Looking up from a roadside ditch.......

At some point in every parable you have to decide which character you identify with.  A good interpretive approach is to move around in the story: be one character first, and then trade places and consider the story from another character's point of view. Today, we are going to lay down in that ditch (from the parable of the Good Samaritan Luke10) and consider the world and this story from that point of view.

It had been a nothing-unusual kind of day for this anonymous traveler, although the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was always a bit dangerous.  It was busy most days and so it was also a favorite of highway robbers.

That's how we ended up in the ditch: mugged, stripped, robbed.  Wounded and left without even our dignity, we now lay there and pray that someone ...anyone....will come to our aid.    We can hear the feet of passing travelers, yet they continue on.  Once, twice.  Without someone's help, we are lost.

Of all the things we know or think we know about this story, let me highlight what we don't know.  We don't know if the guy in the ditch was a Republican or a Democrat.  We don't know if he was a CEO or welfare recipient; whether he was a convicted felon or model citizen; whether he was straight or gay; whether he was a wife beater or in a happy and long marriage.  We don't know if he was brilliant or just barely literate; whether he was depressed or happy; whether he was a drug addict or in perfect health, whether he was a couch potato or a tri-athelete.  We don't know anything about this man in the ditch except this:  he was a person in desperate need of help.  It was life or death.  It was now or never.

So it wasn't politics or currying favor or identifying adequate credentials that led to a hand reaching out to that desperate, dying man.  It was compassion - the deep stirring of the heart which recognized a fellow human being abandoned by the world - that powered that act of mercy.  The wounds of the victim caused equal pain to the rescuer and he reached across the divide of 'all that my mother taught me' and gave life-saving aid.

I can only imagine the gratitude of the wounded man, but I imagine it as enormous, indescribable, and, truth be told, totally unexpected.  All that could be known about this wounded man was his wounded state and deep need....and apparently, that was enough for this unknown Samaritan.

Who reaches out to wounded people simply because they are in need?  Who is willing to do the hard work of bandaging and transporting him to an inn, nursing him for a couple days and then be willing to pay whatever it costs to bring him back to health?  Who cares that much?  Who can muster up that kind of compassion?  Who acts like that?

Jesus.  Want to know the breadth of God's love for God's creation?  Look at Jesus.  Want to know what kind of God has come to be among us?  Look at Jesus.  Want to know how God acts towards the anonymous,wounded people of this world?  Look at Jesus.

It is hard to tell what is more scandalous in this parable - that a hated Samaritan embarrassed observant Jews by living out the compassion of the Torah's teaching by loving the neighbor....

.....or that Jesus presents himself as a Samaritan: one of the hated ones; one of the unclean ones.
But the one, who in the end, poured out all he had and all he was for the sake of a wounded and dying humanity.