Proper 10C
Luke 10:25-37
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex.

There is a particular image in the story of the Good Samaritan that I cannot get out of my head this summer. You know the story, even if we had not just heard it. A man leaves Jerusalem, is attacked and left for dead by bandits, a man who knows better passes him by, a second man who knows better passes him by. Freeze the frame there with me for a moment. The sun is high in the desert. The beaten man lays on the side of the road. His breath is shallow, his wounds bleeding. He is alive; Luke doesn’t tell us much but he does tell us that. He knows what has happened to him. He knows his prognosis is poor. He knows he is what most would consider to be a lost cause. He does not know what happens next, if anything. This is a blink and you miss it moment, but it is a familiar image if we take the time to let it be.

This is possibly the most familiar story Jesus tells, the one that has seeped out into the culture even as church participation declines. We have Good Samaritan laws, Good Samaritan hospitals and charities. To be a Good Samaritan is to be a helper of someone in distress. So it is easy to hear in Jesus’s command to “go and do likewise” a very simple and straightforward meaning of the parable. We are to be kind to others in need. To be sure, this is an important feature of Jesus’s teachings, but I am going to take for granted that you understand this and invite you to consider that perhaps Jesus is doing something deeper, and that that particular point is not the point this story is trying to make. In his reflections on this parable, the priest, scholar, and sometime culinary enthusiast Robert Farrar Capon notes, “Niceness has nothing to do with the price of our salvation,”* and of course the salvation of the world and the gift of abundant life is what Jesus is primarily concerned with.

Jesus receives this question multiple times throughout the Gospels: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” It’s an important question. What is the price of salvation? How do I find life that will last? It’s not just a question about life after death, but about life as we know it now, about a sense of orientation and understanding that is grounding instead of fleeting or absent. As Luke tells the story, this is the only time that Jesus turns the question around on the asker, in this case an expert in the Jewish Law. He knows the answer already: Love God, love your neighbors. But Luke also intentionally places this interaction in a larger story arc after Jesus has finished his ministry of healing and teaching and feeding in Galilee, and has begun his journey to Jerusalem for the events of Holy Week. Jesus understands what will happen there, one way or another. He will engage in a final tangle with the powers that be and offer up his own life in an unjust death that confounds his followers and looks like victory to his opponents. He intends to become a lost cause. 

And so this is an important theme throughout his teaching in this part of the story: to follow me, Jesus says, is to lose yourself. Be a loser like Jesus. To find him, you have to get lost. Ignore the signposts that point to fulfillment and safety as society understands them and run out into the desert. The best part is you don’t even have to try, because lostness is, it seems, an inherent part of what it means to be alive, in some way or another. We know this man on the side of the road. We know him because he is us. We know him because we know those parts of ourselves that have been beaten and left for dead: beaten by others in our past or present, all too often left for dead by our own selves. We know the images from the news of those in the world who have been beaten and left for dead or who will be beaten and left for dead by those in the halls of power. Here, in the desert sun, we know intimately what parts of ourselves, of the world, we consider to be lost causes. To know ourselves beaten, left for dead, and yearning for redemption is to be like Christ.

It would be easier, nicer, to place ourselves in the role of the Samaritan who binds up the stranger’s wounds. Everyone wants to be the hero. But I have often observed that so much of the Christian life is lived lying flat on the road in a moment of not-knowing, in the unbearable tension of about-to-be-saved, in the cry with the psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” In this moment under the desert sun as the Levite recedes across the horizon, the man who fell among thieves is a lost cause very much indeed… and the Samaritan is already on his way down the road, though neither of them knows how significant that encounter is about to be.

I recently came across an interview with the Rev. Pauli Murray, the first Black woman to be ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. Before her ordained ministry, Murray had a long and storied career as a civil rights attorney in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the interview she reflects not on her victories but her failures, saying, “In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”

Lost causes found. What a perfect capsule of Gospel. God is not in the business of leaving us or the world and her broken children for dead. Each of us knows where there are lost causes waiting to be found. And though we know not the day nor the hour, the Good Samaritan is on his way to find us, to give himself away for our sake, to abandon his own journey and bind up our festering wounds all through the long night. This too is an image of losing oneself to find Jesus: not merely taking pity on broken places and people and letting that be enough, but letting it derail our entire journey, letting that healing take claim on all the time and resources it needs so that new life can take hold.

What must we do to inherit eternal life? To face those parts of ourselves that we see as lost causes and see them as the avenue by which new life can come is to understand more deeply the mystery of Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being. Go and do likewise.

*Capon, The Parables of Grace (1988)