churches would be heavily involved in charitable donations and volunteer work with the poor, the homeless, and the oppressed in the US and outside. Unfortunately, that is not true.
Johann Baptist Metz, a German theologian, who as young man fought in the Second World War. But the German holocaust of Jews and other minorities deeply impacted him as he became a priest and a theologian. He asks a very relevant question for modern Christianity, “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy’ as apathetic as ever?” You might ask this question to different Christian churches, and you will discover some disappointing answers. And maybe a few good answers!
What Metz designates as “Bourgeois Christians,” I would term as “capitalist Christians,” who are unwilling to donate monies and volunteer time to any cause that does not agree with their central beliefs. Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individual obsession with personal sin and salvation rather than with collective concern with social suffering. It has a commitment to church doctrine rather than engagement with human suffering. Sin management has become more important than human suffering, let alone the suffering of other life from climate change.
Bourgeois Christianity fosters an individualized response, conditioned by their central doctrinal beliefs. And the sad part is that it fails to understand compassion as a viable response to global calamities. They may be willing to provide feeding the homeless and the poor with the proviso that they attend a worship service. But they often are unwilling to give anything to strangers or people suffering. While some churches, and our church, contributed to the suffering and destruction wrought Hurricane Katrina striking the New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Many did not, for New Orleans is party town of full of sinners. .
Charity and giving becomes extremely selective: Fundamentalist Christians will donate to a pastry shop that refuses to bake and sell a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, and they will refuse the pan-handler in the street by ignoring and walking on the other side. Capitalist churches will ignore human suffering from severe weather events or earthquakes or AIDS in Africa. But they will contribute to support the Uganda government legally criminalizing LGBT folks or people living with HIV. They support missionaries of hate at home and abroad, but where is God’s love or the ministry of Jesus in their charity?
At the core of capitalist Christianity is the rejection of “compassion” and ultimately, the radical inclusive ministry of Jesus. The inclusive ministry of Jesus has been distorted into a salvation religion that separates out the sheep from the goats, but they fail to hear the words of Jesus.
A lawyer asks Jesus asks the question: “What must I do inherit eternal life?” Jesus returns the question with: “What is written in the law?” asks him “The lawyer recites the verse: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer suspects that Jesus understands neighbor differently than the traditional view that restricted neighbor to fellow Israelites and restricted by Pharisees to the pure like themselves. So he asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” This is question becomes the occasion of Jesus’ parable of the God Samaritan.
First, it is the only parable that takes place in a specific location: The road to Jericho. Jericho is a lush and green town. It is the Palm Springs of ancient Palestine. It was called the “City of a Thousand Palms” because the surrounding area is desert. It was a sort of oasis city. King Herod had a winter palace there. There was wilderness from the road from Jerusalem with a lot of caves, inhabited bandits and dispossessed peasants.
Jesus draws the listener into his parable, in particular, into the perspective of the wounded traveler. The passing travelers set up the expectation that one will be the neighbor. The first two are a Temple priest and a levite; both are from the same Israelite tribe, the difference is that priests trace their ancestral lineage back to Moses’ brother Aaron for the claim of priestly inheritance. Jesus uses the phrase for the priest and the levite: “upon seeing him (the wounded traveler) passed by on the other side.” The priest and the levite pass the wounded traveler. According to a verse in Leviticus, a priest may not touch a corpse without incurring contagion of impurity. The same goes for the levite who avoids the impurity and contagious situation for the sake religious ritual. Jesus’ audience are probably thinking Jesus will have some anticlerical punch line.
Never would they dream of the shocking scenario that Jesus has in store for them. “A Samaritan,” the word falls of the lips of Jesus, and his audience experiences scorn or gasp in horror. Surely this hated Samaritan will do likewise and pass on the other side of the road. Samaritans hate Jews as much as Jews hate Samaritans. Instead, the Samaritan is overcome with “compassion;” he does not pass the wounded traveler. He had compassion, literally “his heart was moved” for the man. The Samaritan provides a shock. There is no Jewish person rescuing the wounded man. The Samaritan cares for the man’s wounds with oil and wine, places him on his mount, and takes him to an inn. He instructs the innkeeper to care for him and promises to further reimburse the innkeeper for additional expenses. A hated enemy is moved with compassion for a fallen enemy and cares for his needs to nurse enough him to health. He overcomes the emotions and fears engendered by centuries of cultural prejudice to identify with the wounded traveler
Jesus queers the response with the unanticipated and subversive introduction of the compassion of the Samaritan. He challenges the lawyer on three levels: First, Jesus challenges the traditional commandment to love God and love your neighbor by indicating that the lawyer’s understanding has to be more inclusive. Secondly, when Jesus turns to the lawyer and asks him, “Which of the three proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” the lawyer is forced to say, “The one who showed him compassion.”
If your substitute “LBGT,” an African American, or an undocumented Hispanic worker for the certain prejudicial audiences, you capture the original shock of the parable. The Samaritan is labeled “good and a “neighbor.” Jesus shatters ethnic barriers of centuries old hatred and violence between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus chose a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness, and the Samaritan becomes Jesus’ hero of radical inclusiveness and in history as “good.” And this moral lesson lives on in the number of Christian institutions that carry the name “Good Samaritan:” hospitals, nursing homes, suicide or crisis hot lines, orphanages, food pantries and care for the homeless and the vulnerable.
Diarmuid O’Murchu calls the parable of the Good Samaritan an “inclusive transgression on a truly provocative scale. Richard Kearney describes it as
Love of the stranger as infinitely other! And wonder at the very strangeness of it all…the spiritual epiphany of welcoming, the poetic shudder of imagining, the ethical act of transfiguring our world by caring for the stranger as watch the world become sacred.
Let me rehearse the conclusions of the parable: The priest and Levite striving to be faithful to their religion—the same religion as Jesus—walk on the other side of the road to make sure that they do become ritually contaminated. Jesus chooses a known and hated outsider to test his vision of radical inclusiveness. Other examples of Jesus’ encounters with Samaritans is the Samaritan woman at the well whose response to her encounter goes back to her village to tell people of her graced encounter with Jesus and the ten lepers healed healed by Jesus, in which the only healed leper to return and thank Jesus was a Samaritan. Jesus knew first hand what it meant to be an outsider, growing up with up with the suspicions that he was illegitimate and denied access to his village synagogue.
Johan Metz, who wrestled with Christian complicity in holocaust in post-war Germany, asks “Do we share the sufferings of others or do we just believe in this sharing, remaining under the cloak of a belief in ‘sympathy” as apathetic as ever?” In other words, do we do something about human suffering or just like the idea of sympathy and do nothing?
Many capitalist Christians cannot be blinded to travelers on the road to Jericho and let their beliefs and doctrines prevent them for caring and showing compassion. They forget this parable of Jesus, or take a narrow, exclusive notion of neighbor. I saw a video of town meeting in Sarasota, where a woman, who is probably identified as a Christian, gets up and makes an outrageous claim that the “homeless are not human.” I have heard similar claims in the public media on driving the homeless away from our neighborhoods, denying social programs such as social security and healthcare, food stamps. Let’s make cuts to social welfare programs.
So many Christians have been obsessed with sin and sin management, they accept that humanity is sinful and not deserving the grace of God. This sin management view is the distortion embedded in the thinking and practice of many Christians, like the priest and levite, that my purity status is more important and religious ritual as well. Christian obsession with sin management is destructive because it promotes exclusiveness, violence, and detaches us from the stranger who is our neighbor. My personal salvation is more important than feeding or caring for the poor.
What matters to God is not human sinfulness but human suffering and the failure to respond to such suffering! There are so many people wounded on the side of the road to Jericho. The road to Jericho is everywhere. Do we see as the Samaritan sees with the compassionate heart? Is the vulernerable and the poor truly our neighbor?
Metz speaks about the dangerous memories of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection “Where is God?” There is clear cut answers found in the gospels: God is on the side of the suffering, the poor and vulnerable. Remember Jesus;’ words: “When you do this to the least of my family you do to me.”
The dangerous memories of the gospels are pivotal for our response to human suffering. What do we do when we remember Christ’s word: “Go and do likewise.” We must remove the blinders of whatever privileges we have and see as the Samaritan sees. We engage face to face human suffering and not walk away, but care for the wounds of the stranger half dead and care for the suffering stranger. We move from being strangers to neighbors.
Martin Luther King Jr. made this prophetic observation in New York City in April 1967:
On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come and see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not constantly be beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars need restructuring.
Only compassion for strangers teach us the depth of the radical inclusive love of God’s kindom. Do as Jesus instructed: “Go and do likewise.”