Between noon and three

Preached on Sunday, July 13, 2025, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Today’s Gospel brings us the parable of the Good Samaritan. So famous is this parable, so loudly does it echo through the ages, that the other readings almost disappear into the background. And rightly so: this is one of those passages that even hardened atheists seem to know by heart, and they treasure it at least as much as believing Christians do.

Most sermons on this parable preach the same message Jesus did: “You, go and do likewise: be a neighbor to those in need, in the way the Good Samaritan was to the man robbed and beaten.” In this reading, we might see Christ himself as the great Good Samaritan. St. Paul seems to take this approach when he says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” That is, while we ourselves were incapable of helping ourselves, Christ came to the rescue.

In some of my own sermons on this parable, I’ve suggested we might find another layer of meaning in reading Christ not as the Good Samaritan, but as the man beaten by the side of the road, while all of us, who start out as Samaritans, foreigners, are made neighbors, members of the household of God, by our taking him in.

Either way, the Priest and the Levite usually get short shrift. They are the picture of what NOT to do, as they hurry about their busy, important lives. This makes it an especially tough passage for us to hear, because, in Berkeley, in the Bay, how many such helpless people in need do we literally walk past on a daily basis? The experience of simply walking down the street becomes an exercise in bitter moral failure. 

I don’t know about you, but “precisely zero” is the number of times I have walked or carried a homeless person to the Hotel Shattuck, gotten them a room, and then given my card to the front desk to open a tab for room service. And, to make matters worse, “more than I can count” is the number of times I have walked past them on my way to St. Mark’s for some appointment or a service in the chapel.

There are other ways I personally and St. Mark’s as a parish have engaged and helped the struggling on our streets, and you ought to proud of that: everything from impromptu conversation, occasional direct aid, and genuine welcome and inclusion in this worshiping community, to our feeding ministry and the weekly clinic we host, to the money we send to the diocese and the many housing and social ministries that funds. So it’s not nothing. But it’s still hard to hear this parable, knowing that the Lord’s demand of direct, one on one, personal engagement is mostly absent for us — and, worse, feels genuinely impossible most of the time.

So this morning I want to spend a little time considering that poor priest and Levite, whom we normally paint as the villains in the story. The fact is, they are not the villains, they didn’t rob and beat up the traveler — that distinction belongs to the bandits. And, far from being merely heartless to the poor man’s sufferings, they both happened to be members of an occupation governed by strict conditions and prerequisites, especially around contact with the dead. 

Jesus notes this poor man had been beaten and left for dead, and from a distance it might looked like he was indeed dead — so of course the priest and the Levite crossed to the other side of the road. Their job was an important one, one they understood to accomplish real social and spiritual good for the people in their care and the nation as a whole. It’s not that they didn’t care about this poor man. It’s that their job was important enough to have to rank the needs of the community over the needs of an individual, who in this case might have been beyond help anyway.

If you say, “Yes but this is the logic of Caiaphas,” you would be right. Remember, the night of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest, Caiaphas tells the council, “Better that one man should die than the whole nation perish.”The Church reads a deeper logic in Christ’s crucifixion, such that Caiaphas’s Machiavellian compromise turns out to be a true prophecy: this one man does die, so that all humanity might not perish but have eternal life. Still, any diplomat of any skill would have a hard time disagreeing, either with Caiaphas in the early hours of Good Friday, or with the priest or the Levite in today’s parable. They are not, in fact, wrong in their calculation of their duty. Yet Jesus lifts up the Samaritan as the example to emulate.

What’s going on here? If the priest and the Levite aren’t actually wrong, if instead they are the perfect image of obedience and dedication, what is the teaching? One way of reading it is to observe that this is the sort of thing that’s behind the charge of subversion so often leveled at Jesus, in his own lifetime and long after. If the priest or the Levite had followed Jesus’s teaching in the parable and helped the man, they would have neglected the temple and their religious duties, duties sanctioned by generations of historical development and by Holy Scripture itself. 

Is Jesus really suggesting we do away with all these structures and institutions for the sake of helping a single suffering person? And if we do, if they’re all swept away, what would be left to motivate the next good deed? Jesus tells the parable in the first place in response to a question about obeying the law. But if the law itself is swept away in the act of obeying it, then again the question remains, what’s left to motivate the next act of love? What’s left to hold power to account? The most Jesus himself says about this question is that he does not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it; that the law in fact does not pass away.

So maybe Jesus is not as subversive as this reading suggests. But we’re still no clearer to understanding the logic at the heart of the parable, why it’s the Samaritan who gets lionized while the priest and Levite are not.

Many commentators note that the Samaritan is a foreigner. Remember, Samaria was the successor to the northern kingdom of Israel after its people were exiled and scattered by the Assyrians. By Jesus’s day, some of its people were descended from the Israelites who had remained in the land, but on the whole they were a mix of other tribes and nationalities. Even before the exile, the people of the northern kingdom had been rivals to the people of Judah from the days of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. That a Good Samaritan is the one who helps this poor man on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem — one of the quintessential Judean roads — makes for a much greater impact on Jesus’s hearers. This foreigner has compassion on a suffering man. And, most commentators note, this compassion fulfills a deeper law than the one motivating the priest and the Levite.

I want to maintain, however,  that the priest and the Levite are not without hope. They are being faithful in the way they know how. Indeed, they are maintaining the religious structures in which Jesus’s parable inheres and makes sense in the first place. And yet its the Samaritan who fulfills the law.

There’s no way around it, there is a real tension running through the parable. But then Christian life is full of the same tension: the tension between the world as it is and the world as it is meant to be, the world God is working steadily to build. One of the consequences of humanity’s fall from grace is a departure from a former intimacy with God. This present lack of intimacy is overcome in the rites and ceremonies of religion, in which we see as in a glass darkly what in the end we shall see face to face. 

The priest and the Levite work faithfully to keep this intimacy possible in the here and now, for all the people of God. The Samaritan, on the other hand, breaks in as a representative of the life of the world to come, in which every tear is wiped from every eye, and disease and pain and death shall be no more. The Samaritan puts aside every division, every social more, in order to heal and restore. 

When Jesus suggest that this is what fulfills the law, he is pointing to the life of the world to come, and suggesting that the fulfillment of the law, as a whole, does not finally occur until we enter the kingdom of God in full. And, by corollary, he is suggesting that whenever we go and do likewise, we ourselves initiate a momentary breakthrough of heaven on earth. The law which priest and Levite obey is not abolished or superseded, but it is transcended, in every instance of care and compassion.

I think this is really lovely, but it still presents us with a problem, because while we are in this life we still need the structures and institutions by which we can make sense of the acts which transcend them. And insiders, like ordained people and active, engaged members of churches, almost always err on the side of those structures and institutions. It can’t really be otherwise, these institutions are themselves signposts that a different, a greater life is possible, that the estrangement of the world from God is a sad thing, a temporary thing, which God is in the business of healing.

We’re left simply to thank God, that outsiders are not bound by the same law as insiders. They are free in a way we are not. And their freedom from the very laws and rites which, we believe, open our eyes and fill our hearts, by God’s grace shows us just how blind we are and reveals how stony our hearts can be. 

So, until trumpet shall sound, and the clouds be rolled back as a scroll, let insiders everywhere, and especially in the church, be glad for the presence and witness of outsiders, who, like the Good Samaritan, so often unwittingly inaugurate and even embody the very thing we long and pray for — till we ourselves wake up in the Innkeeper’s care, healed and restored by their quick thinking and selfless ministration. So we shall be made outsiders ourselves to our former lives, and as outsiders, finally free to enter the inheritance of the children of God.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.