I first preached a much longer version of this sermon 18 years ago from this pulpit in what we call in Baptist circles “preaching in view of a call.” Afterward, the church voted. It was about 93 percent in favor. After reviewing that sermon and having to revise it to re-preach it today, I think I now better understand the 7 percent. And, no, you’re not getting a chance to vote today!

Anyway, if you grew up in or around church, you probably think you know the Parable of the Good Samaritan so well there’s nothing for a preacher to point out. Being a Good Samaritan means being good to your neighbor, especially your neighbor in need. It means helping people, not being selfish, and giving to charity. It means stopping to help change a tire for a roadside stranger. It means Christmas toys for the less fortunate children of the world. It means volunteering at the Stew Pot now and then. In general, the moral of the story is that we all ought to be a little more caring and compassionate. End of story. Or is it?

Familiarity doesn’t exactly breed contempt in this case, but it could breed neglect of something all the more important than morals. What is really at issue in this story? Why did Jesus tell it? It doesn’t seem to be that Jesus is leaving us a bit of advice about community service or being neighborly or how the world would be a better place if we all just pitched in. The issue is the biggest one of all: how to inherit eternal life.

That was the question that started the conversation the ends with Jesus telling this story. And isn’t that our most important question still? Anybody here interested in what happens to you when you die? Anyone not a little concerned with what it takes to earn to your wings, so to speak—even though earning your wings is not a biblical picture of the afterlife? The whole harps and halos thing is hardly interesting, if you ask me. But if you are talking about a life to come that involves being at home at last inside your own skin, feeling accepted by people who know you completely and still love you unconditionally, and having something to do at all times that gives meaning to your life every day, feeling free from guilt, and seeing that justice finally prevails—well, then, we do want to know about that, don’t we? And if that’s the kind of life we don’t want to pass us by, then we need to pay closer attention to this story about not passing by that life on the other side.

A lawyer questions Jesus, as lawyers are wont to do, don’t you know?! But before we jump on lawyers here, I must tell you that this one was more like a religious scholar, an academic type, more like a seminary professor or dean than a trial attorney. But we shouldn’t limit the likeness too narrowly since likeness to narrowness is the real point. Preachers with Ph.D.s can be just as narrow and testy. Sunday school teachers who think they know all the answers before they even know all the questions can be just as narrow and testy. All of us are candidates, in other words; and not just for likeness to the lawyer, but, for good or ill, to any of the characters in Jesus’ parable.

Well, Jesus turns the tables on the lawyer, the way he does with all of us any time we think we have our Christian lives all figured out in neat little formulas. We read the scriptures again, and Christ confronts our cocksureness with his authority. When Jesus poses the question back on the lawyer in good rabbinic fashion, the lawyer answers well: Eternal life is the reward for loving God and loving your neighbor. Jesus seems satisfied: Do this and you will live, he says. Do this, live like this, and you will not pass by the life you seek.

Of course there’s the rub, isn’t it? Do this! Move from mind to matter, from doctrine to duty, from devotion to discipleship, from thought to action, from yearning to be a saint to actually being a servant. We want to know with the lawyer, however, just what that entails. Just who is our neighbor?

And my goodness, isn’t that a pertinent question to us today? Who’d have thought the way we think of an act toward immigrants would have something to do with eternal life? Who’d have thought ethnic prejudice would have something to do with eternal life? But here we are right in the middle of those very current affairs in this ancient parable.

And now a modern one. Kim and I have a new house, as many of you know. And one of the porches has become a new place for little birds to roost and poop. Birds have trees, they have their place, and we didn’t build our house as a birdhouse for them. Let them go back to where they came from. So we put duct tape on the porch eaves so they wouldn’t be able to get comfortable. I know, I know, we’ll have PETA after us. Well, we succeeded—too well. We captured an illegal little bird the other morning, not with its feet stuck to the tape as we expected, but its wings. It was scared and shaking and dying. We took it in and sprayed oily cooking spray on the wings to loosen the grip of the tape. Then we carefully peeled the wings off, losing some of the feathers in the process, and washed off the bird as best we could. We released our feathered foreigner onto the porch, and it quickly leapt away, trying to trust its broken wings. We’ve taken the tape down, but we are now looking for some other way to limit access to these fowl creatures.

I understand why the lawyer wants well-written, well-defined statutes that allow him to know who his neighbor is so that he will know how far he has to go. “What are the limits of my obligations?” we ask with him. One traditional answer to this old question in Jewish history was that your neighbor is any other Israelite like you. Love those like you. Love those of the house of Israel. Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

The lawyer looks for limits of love, and Jesus looks for limitless love. The lawyer asks about the object of love, and Jesus points back to the subject of love, the lover’s own soul. Eternal life is the life of the God of love that must flow through you to others; it is not the result of whether you have loved enough to qualify yourself. Who you are and what you do go hand in hand.

So back to the story again. A certain man, Jesus says—no one in particular, but clearly a fellow Jew by implication, someone the lawyer would have thought a neighbor—was traveling along, minding his own business, when he was ambushed on the road. Robbed. Stripped. Beaten. Left for dead. As one commentator puts it, He lies in the sun in shock; he looks dead—blood dripping and drying, face baking in the sun, lips cracking, mouth dry, as two-day-old pound cake. He is helpless; half-dead, whatever that means. But he looks … dead.

Along comes a priest down the steep rocky road from Jerusalem to Jericho. It’s probably the day after the Sabbath. He’s been doing godly work all weekend: preaching sermons on loving God and neighbor, visiting the sick, attending committee meetings. He deserves a little rest for the weary. It’s 17 miles to Jericho and a little R&R. Maybe he’s meeting some people. Doesn’t want to be late and be rude. He sees the half-dead man on the side of the road, but he passes by that life on the other side. And we want to know why. Did he leave his religion back in Jerusalem? Did he figure he’d given at the office? Did he have no heart?

No, he was probably doing exactly what he thought he should. He was being scrupulously faithful. You see, the Law of God said this: The priest who is chief among his people shall not touch or go into the room with any dead body—not even his father or his mother. He would be ritually unclean if he did. And unclean priests are no good for their job of making other people clean.

So he faces a dilemma: the man looks dead. Does he risk violating the law of God, losing his calling, his reputation in the community, his church pension, just to help a man who might be alive but is probably dead? He chooses his own life over the life of the man in the ditch. Wouldn’t you? He deems him dead and chooses life instead. But in doing so, he misses the point of how one inherits eternal life. Jesus himself died in order to bring life to us. We would rather let others die in order bring life to ourselves.

The Levite also passed by life on the other side. He too saw only death and avoided it. Levites were a bit more like deacons by this time in Jewish history. They had once been the only priests of Israel, but long ago they had had their own run-in with uncleanness. They had cavorted with unclean Canaanites and been demoted from true priests to a lower station that could only serve as support staff in the Temple, taking care of the facilities and preparing the sacrifices.

You have to be careful if you want to maintain your standing in religious communities. You have to guard the people you love and hang around with. You have to watch what you say and do. If you are around unsavory characters, you’d better keep your own savor plain. Any minister knows this. Some of us are better at it than others. But what is better?

Notice that the Samaritan man is the hero of Jesus’ story. He stopped to help. Why? Well, because, I think, he had long since stopped worrying about his reputation. He knew he was himself as good as dead to a Jew. Samaritans were mixed breeds—the product of Jewish and pagan coupling. They were enemies of the Jews, and even 30 years earlier they had stormed the walls of Jerusalem, burglarized the temple, chipped their names in the walls, and left a pile of human bones to defile the place.

If you want to feel the sting of this parable, consider how would you like it if some Islamic jihadist broke into our sanctuary one night, broke all the furniture, splattered red paint on the Lord’s Supper table and spray-painted the tapestry with obscenities. And then you find Jesus making one of their kind the hero of the story! The point is that he is going for something deeper than our ethnic and religious rivalries: Jesus wants us to find the human and spiritual truth of life.

Well, the priest saw the man and passed by. The Levite saw the man and passed by. The Samaritan saw the man and stopped. The difference goes to what they saw: the first two saw only death and trouble for themselves; the Samaritan saw a glimmer of life and an opening for him to help. I think what he saw lying there in the ditch was … himself.

This is true compassion: not looking down on someone else and offering a hand up, but getting down with that person and getting up together. Only if we can see ourselves in the other will we really love our neighbor … AS OURSELVES!

Frederick Buechner puts it this way: Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Sometimes fatal, he says. Fatal means deadly. But what Jesus teaches is that there is life only after death and through death; there is never eternal life instead of it. Only when we die to self can we truly live. Only when we can embrace the man in the ditch as we do the man in the mirror can we taste that life. And if we do, we might be able to look upon the man on the cross and see how we are there, too. Identification with the victim is one of the chief contributions of biblical religion.

Only when we do not pass by the dead and dying on the other side do we have any hope of knowing life on the other side when we pass.