Notice that we prayed for two things: that God might grant us to know and understand what we ought to do, and that God might grant us grace and power to do what we know we ought to do.

It’s helpful to be reminded, as we were in the reading from Deuteronomy today, that God’s expectations for us are not difficult, but are expectations within our reach. We can know them and we can do them, because, as God says, “What I am commanding you today is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us, so we may do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us, so we may do it?’ No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may do it.”

This is a timely word for us, as it was for the lawyer in today’s Gospel reading. The expert in the Law was trying to make things more complex and difficult than they actually are, as the lawyer in every one of us often does. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asked, as if he didn’t have a clue, even though he was an expert in the Law.

“Well,” asked Jesus, “what is written in the Law? You’re the expert. What do the Scriptures say? How do you read them?” And the lawyer knows the answer. It’s not too difficult for him, because he has studied the Scriptures all his life. The answer was right on the tip of his tongue, and he brought it right out: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

“Right,” said Jesus. “I knew you knew it all along. Do that, and your will live.”

“Yea,” asked the lawyer, wanting to jaw and define and argue the matter to death, “but just who is my neighbor?”

He wanted a definition, you see, so that he could know just exactly who it was the Law obligated him to love as himself, so that he would also know what the limits of his obligation were. That’s what a definition is – the placing of limits on something – and that way, if Jesus replies that his neighbors are some particular persons like the good, clean-cut, healthy, middle-class White-American-Christians who live on his street, then of course the lawyer knows that he’s off the hook when it comes to other people. And if Jesus gave a precise definition of “neighbor,” such as “the person who lives in the house next door to you,” then the lawyer would know that he was in right relation with God because he was in right relation with the definition, because only yesterday he had helped the man next door with his garage sale, so if his neighbor is the man next door, then he can pat himself on the back and enroll himself among the justified and the saved because of the helping hand he extended to his next-door neighbor, as well as, on occasion, to others on his block.

But Jesus doesn’t give him a definition of “neighbor.” Instead, Jesus tells him a story, one of the best-known stories in the Bible, and then asks him another question.

A man was going down from Colorado Springs to Canon City, and he got waylaid, Jesus said. He was beaten up and robbed and thrown into a ditch along Highway 115, and he was left there half dead. Later that evening a priest was traveling that way on his way to a church meeting. The priest saw the man by the side of the road, but he quickly looked out the other side of his car. He pretended to himself that he hadn’t seen what he had seen, and he sped on toward his meeting.

And then, said Jesus, a vestry member came by, and the vestry member, too, saw the man. But he also needed to get to the meeting, so he, too, passed by on the other side. (A cynical reader of this story once suggested that the reason the priest and the levite passed by on the other side was that they could plainly see that the poor duffer had already been robbed.)
But Jesus didn’t suggest that. All Jesus said was that there was a third man who came by, and this third man didn’t pass by on the other side. He stopped. And this third man was a Samaritan, which, to the Jewish expert in the law who was asking the question about who his neighbor was, was like saying that the third man was a dark-skinned guy with a south-of-the-border accent, who was driving a beat-up pickup truck with expired Arizona license plates and who was very likely an “illegal” to boot. To the good “middle-class” Jewish lawyer who asked Jesus the question about who his neighbor was, a Samaritan was rock bottom, a no-good foreigner!

In the Bible, “Good Samaritan” is an oxymoron. The good people of Judea in Jesus’ day didn’t consider Samaritans good at all. “Good Samaritan” is the name we’ve given to the story and placed in the little section headings of our English Bibles when we weren’t listening carefully. So listen carefully. Jesus never says that the Samaritan is good. In fact, when someone in a similar situation in another Gospel calls Jesus good, Jesus tells him to take it back, because not one is good, not even Jesus, that only God is good.

Well, anyway, this Samaritan who was not thought to be good got out of his pickup, and he poured some cheap wine he kept under his seat on the man’s wounds and bandaged them up with his dirty T-shirt. Then he placed the poor guy in the back of his pickup and took him to the Doubletree Inn, where he checked him into a room and paid for two days of R & R for him and told the manager to have a doctor check the man over. Then he told the manager that he would come back in a couple of days, and that when he returned he would pay for any additional expenses the manager had incurred.

And it’s at this point that Jesus turned to the lawyer and asked his next question: “Which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who was beaten and robbed?”

And again the answer was right on the tip of the lawyer’s tongue. “The one who had mercy on him,” he said. “Right again,” said Jesus. “See, you knew it all along. Go and do likewise, and you will live.”

Knowing and understanding what we ought to do really isn’t difficult. A prayer for knowledge and understanding is a prayer that we can actually answer for ourselves, or, rather, that God has already answered for us. The answer isn’t somewhere way up in the heavens, so that we have to send someone there to fetch it for us. It’s right here in the Scriptures for us, in the same Scriptures the lawyer had. That’s why we have Sunday School for our children and Bible classes for adults, and why we read the Bible at home, because God has already given us the means to receive what we asked for in the first half of our prayer this morning. As we acknowledge in another of our prayers in the Episcopal Church, it is God himself who “caused the Scriptures to be written for our learning” in the first place, so that we might know and understand what we ought to do. All we have to do is a little reading and a little study. It’s not difficult. In fact, for anyone who has spent any time at all in church, it’s already in his own mouth and in his own heart. All he has to do is to do it, and he will live.

And that’s where the second part of our prayer comes in, the part where we pray that God will grant us grace and power, the grace and power actually to do what we know we ought to do, the grace and power needed to be a neighbor like the man with the accent and the pickup from Samaria.

So how do we receive the grace and power to “go and do likewise”? We receive the grace and power to “go and do likewise” also from hearing the Word, but from listening very carefully so that we might identify ourselves in the story. As you sat and listened this morning, as you heard this story for the umpteenth time in your life, who in the story did you identify with? Were you the priest or the vestry member who passed by on the other side? Maybe. Sometimes. Or were you the Samaritan himself, the one who stopped and helped? Maybe. Sometimes. Or were you the lawyer who asks the question in the first place and who just wants a simple answer to the problems of life? Maybe. Sometimes. All of us can probably identify to some extent with each of these people in Jesus’ story.

But I’m going to follow Robert Capon’s lead this morning and suggest that the person in the story all of us identify with is the poor, sad guy in the ditch. Jesus’ story of the Samaritan on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho is a story about the man who had been beaten and left half dead by the side of the road and who was just about to take his last breath, the one who was just about out of hope, when help arrived from an unexpected quarter. The story, of course, is also about someone who arrived from an unexpected quarter, about the Samaritan, about the One who was “despised and rejected” by the good folks, the One who “bore our iniquities,” the One who, as Paul says, ”rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us into his kingdom of life.”

The man in the ditch, you know, wasn’t without responsibility for his own situation. Part of his plight was his own doing, his own fault. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious. We are told that no one in his right mind ever traveled that road by himself, because there was always danger there. People were always being robbed and beaten and killed on that road, just as they are on the road of life. And yet this guy stupidly took the road by himself, and you just want to say, “Well, then, he got what he should have expected, what he deserved. He should have been smarter. He should have acted differently and listened to advice and lived right and minded his mother. He should not have done what he wasn’t supposed to do.”

But wait a minute! Who does that sound like? Isn’t this you and me we’re describing here? Isn’t this you and me, the ones who confess that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us,” the ones in the pits, the ones without hope, the ones only half alive by the side of the road, before grace arrived?

Haven’t we heard this before? It’s all right in the Scriptures – about how, when we were at our wits’ end – when our attempts to travel the risky road of life alone had ended in disaster, and when we were all but dead and without hope because we had not lived as we ought but had taken the road by ourselves instead of taking it with God – about how when we were lying there bleeding and weeping and not knowing what to do next, and not able to do anything to help ourselves even if we had known what to do – about how at that point God sent his own Son who gave his own blood to rescue us and to pay for our care and also promised to return to see us back to health and life.

How do we receive the grace and power to “go and do likewise”? We receive this as well from hearing the story, from listening very carefully to the whole story, to the story of our journey from all the way from Eden to Calvary and the empty tomb. Sometimes maybe we need just to sit and listen, to listen carefully, before we can really hear what the story means for us. Perhaps we need to listen carefully enough to realize just how lost we are, lost like the man in the ditch in Jesus’ story, before we can realize that it’s only by grace that we have been given life to begin with, that it’s only by grace that we live at all. Perhaps it’s only then, when we listen carefully to the whole story and recognize that it is we who have been found wounded by the side of the road, and when we realize that we are the ones who have been “neighbored,” that we receive the grace and power to “go and do likewise.”

“Going and doing likewise” is not just the taking of the man to the inn. That’s merely the final issue of two critical steps in our spiritual lives that precede the trip to the inn and that are themselves part of the “going and doing likewise.” Before the trip to the inn there is the noticing. Not just the seeing with one’s eyes. The priest and the levite saw the man with their optic nerves. But actually noticing requires the circumcision of the heart which God promised back in Deuteronomy, and it was the Samaritan, not the priest or the levite, who noticed the poor man with his heart and in his gut. (Which is what the Greek word here means when it says that the Samaritan had compassion on him, that he felt for him in his bowels.) The Samaritan recognized who the man was! Not that he knew his name, but that he recognized that even though the man was not from his part of the country, he was a fellow human being, someone who may count for nothing to many, but who counted for much to God. It was the Samaritan, the foreigner from some mysterious place far away, who saw the man by the side of the road as a fellow child of God in need, someone like himself.

It’s so easy, isn’t it, through only a casual hearing, through a casual reading of life itself, to identify ourselves with the priest or the levite, so easy to identify ourselves with the ones the world calls good, with people with whom there isn’t too much wrong on the outside and who are maybe just too busy sometimes to “go and do,” or who are maybe just a little timid or shy or fearful. It’s even easy to identify ourselves with the lawyer, who just wants a clear-cut, simple answer to the questions of life, and who really wants to live by those answers, if only someone will tell him what they are.

But it takes a careful hearing to see ourselves as the one by the side of road, as the one who is lost, the one at death’s door, the one without hope before grace arrives.

The story of the man left by the side of the road and of the Samaritan who was not thought to be good is not a story of human niceness or human goodness. The words “good” and “Samaritan” are contradictory; “Good Samaritan” is an oxymoron. The story about the Samaritan and the man in the ditch is a story about the grace of God, the story of one who was “despised and rejected” and wounded, and the story of another who shared that rejection and those wounds. It’s the story of the compassion and mercy and love that we receive from a mysterious Stranger, the story of the possibility of our recognizing, with our hearts as well as with our eyes, the bonds of our common humanity that unite us, the story of the One who comes to make that clear to us by loving us in our lostness. It is the story of Calvary, the story of how grace happens, the story of how grace happens there in the ditch and on a hill far away, on a Cross outside the city gate where all the refuse is tossed and where no good person ventures, the story of where the need is.

Listened to carefully, it’s our story, and God’s. It’s the story of grace, the story of the opening of minds and hearts as well as eyes, the story of grace needed and grace received, grace to “go and do likewise,” so that we might live.

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