supermarket samaritan

The parable of the Samaritan who stopped is well-worn and often told, thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary. This year, I found him in the supermarket parking lot, straightening the carts. Thanks for reading.

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We reveal a lot about ourselves in a supermarket parking lot.

Specifically, we reveal a lot by what we do with our empty cart once we have put our groceries in the car. Do we leave it kind of tucked in between cars? Do we push it up on the grass rather than walking it to the cart corrals that sit in most lots? Do we take time to slide it into place with the other carts so things will be easier on the poor kid who has to come retrieve them and take them back to the front door of the market?

As you can tell by my detail, I can get kind of judgy in the parking lot when people leave their carts so that others have to clean up. My indignation rivals how I feel when someone leans all the way back in the coach section of an airplane. Both situations fly all over me because I infer that the perpetrators have no regard for other people–my judgment, mind you, not necessarily their actual perspective or situation. I don’t know those people; I just judge them.

If I were to update our parable, I might just tell it in a supermarket parking lot because there are lots of chances to get judgy as we read the story. Is the lawyer asking Jesus a straight up question, or is he trying to trap Jesus? Shouldn’t the priest and the Levite (both Hebrew clergy) have stopped? How dare they walk by? And what was the Samaritan man doing wandering in a region where he did not belong?

You get my drift.

Let’s start with the lawyer and his questions. A lot of commentators assume he was trying to trap Jesus, as we might infer from our translation this morning, but we can also read it as though he was sounding Jesus out, trying to get clarification. So, in a non-parking lot spirit, let’s assume he really wanted to know how to live a life in God.

Let’s also assume Jesus was giving him a direct answer when he answered the question with a question and then the lawyer quoted the Shema: Love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.

A big part of the reason I think the lawyer was asking honestly is his second question: Who is my neighbor? It’s a great question because it requires specificity. Luke says the lawyer asked it in order to “justify himself”—to show he was in the right.

Commentator David Lose writes, “Jesus chose a Samaritan, to remind this self-justifying lawyer that there is no self-justification possible, because the moment we can justify ourselves we no longer need care about those around us. The consequence of justifying ourselves, it turns out, is to struggle to recognize the presence of God in our neighbors and, even harder, in our enemies.”

Theologian Karoline Lewis carries his thought a bit further: “I am convinced, more than ever, that the question of the lawyer is the question of faith today. We need to ask it over and over again, and especially when we don’t want to. I never want to—but I have to. And I will because this story reminds me to trust in Jesus’ answer. An answer that forces me to answer for myself. And, in the end, that is what faith is supposed to be.”

Jesus’ answer is the parable we call the story of The Good Samaritan, though Jesus never called him good and the story is about way more than just him, though who he was in relation to everyone else is at the core of what the parable has to say to us. Theologian Debie Thomas writes,

“The enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’ day was not theoretical; it was embodied and real. The differences between them were not easily negotiated; each was fully convinced that the other was wrong. So what Jesus did when he deemed the Samaritan “good” was radical and risky; it stunned his Jewish listeners. . . . He was inviting them to consider the possibility that a person might add up to more than the sum of their political, racial, cultural, and economic identities. He was calling them to put aside the history they knew, and the prejudices they nursed. He was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.

If we were putting it in a modern context, we could say An Israeli person is robbed, and a Palestinian saves their life. A liberal Democrat is robbed, and a conservative Republican saves their life. A white supremacist is robbed, and a black teenager saves their life. A fundamentalist preacher is robbed, and a trans person saves their life. Or if we want to really get down to it, a Red Sox player is robbed, and a Yankee fan saves their life.

Jesus was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.

Whether we are talking first century Palestine or twenty-first century America, how we love one another is a live question, and that question keeps bumping up against the reality that we show our love by what we do for those who need us, and not just by seeing people in need and thinking about how much we love them. As most all of us can attest, thoughts and prayers, while essential, only go so far if they are not accompanied by something more tangible. We really begin to love each other when we act like it—when we do something.

Commentator Kristin Berkley-Abbott says,

“This training of love for the world can start small. We might not start out by stopping for every stranger in need that we see or giving away all of our money and possessions or moving to the streets in solidarity with the homeless. We can start where we are. We can help out even when we don’t have to. We can stop keeping track of who has done what to wrong us or who is taking advantage of the system. Instead of keeping track of our losses, we can keep track of gratitude. We can share with people who haven’t had the lucky breaks that we have had. . . . It’s not enough, however, to love the people who are easy to love. It’s much harder to love those who have behaved in horrible ways. But we must love them too. In fact, it might be the more important task.”

Which takes me back to the parking lot. The main reason it has even become a thing for me, other than being frustrated when someone leaves cart blocking a parking spot, is that Big Y in Guilford hires a lot of special needs folks and they end up being the ones who have to retrieve the carts. I have watched them wrestle with the tangled mess left for them. One of the ways I deal with my indignation is to straighten out the carts in the corral when I can. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing that when a woman came up with her cart and I commented about my frustration, which led her to cut lose on a short swearing rant about the character of the other shoppers. Though I understood her anger, I didn’t share her rage.

I also didn’t know anything about her story or why the carts made her so angry. I have seen Ginger struggle with her anger when able-bodied people park in designated handicap spots. Not everyone knows her passion is so intense because her dear friend was paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident.

Rage doesn’t offer much possibility for redemption. The same can be said of fear. Compassion lies beyond our fear when we do the work to humanize one another.

Jesus didn’t tell the parable to embarrass the lawyer or incite enmity towards the two members of the clergy. He was telling those who were listening what it took to be a neighbor. One way to hear the story is that the place we best learn that is when we feel like we are the ones in the ditch because when we are wounded and hurting, what matters is not whose help we’d prefer, or whose way of practicing Christianity we like best, or whose politics we agree with. What matters is whether or not anyone will stop to offer kindness.

From there we can see that every wounded person—which means everyone—is our neighbor and is deserving of our compassion and kindness, if we are willing to notice them. Even those who don’t put their carts up. Amen.

Peace,
Milton