I don’t know about you, but the parable of the Good Samaritan annoys me. It especially annoys me, since I’ve been ordained a priest. It’s at the back of my mind every time I walk out the door, every time someone stops me to ask me for money. It popped into my mind yesterday, as Corrie and I were walking to the Farmer’s Market, and passed someone sleeping in the grass. As we went by, Corrie asked me, “He is breathing, isn’t he?” We didn’t give it another thought; although I’ll admit, I did look for him when as we made our way home an hour or so later.

I’m sure the same thoughts go through many of your minds, as you’re driving down the highway and come across a disabled vehicle, or encounter someone in need as you are walking down the street.

The Good Samaritan. Of all the parables Jesus told, none of them is more familiar, more firmly fixed, not only in the minds of Christians, but throughout our culture, than the story we heard in today’s gospel. Good Samaritans do that sort of thing—they help people who are stranded by the side of the road, they come to the rescue of those in need, and our culture rewards them, with fame, and sometimes financially, too.

The Good Samaritan in our culture is a feel-good story. We like to hear about someone who stops and helps someone in need, because we like to think that, if we were in that situation, we would do the very same thing. Of course, most of us, most of the time, don’t. We don’t help the person in need; we drive right by. We are like the priest or the Levite in the story, going about our business, too preoccupied, too focused on ourselves to reach out.

The priest and the Levite, too, had their excuses. They were undoubtedly busy, priests always are, and besides that, in first-century Judaism, for a priest to touch a dead person, was to make himself ritually unclean, and unavailable for the work he needed to do on behalf of the people.

While admirable, that common interpretation of the parable is probably not what Jesus, or Luke, had in mind. To explore the story’s meaning, first we have to pay attention to the context in which it is told. Luke places the parable, which only he of the gospel writers relates, in the middle of a dialogue between Jesus and a lawyer. The lawyer asks him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds with a question of his own, to put it in our words, “What does scripture say?” The lawyer responds with a summary of the law: “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 your neighbor as yourself.”

There’s something interesting going on here. In Matthew and Mark’s slightly different version of this story, they put these words in Jesus’ mouth in response to a question about which are the most important commandments. But here, the lawyer gives the response and I find it significant that this important teaching is put in the mouth of an expert in Judaism, someone who knows Torah inside and out.

Jesus agreed with him, but then the lawyer had a follow-up question, “And who is my neighbor?” Luke offers the parable as an answer to that question. But you know what, it doesn’t provide an answer to that question. A man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho. He’s mugged and left for dead. As he lies there, a priest and a Levite pass by, doing nothing. Finally a Samaritan comes by and offers help. The question answered by the parable is not “Who is my neighbor?” but rather, “whose neighbor am I?” Who reaches out to me when I need help?

Truth be told, there is very little relationship between our common notion of the Good Samaritan and the parable Jesus tells. In the first place, nowhere in the story is the Samaritan labeled good. Of course you all know that the Samaritans were reviled by most first-century Jews. They were criticized for several things. They worshiped on Mt. Gerizim, not in Jerusalem. They regarded only the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah as authoritative and rejected the rest of the Hebrew Bible. They were commonly believed by Jews to practice a religion that combined aspects of Judaism with other religions, though that is probably part of the propaganda that was leveled against them.

Luke includes a telling episode just a chapter or two before this parable. It was the gospel reading a couple of weeks ago. Luke says that Jesus “had set his face to go to Jerusalem.” In other words he was beginning the final journey that would lead to his crucifixion. On the way, they came to a village of Samaritans, who refused to let him and his entourage enter, because as Luke says, he was on his way to Jerusalem. The disciples, James and John, got the bright idea to destroy the village in retribution, but Jesus rebuked them.

So, it was in this context that Jesus told the parable of the Samaritan reaching out to help someone in need. Can you imagine how shocking that would have been to his audience? Place yourself in the sandals of the man who was robbed—of course, he would want help from anyone who offered it, but if that person was a member of the most reviled group around? What then? What if the one offering help is the enemy?

The parable of the Samaritan is not about helping others, it is about love of neighbor, and being loved by one’s neighbors. The lawyer’s question was legitimate—how far does love of neighbor go? Jesus’ answer is, farther than you can imagine. But there is already something of the vast expanse of neighbor love in the lawyer’s original response. To love God, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

The lawyer was asking a legitimate question—how far does love of neighbor extend? How far do our responsibilities go? To the people across the street? The stranger we encounter? To Africa? Jesus’ answer is unsettling. Love of neighbor knows no limits; it extends as far as the world; it breaks down the boundaries that we put up, the walls that shut out our enemies and those we don’t want to think about or care for. Yes, it extends to our enemies.

The reading from Amos puts the parable of the Samaritan in proper perspective. Amos sees a vision of Yahweh, of God with a plumb line in his hand. It is a vision of God’s judgment of Israel. God promises to destroy Israel because as Amos tells us elsewhere, the people of Israel have not kept the covenant or the law. To use the language of today’s Psalm, they “had judged unjustly and shown favor to the wicked. They had failed to save the weak and the orphan, to defend the humble and needy, to rescue the weak and the poor.

Such efforts are not simply charity, things we do out of the goodness of our hearts. They are the heart of what God demands of the people of God. They are the heart of the law in the Hebrew Bible, and as Jesus reminds the lawyer, they are at the heart of what it means to follow him. In response to the lawyer’s statement that the law could be summarized in the two-fold love of God and neighbor, Jesus responded, “Do this and you will live.”

At the end of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer another question, who proved to be the man’s neighbor? He responded, the one who showed mercy. After the shock of hearing how a Samaritan helped someone in need, the lawyer still could not speak the name of his enemy. “To live” as Jesus would have us live means not only loving our neighbor, but embracing our enemy. It means, like the Samaritan, to bind the wounds and take care of the one we hate. It also means, being willing to be embraced by our enemy, to allow ourselves to receive help from them. It means seeing them in new ways. It means breaking down the barriers that separate us and keep us from seeing one another as human beings, as God’s creations, deserving of love.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about being willing to help others. It calls us to look on the world with new eyes, to look on our fellow humans as ourselves. Do this, and you will live.