Gates are made to keep people out, not restrain those on the inside. The guard at this particular gate knew this truth quite well. “Are you a member”, he asked. “No sir, but I have a tee-time with one at 3:30”.
“Were you invited to play here?”
“Yes.”
“Who invited you?”
“David Paulson.”
He glared at my 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis with disdain and walked back to the gatehouse. After acting as if he really looked up Mr. Paulson’s name he turned to me and said “We don’t have a member here under that name, I believe you are in the wrong place.” Assuring him that I wasn’t, he finally acquiesced and with a dismissive tone informed me that I could come in only if I drove around to the back and entered via the staff entrance. I was furious, so much so that my hands shook with anger. Somewhere deep down inside me, and probably in all of us, is a dark place of sincere insecurity. Planted and rooted for years through the whispers, stares and looks of the elite. Growing up the son of a preacher in the Mississippi River Delta of Arkansas, there were always clubs we couldn’t join, neighborhoods we weren’t privy to, restaurants whose doors we never darkened and schools whose tuition alone placed a barrier far too high for my parents to reach.
In that moment of interaction with the guard at the ultra-exclusive Jacksonville Golf & Country Club, all the years of ignominy and shame came flooding into my present. I wanted to hurl obscenities at him. I wanted to somehow prove my worth and value to this little private community, but I couldn’t. I could only drive up the back entrance and make my way to the clubhouse to find the rest of my foursome awaiting and welcoming me.
This is the order of things in this fallen world. The haves who are welcome at any table, and the rest of us, longing for a few scraps to fall our way. And yet, we find in the message of Jesus a starkly different proclamation about who is ultimately let in and who will eventually be left out at His final banquet. The Christ of Nazareth turns the insider/outsider paradigm completely on its head, specifically within the story of “The Good Neighbor", you know how it goes…
“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the law?” Jesus asked him. “How do you read it?” He answered: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. “You’ve answered correctly,” Jesus told him, “Do this and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus took the answer and said:
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up and fled, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him…Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
If you’ve spent any amount of time in church, you’ve probably heard a sermon or twelve preached on this passage. The preacher typically exposits on the great cultural chasm between Jews and Samaritans and then advises us to love our enemies while spinning the story into a morality tale. I’m not so sure that’s exactly what Jesus had in mind. The point of the story isn’t that the Samaritan saw the Jew as his neighbor, or even that the priest and the Levite were not his neighbors. It’s much more subversive than that. What Jesus appears to be doing is redefining who Israel and this particular lawyer must love in order to remain true to Torah, and in so doing, obtain eternal life. That was the original question anyway, was it not? Jesus isn’t just asking the lawyer to care for those who he would otherwise despise, he is challenging him to see a new version of the law, one that exposes this covenant God’s love for the outcast. “At stake throughout was the question: who would inherit the age to come? The parable answered this question with sharp clarity. Outsiders were coming into the kingdom, and insiders were being left out.” [i] This new way of understanding Torah and neighbor meant a redrawing of the community gate to include those beyond the pale.
Jesus is introducing a new way for Israel to be Israel. Instead of hiding behind the gates of Torah, Temple, sacrifice and offering, Christ bursts into this closed community by throwing open the portcullis and letting the dogs in with him. And for Jesus, this is only the beginning of his systematic way of slowly revealing God’s kingdom on earth, which requires obedience to a new way of social, political, economic and familiar lines.
[i] Wright, N.T., Jesus and the Victory of God.
Thanks, Gary Alan; an interesting take on an old story.
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