A balm for all wounds

“I imagine that the first question which the priest and the Levite, asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'” Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a jewel box of layered, paradoxical meaning. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon “On Being a Good Neighbor” sent me to the Gospel text, and to other sources, religious and secular. This process stirred feelings of guilt and shame, anxiety, and uncertainty. The compassionate approach of Rev. King’s sermon helps me deal with these confusing feelings, and his sharp clarity charts a path for responding to them going forward.

Like Scheherazade’s stories in the Arabian Nights, or Socrates’s allegories in Plato’s Republic, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a story within a story, framed by dialogue between storyteller and listener.

Luke’s story is framed by a dialogue about Torah, in which both participants are Jews. Asked “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?,” Jesus replies with a question of his own: “What is written in the law?” To answer this question, the scholar cites Deuteronomy 6.6, V’ahavta et Adonai elohecha, b’chal l’vovcha, u’v’chal nafsheha, u’v’clal meodecha (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might”), words he recites in his daily Shacharit, Mincha, and Ma’ariv prayers, and Leviticus 19:18, V’ahavta lereacha kamocha (“You should love your neighbor as yourself”). “Do this, and thou shalt live,” Jesus says. This Jewish dialogue could have taken place at the Beit Midrash of an orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, or yesterday. Or at a Passover seder: For our redemption is bound up with the deliverance from bondage of people everywhere…

The heart of Jesus’s lesson is “Do this.”  Adherence to commandments cannot be measured by belief alone. All humanity is at stake, the healing of the world.  The scholar knew the Torah verses, but had not yet grasped the full implications, or the actions required.

The archetype of the smart, cunning, manipulative “Jewish lawyer” has a long lineage, across many centuries of Christian exegesis, all the way to Better Call Saul. Unfortunately, Luke’s Torah scholar is often cast this way: “testing” Jesus, trying to “catch” him. But the scribe is Jesus’s partner here. He asks a question we must face: Are there any limits, any distinction between “my neighbor” and every human being on earth?

In response, Jesus pulls the tablecloth from the table, and flips everything upside down.  Like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jesus holds his fellow Jews (priest, Levite, scribe) accountable to God’s commandments as set out in the Torah.   To subvert expectations, and escalate the moral tensions, he makes the story’s protagonist a Samaritan, a member of a group with whom the Jews did not engage.   A bitter, traumatic history kept them apart.  This is the parable’s jaw-dropping plot twist:  an enemy beneath contempt becomes a hero Jesus uses to highlight the moral failures of his Jewish brothers.

The scribe asks Jesus to help him determine the boundary of in-group/out-group classifications.  Rev. King uses his question (“And who is my neighbor?”) as the epigraph for his sermon.  Immediately, King reframes the question.  The question to which we must attend is not about the identity of the other, it is about our own identity; not the definition of “neighbor” but what it means to be a good neighbor – a test that the priest and Levite failed.  The Samaritan was good because he was a good neighbor, “because he made concern for others the first law of his life.” King calls this concern “altruism.” For King, the Samaritan’s exemplary altruism has three defining features:   it is “universal,” it is “dangerous,” and it is “excessive.”

Universal.  King decries the poison of group-centered morality, calling us to rid ourselves of provincialism.  His Good Samaritan homily echoes a sermon he gave in 1953 in which he denounced nationalism as a “false god.”  Writing at the height of McCarthyism, he observed that “[w]e live in an age when it is almost heresy to affirm the brotherhood of man.”  It is normal and appropriate to love one’s native country.  Patriotism, expressed in acts of sacrifice and care, is a virtue.  Rather, “it is nationalism perverted into chauvinism and isolationism that I am condemning.  One cannot worship this false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. The two are incompatible and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot make them exist together. We must choose whom we will serve.”  I recited King’s words at a Rotary Club meeting some months ago.  They were not received well.

The illness to the body politic King diagnosed in 1953 has become a deadly epidemic in 2023, a MAGA addiction (“Jesus, Guns, and Trump!”) magnified by evangelical pastors and their adherents, in violation of everything Jesus said and did.  But this pandemic infects national and religious leaders throughout the world, in unholy alliance.  Extreme religious nationalism (Christian in the U.S., Jewish in Israel, Hindu in India, for example) fuel and reinforce each other to threaten democracy and peace in each country.  Russian Orthodox Christian ideologies justify war crimes in Ukraine and repression at home; Buddhist nationalism justifies genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

In the United States, the erosion of liberal universalism takes the most virulent forms in reactionary populism and re-energized white supremacy.  There is no equivalent on the left.   But who today is immune to the distortions of group identity Rev. King identified?  Even as we have inherited the mantle and agenda of 1960s liberalism, U.S. post-Obama progressives largely abjure the language of liberal internationalism.  The word “liberal” is suspect, if not shunned, as a relic of a bygone era of so-called “respectability politics” out of touch with the justified rage of our era.  It is heresy to say “all lives matter” – those words have been stolen from us, for understandable reasons.  We fear empowering our enemies, from whom we feel a threat no less existential than the threat they see in us.  But Dr. King reminds us in his homily that all this comes at great cost: the “barbaric consequences of any tribal centered, national centered, or racial centered ethic.”

Thankfully, our society is finally learning to value the “lived experience” of each marginalized racial and cultural group, whose unique stories have been disregarded.  Still, Rev. King’s vision of universalism, including complete racial integration as the end goal of the Black Freedom Movement, and his call for movement solidarity among the poor and marginalized of all races — white families in Appalachia, Black families in urban poverty, undocumented Central American farmworkers, Native Americans — is too often silenced by group-centered ethics and local crises on the left, as it decimated by neo-fascism on the right.  King courageously identifies “monopolistic capitalism” as the beneficiary, and extreme economic inequality as the result.

Dangerous.  For centuries, the Parable of the Good Samaritan has been misused in Christian exegesis to promote anti-Semitism through a distorted trope of “legalism versus love,” castigating the priest and Levite for excessive religious concern for ritual purity.

King rejects this false interpretation, imagining a more simple, human explanation:  the priest and Levite were afraid.

Only an ignorant or blind person, or a sociopath, or a criminal seeking to do harm, with nothing to lose, would traverse that godforsaken, terrifying “Bloody Pass” without fear.

Driving that steep, mountainous road in a rental car with Coretta on a visit to the Holy Land, Martin understood this. “Many sudden curves provide likely places for ambushing and exposes the traveler to unforeseen attacks.”  I was reminded of a newspaper article a few months ago about a Florida college student who was fatally shot after he pulled over to help a would-be robber posing as the stranded driver of a broken-down car.  Robbery, beatings, and murder were regular occurrences on that godforsaken, terrifying road.  When I visited Israel with my family as a child, I can’t forget the gun the tour-guide kept in his glove compartment on our early morning drive from Jerusalem to Masada.

Because of this understandable, rational fear, “I imagine that the first question which the priest and the Levite, asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’”

But perhaps King is being too kind.  Perhaps we don’t even ask ourselves this anymore.  Perhaps we just plow forward, sensors on alert.  Perhaps the priest and Levite, averting their eyes, didn’t even really see the robbery victim at all.  Just as I avert my eyes when I pass a homeless person lying on the sidewalk in the Tenderloin or on Market Street, on my way somewhere. Perhaps there were many casualties on the road that day, as our streets are filled with people laid low by fentanyl, methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and gun violence.  Or we avoid the most dangerous streets altogether – and teach our children to do the same.

Excessive.

There was a homeless person lying in the dirt near the sidewalk close to USF as I drove to our Strength to Love symposium.   I drove past him.   Yes, I was eager not to be late.   But I have never pulled over my car to address the needs of a homeless person, even when I had no appointments to make.  What can one person do?  There are suffering people throughout San Francisco, and everywhere, and no one can stop and help all of them. Can they?

But what about the Samaritan?   He did it, in this instance — and, presumably, in others.  And Jesus holds his example as this a model for how we should live.

Calling out the Samaritan’s altruism as “excessive,” King’s stunning honesty is a healing gift.  If the Samaritan had helped the wounded man in lesser ways, he would still have been good.  He would still have far surpassed all of us who look the other way.  But he did more:  binding the man’s wounds, staining his own clothes with blood.  He put aside his own personal obligations on that day, no matter how consequential.  He carried the wounded man to an inn where he could rest and heal.  He paid for everything, “making it clear that if further financial needs arose he would gladly meet them.”  Extending himself far in excess of “any possible rule concerning one’s duty to a wounded stranger,” the Samaritan “went beyond the second mile.  His love was complete.”

What does that mean, “his love was complete,” for those of us whose love is incomplete?

Here is a poem (“Commandments”) by D. H. Lawrence: “When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor/He forced us either to live a great lie, or to disobey:/For we can’t love anybody, neighbor or no neighbor, to order,/and faked love has rotted our marrow.”

But isn’t there a third way:  to discover such a love that is not fake?

And a fourth:   to heed God’s call to action, whatever our feelings might be.   “Do this,” Jesus says.  He doesn’t say “feel this.”  Over and over, the Torah reminds us of the multigenerational trauma of our bondage in a strange land, so that we treat with care the stranger (ger), the refugee, the undocumented, the discarded and abandoned in our world today.  Generosity and care are demanded of us, no matter what.

Is it rude to ask God, or Jesus, or each other, how much generosity, and how much care?

I deeply admire Paul Farmer, who died last year.  Dr. Farmer spent his adult life caring for people in some of the most impoverished communities in the world, especially in Haiti and Rwanda.  The organization he founded, Partners in Health, has provided life-saving care for hundreds of thousands of people without access to medical services.  One of Farmer’s mentors was the Peruvian Catholic liberation theologian Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez.   “If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums on the farms and in the mines,” Gutiérrez wrote, “then my world changes.”  (Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, 1979). Yes, the commandment to love one’s neighbor requires us to help the wounded victim you happen to encounter by the side of the road.  But for Gutiérrez and Farmer, it is much more than that: our obligation is to go out and look for the discarded, displaced, abandoned victims of our unjust society, in the poorest and most dangerous shadow places of our world, and give them care.

At the end of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Ishak Stern (Ben Kingsley) presents Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) with a ring inscribed with a passage from Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 37a): “Whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world.” (The same idea is expressed in the Quran, Surah 5, verse 32.)  In response, Schindler is overcome with sorrow and guilt.  “I didn’t do enough.”  This car – why did I keep it?  “Ten people right there.  Ten people.  Ten more people.”  He takes a gold pin from his lapel.  “Two more people.  They would have given me two for it, at least one.   One more person.  That person is dead.   For this [pin].”

Numbers:  In the U.S., “[m]ore than 1 million of our public school children are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters and abandoned buildings.”¹  Worldwide, in early 1945, more than 40 million people were displaced by the Second World War; today, in April 2023, as a result of persecution, war, conflict, violence, and human rights violations “total forced displacement now exceeds 100 million people.”² People forced to flee their homes remain at great risk of violence, exploitation, illness and hunger.  According to the website of the UN Refugee Agency, a donation of $73 provides “a kit of core relief items like blankets, sleeping mats, jerry-cans, a bucket, mosquito nets and a kitchen set to an Afghan refugee household in Pakistan.”  More numbers:  Last week I took my family for a ski vacation in Tahoe.  Hotel, ski rental, lift tickets, spa — it cost approximately $7,300.  That’s one hundred blankets, right there.  Plus, one hundred sleeping mats, jerry-cans, buckets, and kitchen sets.  For one hundred refugee families.

The problem with numbers is that there is no end, and there can be no rest. There will always be countless more fellow human beings in need.  Whatever care we might give to others, it will never be enough.  If we rest, there will be people left abandoned on the road.  If we don’t rest, we will burn out, and we cannot sustain our lives, nor help anyone else.

The Zen precept “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them” evokes this tension, as does the idea of the Boddhisatva, who will by choice refrain from escaping the cycles of birth and death until every suffering being is saved, every wounded soul is healed.  Still, Buddha taught to abjure self-denial no less than self-indulgence, to ground ourselves in Dharma’s Middle Way.  Hedonism and self-sacrifice, sensual pleasure and bodily mortification — we must guard ourselves against immersion in either extreme, lest we become addicts, hungry ghosts who can never find satiation or solace.

Kohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, offers similar wisdom: “Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes” (7:18).  So does Rabbi Hillel, who asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”  So does Aristotle, who counsels us to live by the “golden mean,” abjuring the extremes of “deficiency” and “excess.”  To have a life filled with mitzvot, we must sustain our life, our family, our mental health.   My friend (and symposium dialogue partner) Fr. Donal Godfrey reminded me that Jesus himself took time off for his own spiritual and emotional care.  Even Jesus took a break from caring for others on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines.

I am especially moved by meditations from the Franciscan monk Thomas Merton on these themes.  Like Dr. King’s sermon, Merton’s essay “The Good Samaritan” is framed to address the question “who is my neighbor.”  Like D. H. Lawrence, Merton abhors faked love.  Writes Merton: “For we do not and cannot love according to classifications.  Or if we do, then we do not love in the full sense of the word.”  But Merton reaches a radically different conclusion.

“Do you think perhaps this is the meaning of the parable:  that all men are to be loved because they are men?  Because they are human, and have the same nature?  No this is not the meaning.  This would be simply a matter of extending the classification to the broadest limits, and including all men in one big category, ‘Man.’  Christ means more than this however, for He gives a more than philosophical answer.  His answer is a divine revelation, not a natural ethical principle.  It is a revelation of the mystery of God.”  (Merton, “The Good Samaritan,” 1962, published in The Merton Reader, 1965).

For Merton, “altruism” is an insufficient word for this.  There is no word in English that adequately captures it, nor in Latin, nor Greek.   Only the Hebrew word chesed, which is evoked by the English word “lovingkindness.”  For Merton, “Chesed (mercy) is also fidelity, it is also strength.  It is the faithful, the indefectible mercy of God… the sun which does not change, behind the passing clouds which are other aspects of God.”  Chesed is God’s truth.  Chesed is “infallible strength,” binding us to God, filling us with inexplicable joy.  “The power of His mercy has taken hold of us and will not let go of us:  therefore we have become foolish.”   We are made comical by chesed.  Numbering us “among the aliens and strangers… chesed has not only robbed us of our reason but declassified us along with everyone else, in the sight of God.”

Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, volunteered to accompany the Jews arrested in the roundups to the Westerbork transit camp, where she worked in the hospital.  Given multiple chances to escape, she declined.  “Ten thousand have passed through this place, the clothed and the naked, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy,” she wrote, “and I am left to live and work and stay cheerful.” In a letter to a friend, she wrote:  “I keep discovering that there is no casual connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them.  Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you.  The fellow man himself has hardly anything to do with it.  Oh Maria, it’s a little bit bare of love here, and I feel so inexpressibly rich; I cannot explain it.”  She was murdered in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943.   The last line in her diary was this: “We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”

My friend Silena Layne said something very powerful at the symposium that has stayed with me.  In the morning session I had shared with everyone my experience of passing by the homeless person lying in the dirt, and the troubled feelings that I had carried with me.

“Yes, there are suffering people everywhere,” Silena said.  She spoke to me privately, at the end of the day.  “Nobody can stop and help all of them, that’s true,” she said.  “But we can stop and help some of them.   We can’t always do it, as you say.   But sometimes we can.”  She spoke these words kindly, without judgment, reflecting her own practice in the Tenderloin where she lives, and giving me her open hand.