For many of us, the story of the Good Samaritan is possibly one of the most familiar parables that Jesus told in the Gospels.  What solicits the storytelling from Jesus, according to Luke (LK 10: 25-37), was a “scholar of the law” who asked Jesus what must be done to inherit eternal life?  Jesus responds as he so often does with a question, “What is written in the law?  How do you read it?”  And then we hear the familiar “combination-commandment”:

“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your being,
with all your strength,
and with all your mind,
and your neighbor as yourself.”

After this we have the turn in the Gospel where the law scholar, who “wished to justify himself” asking Jesus…“And who is my neighbor?”

I find it interesting that the scholar in asking this question about identifying the neighbor completely ignores the part of the law that he quoted that followed the imperative to “love your neighbor” – he pays no attention to the two words that immediately follow neighbor, which, perhaps more than we are first aware of, could be the most powerful piece of the entire commandment.  The two words as yourself.

In the story of the Good Samaritan that follows we hear how an unidentified man “fell victim to robbers…[who] stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half dead.”  I wonder if there could be significance in not identifying the man who was beaten by the robbers.  As the story continues, we learn of how first a priest and then a Levite passed the half-dead man without stopping to care for him.  It was finally a Samaritan who “moved with compassion…approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds…and lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn, and cared for him.”

The focus of interpreting this story has many times centered upon the failure of two persons to respond and the perhaps unanticipated compassionate response of a very despised character at that time -a Samaritan. That interpretation provides a definite challenge in the story, as Jesus surfaces at the story’s conclusion when he asks the scholar “Which of these three in your opinion was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”  The scholar, whether he is comfortable with it or not, seems compelled to identify “the one who treated him with mercy” as the one who was neighbor to the “robbers’ victim.”

I am still struck by this un-named and un-identified man who has been beaten and left for dead?  Who is he?  While we have many times heard purported motives for the failure of the priest and Levite to respond and the perhaps surprising response of the despised Samaritan in this story, the fact that we don’t know anything about the man lying half-dead alongside the road seems to be significant.  We don’t know who he is.  He could be ANYONE.

I think it is fair to say that the way that we identify ourselves in our lives determines to some extent how we respond to things that life presents to us – events and people.  I know I many times find myself responding or failing to respond in ways that are aligned with the me or the identity that I consciously or subconsciously like to present myself to be.  Sometimes I am not aware I am doing it at the time, but upon reflection later, I can see that many times my responses to situations flow from an identity or image that I have of myself or that I think others have of me.  There is at least a little bit of inauthenticity in that.  But it is the reality many times.

The question in this for me seems to go back to this whole idea of God’s love and how I identify with THAT.  In other words, do I hold onto an identity based upon my status in the world, what I do as a profession, how people see me, what is expected of me, or other external factors, more than an identity based upon the Love of God?  What if the man beaten and lying half-dead on the side of the road in the Gospel story is me?  What if the robbers are precisely those external (cultural, religious, professional, etc.) identities that I have subscribed to that deprive me of a deeper awareness of the fact that I am created by a God Who is Love and is in Love with me.  And this goes for everyone –  all of us created and maintained in each moment of our lives by a God who can do nothing but Love.

Could this deeper hidden identity be somehow tied to that part of the phrase that the scholar in the Gospel left out when he posed the question about “Who is my neighbor?”  “Wishing to justify himself,” the scholar was holding tightly to his identification as a “scholar of the law,” and in the process skimmed over his truer identity as one created in love to love.  Could this be the meaning of love your neighbor AS YOURSELF?  Could we really love our neighbor from anything other than God’s love for us?

I wonder if this commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is another way of loving God with your whole being.  Could we have nothing else to give to each other but God?  This would mean that loving each other really means being WHO we are.  We can only love each other through God, because that is who we are, the Be-loved of God.   It’s not something we can do as much as it is something we ARE.  We can only truly love “our neighbor” as our “self.”   The difficulty comes when we mis-identify ourselves and simultaneously fail to see or identify (with) our neighbor.  The two seem to go hand in hand.

It seems that these false identities we carry around determine our attitudes and actions so much so that, like the Levite and the priest in the story, we walk on the other side of the street to avoid the pain of seeing our self as the half-dead beaten victim who has been robbed of the awareness of how precious we are as created in and from God’s love. We allow so many identities or identifications to hide our deepest identity, AS we are.  We hold so tightly onto these identities that feign to grant us security that we pose the question about identifying the neighbor, when we can’t even identify with our deepest self.

Jesus seems to be pointing out that the only way we can begin to see our neighbor, or to be a neighbor, is to see ourselves compassionately in and as the neighbor.  And the word that seems to capture this in the story is mercy.  We are neighbor to each other and ourselves when we can begin to mercifully see our own precious beloved-ness by God in each other.  Then we can see through surface identities and stop robbing ourselves and others of the deepest and most precious identity that we all have of our being created in and as Love!  Then like the Samaritan, moved by this compassion, we can approach the victim, pour oil and wine over the wounds…and lift the victim up on our own animal in care.

Peace,

Thomas

(originally published October 9, 2017)