MBCC Blog:

Yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be unpacking, whatever. I'm sitting at home waiting for the cable guy (b/c I consider myself to be part of a group of folks that loves my TV) and I had a few thoughts on today's topic.

At the beginning of the message, when Bruce asked the question "Who are your people?" I immediately thought of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. A man came to Jesus asking for the way to eternal life and Jesus gave him the Torah in a nutshell. In an effort to make sure everything was perfect so he could be sure to inherit eternal life, the man asked Jesus for a deeper interpretation of the term "neighbor." Jesus' response was the parable. At the end the man rightly comes to the conclusion that the one who shows mercy is the neighbor. I like that Jesus is taking the idea of one's people and expanding it even further, which is what Jesus did - challenge, stretch and question. For me, it is reason enough to have Esther in the canon.

I was reading in my Renovare Study Bible, and there was a pretty good note on the passage, so I'm going to quote it here, rather than stumble about with my own thought. Work smarter, not harder.

"The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well-known of all Jesus' stories. In it, the person you least expect to help the robbed and beaten man stops and saves him, while the ones you'd think would be the first to help him go right on by. For those listening to Jesus tell this story for the first time, it would have been very difficult to take. The hero is not a priest, but an enemy of the Jews. The enmity between Jews and Samaritans went back hundreds of years. It would have been inconceivable for Jews to have identified with the Samaritan. Not wanting to identify with the priest or Levite, who both erred on the side of caution rather than compassion (touching a possible corpse would have rendered them unclean and made social interaction temporarily impossible), their only choice would have been to put themselves in the place of the victim, bleeding and helpless in the dirt, beset by flies under the killing sun. Imagine then their mixture of horror and relief when the one who saves them is the one they hate.

This story is not only about stopping to help those whom we have been taught to mistrust or have had bitter conflict with. It is also about putting ourselves in the skin of the half-dead, the destitute, the despairing - sometimes a place where we can indeed find ourselves at one or more points on our own journey between Jericho and Jerusalem. It is about realizing our neighbor is the one who is kind to us, regardless of skin color, religion, politics, or personal past history. This may be much more difficult than finding the inner strength and grace to stop and give aid and comfort to our enemy. To comprehend our utter inability to help ourselves, swallow our pride, and permit those we dislike or detest to save us is to come to the point of calling them friends. It is the crossing of an enormous barrier on this earth, certainly one of the most unspannable for human nature. It is perhaps as difficult as the gap experienced by people who have always considered God false of, if God exists, a monster and then who discover, in fear and disgust and awe, that God is the only one stretching out to bring them back from the brink of death."

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