For all of the whining many of us do about getting older, there are a lot of pluses that it brings, along with the downside, like the inability to stay out late at a party without falling asleep. Just the other day, someone who had just passed a big milestone told me that she thought age brought a lot of benefits: When you’re younger, you don’t have a very good sense of yourself, you’re a lot more upset by things, you don’t know where you stand in life, and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out who you are, and where you belong. When you’re older, on the other hand, many people find a welcome sense of relief from all that. You have a much better sense of who you are, of what you’re good at and what you’re not, you acquire a sense of being established, and, and if you’re lucky, you’re able to figure out what to focus your attention on, and what not to. Sometimes we call that maturity. And it’s a good thing.
And yet, like all things in life, with maturity and being established comes a flip side that we sometimes don’t see quite so clearly. And what put me in mind of that today in this story of the good Samaritan is not the behavior of the Samaritan, but the first two people who walked by on the road.
Their behavior is not judged harshly here, because in many respects they showed good, sound judgment in deciding to pass this situation by. This road to Jericho that Jesus chose for this story was chosen because it was a terrible stretch, apparently, steeply sloping, and not only that, but overrun with robbers and thieves, and it wasn’t uncommon to be beaten up and robbed on that road, or even for someone to use a supposedly beaten-up man as a decoy to lure someone into a trap.
So the priest and the Levite passed this by, and given the neighborhood they may have done the right thing, just like we’d probably drive by a suspicious car in distress on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Nothing here says they were not good people — as Martin Luther King says in a famous sermon he gave on this reading, they may have been in a hurry, late for a meeting of some kind of a Jericho Road Improvement Association, intended to address the root causes of all the crime in the neighborhood. They may be good people who simply decided not to be struck by this scene.
And the point of them missing it, and the Samaritan outsider getting it, is that somehow it is the outsider, the one who does not feel at home, the one who is not set in his ways, he’s the one who has the ability to assess the situation clearly and act with compassion, and common sense, and good judgment. He’s the one who knows what to do. A little time and a few bucks and some practical wisdom, and he has done the right thing. But it’s the other people, who have social standing and all that mature good judgment, they are the ones who pass things by that should arrest their attention.
Why does this happen to us?
It’s almost as if we start to see the world around us as a series of concentric circles. In the first circle around us we have a circle of people close to us whose fate is very important to us, and for whom we would try to do anything. We live our lives for them. Outside that circle is people a little less close to us, perhaps some other members of our family, or friends, or people in this parish, who we care about deeply. We know them, we trust them. And at some point, outside those circles, we get to places where we’ve made some judgment, probably subconsciously and over a long period of time, that it’s simply not something that is close enough to us to bring us to action. We draw some lines, or we’d go crazy, we think. There have to be some things we decide we can’t understand or fix, or where the risks don’t make any sense compared to the other places we’ve decided to concentrate our time.
The point of this reading is not that we have to be paralyzed by needing to fix the situation of everyone in this world, but to notice how we make decisions about who needs help, our help, our intelligence. Life’s hard enough, and we’ve set up some boundaries for ourselves just to make things manageable, and going outside those boundaries into a potential mess upsets the equilibrium.
But you won’t need a lot of imagination this coming week to see all sorts of people whose lives are messes, left beaten up on the roadside, sometimes literally, and who have been left by themselves. Maybe they are tiresome, maybe they are dangerous, maybe they just need something, or maybe they can’t be helped at all. And yet there they are.
Jesus tells this story, not to make us feel bad, but to remind us again that the way God sees the world isn’t the way we usually do. We need boundaries that help us feel like we’re in control; God doesn’t. As established people with good judgment, our temptation is always to ask the question, Am I cut out for this? What will happen to me if I help this person? And instead, as the Good Samaritan instinctively knew, the question really is: What will happen to them if I don’t?