+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The typical sermon one might hear on the Parable of the Good Samaritan usually starts with the reminder that Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along particularly well. They had cultural and religious differences which separated them and created enmity despite all being Israelites. They weren’t neighborly, but they weren’t perfect strangers either. Samaritans were to Jews what Anthony Keddie called “proximate others” and we might think of this being a case of familiarity breeding contempt. So the divide isn’t like people from different planets. It’s more like Hindu vs. Buddhist or Christian vs. Mormon–they started from the same place but diverged enough to mean that you’re dealing with distinct though related religions. Anyway, this standard sermon ends with some lesson about how we might see God’s Grace expressed in the actions of those we least expect, and even if we have serious theological differences. I’ve preached that sermon before, and it’s true enough, but there’s actually something more interesting and challenging going on here, too.
Note the setting and the characters. The traveler is going down from Jerusalem. Why would he have gone up to Jerusalem in the first place? Almost certainly to sacrifice at the Temple as every able-bodied male Jew was required to do three times a year. We sometimes don’t realize how peripatetic both ancient and medieval people could be, but even so people tended not to “get away” to the city or the country on a frequent basis like some of us may do today. This isn’t like going down to Columbus or up to Ann Arbor several times a year for the “big game”–though sometimes those seem a bit too close for comfort to pilgrimages to ancient temples for the sacrifice.
Anyway, my suspicion is almost certainly confirmed by the fact that the first two who come upon the man are a priest and a Levite. These classes of men had particular roles in the sacrificial system of the Jews, and we needn’t get into all the particularities. Think of priests like the priests we still have, like me, who do the actual business of the sacrifice (albeit a “bloodless sacrifice” in the New Covenant), and of the Levites as a bit like the servers and Lay Eucharistic Ministers who assist at the altar and in the distribution of the Sacrament.
So why do they shirk their responsibility to help this man? We usually assume that they are simply heartless, and that perhaps their pride in their positions of religious authority have blinded them to the needs of lesser mortals, even those in extreme distress. No doubt there is an element of that, but there’s more. Notice that Jesus says the bandits left their victim “half dead.” The Greek here is ἡμιθανής. I’ll spare you the details of the lexical rabbit-hole I went down with this peculiar term, which is a hapax legomenon (a word that only appears once in the Bible) unless you count the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, which only appears in an appendix to the Greek Bible. If you really want me to regale you with details of Strabo, Diodorus, and Dionysius Halicarnassus, you can pigeon-hole me at coffee hour.
The upshot is that the victim by the roadside would not have immediately been clearly dead or alive. You’d have to get up close and personal to make a determination, feeling for a pulse or for breath. And if he turned out to be dead, the priest and the Levite would have been in a pickle. He would have been ritually unclean and thus unable to do his job until purifying himself. This is what Leviticus says, in the 21st chapter, verses 1 through 3:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them that none of them shall defile himself for the dead among his people, except for his nearest of kin, his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, or his virgin sister (who is near to him because she has had no husband; for her he may defile himself).”
These exceptions for touching close family members did not apply to the high priest, who couldn’t even do that. Lest you think this ritual concern died with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, I found an article this week published by Chabad, which is probably the largest Ultra-Orthodox group, and the one organization on that end of the Jewish spectrum that reaches outside the shtetl to engage with more reformed and secular Jews and even those of other religions. The article was about caring for the dead, and the upshot was that doing so was a mitzvah–a good work–but the kohanim (those descended from Moses’ brother Aaron who once served as the temple priests) must still avoid hospitals and nursing homes, and cemeteries lest they get too close to a corpse. They haven’t made sacrifices in nearly two thousand years; my understanding is that the only role they really still play is being given the first Torah reading at synagogue and blessing the congregation at the end of the service. (You’re not supposed to look at them when they do this, by the way, but famously when he was a child, Leonard Nimoy peaked one Sabbath morning, and thus, Mr. Spock got the inspiration for the Vulcan salute).
So, why couldn’t the priest and the Levite just take a chance knowing that they could purify yourself afterward. It’s inconvenient, but you might save a life. Well, the Book of Numbers outlines the purification ritual, which requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. More than an inconvenience, procuring said ashes from the Temple where a small supply would have been kept was somewhere between highly improbable and virtually impossible. Tradition holds that between the time of Moses in the 13th Century B.C. And the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70 only nine spotless red heifers had been identified and sacrificed, so supplies were limited, to say the least.
As an aside, if you’re looking for a fun, summer read, I commend to you Michael Chabon’s funny, exhilarating novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It’s an alternative history, hard-boiled detective story whose premise is that after the Second World War the Jewish State was founded not in the Middle East but in Alaska. The book plunges the reader into the investigation of a murder which uncovers a group which believe it has found the long-anticipated Messiah and a spotless red heifer, promising the possibility of building a third Jerusalem Temple and reestablishing the sacrificial system. I say the book is funny, because it is, but it’s also a bit scary since there are both Ultra-Orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian sects that have been pursuing just this sort of thing for the last several decades. (Note well, here, that I am not making a statement about the modern state of Israel one way or another. I’m just saying that strange, end-times theories are generally bad for both politics and–more importantly–mainstream religion, both Jewish and Christian). Anyway, read the book; you’ll love it!
Back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan… The point in all this is that the priest and the Levite didn’t ignore the wounded traveler just because they were heartless, though they may well have been. They ignored him because they put ritual purity and the outward exercise of religion above love of neighbor. The Samaritan had no such cause for scrupulosity. Despite being children of Abraham, Samaritans were not allowed inside the temple, much less could they participate in the sacrifices. The best they could do would be to hang out in the so-called “Court of the Gentiles” with the Greeks and Romans and money-changers. Most of them would have probably resented the Jewish temple elite enough not to even do that. We learn from the Book of Ezra that five centuries earlier, when the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon, the Samaritans had offered to help them rebuild the Temple. The answer? Thanks, but no thanks. In all events, it was the Samaritan’s lack of interest in and need to maintain purity that allowed him to love his neighbor, not just in word but in deed.
But how does this relate to us, you might justifiably ask? Unlike most if not all other religions, Christianity does not have a purity code. If some behavior is verboten it’s because it’s immoral, not because it makes approaching God impossible. The one pure sacrifice was already made by Christ on the Cross, and even if your priest is a great sinner (which he is) he can still administer a valid Sacrament to you, because sin, while serious and while we shouldn’t abide grave sin in the clergy, does not pollute in a ritual sense. This assurance, established by Ecumenical Council in the Fourth Century and termed Anti-Donatism, is your most important church insurance policy, and you don’t even have to pay for it.
Since food is often the first thing that comes to mind, because we remember that there are som many dietary restriction in the Old Testament, it’s nice to know that Christians get to eat and drink whatever they like in moderation. If the Church encourages (though not requires) avoiding something or another it’s either as a spiritual discipline to conform us to Christ’s own abstention–like when we are encouraged to abstain from meat and other delicacies on Fridays–or to avoid scandal–like not eating food sacrificed to an idol in from of a neophyte. It’s never because we thus become ritually impure and have to hose ourselves off before we can pray!
All that said, avoiding contamination is a very human tendency, and any anthropologist will tell you that our concern with it is preternatural. Maybe it’s not “unclean” food or dead bodies or a misogynistic monthly spousal separation for us. Maybe it’s the homeless person who hasn’t bathed in a while because she’s living on the streets. Maybe it’s the oleaginous business bro whose angle you haven’t ferreted out, but you know he’s got one. Maybe it’s the mentally disturbed or cognitively disabled person, because you’ve irrationally convinced yourself you’re gonna catch it. Maybe it’s the person whose sexual preferences you disagree with or that just give you “the ick.” Again, I assure you, whatever you think about those issues (and I know there’s a diversity of opinions here about that, which is fine), whatever “gay” is, it’s not an air-born infection.
And, sometimes, there is something in the environment which is literally infectious, but that doesn’t mean it has the capacity to make us ritually impure. Hear me when I say that I am not encouraging anybody in particular to put themselves in danger, here, but I am so grateful that among the handful of Episcopalian saints on our general calendar are the “Martyrs of Memphis.” When the Rt. Rev’d Charles Quintard, Bishop of Tennessee, invited the Sisterhood of Saint Mary to Memphis in 1873 it was to establish a girl’s school at the Cathedral. That school remains to this day, and stands as one of the best of its type in the country. Little did Bishop Quintard and the sister know that a terrible outbreak of yellow fever would strike Memphis five years later, in 1878. Most who could leave the city did. The sisters could have done, but they did not. They remained and ministered tirelessly, valiantly to the sick and dying. In the end four of them died in this humble service. So I thank God for Sr. Constance, Sr. Thecla, Sr. Ruth, and Sr. Francis for reminding me that Jesus is not just the Good Shepherd. He is also the Good Samaritan, and I pray to the Father and beg the intercessions of the Martyrs of Memphis that I might be prepared to do the same should the day of decision come.
The point here is that both the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd weren’t afraid of getting down in the dirt. They teach us that love of neighbor calls us to go where Christ has gone–among sinners, in the slums, sometimes in the sewers. Jesus didn’t just stop there. He went all the way into Hell. The one truly pure priest and victim did not thus become unclean. Rather, he cleansed the filthiest corners of every hovel and every heart simply with his presence. And when he abides in us, we are no longer separated, we are no longer soiled, we are, rather, saved from every spot of sin, having been washed clean with his most precious blood.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.