An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Making and Unmaking Nobodies

A sermon on Luke 10:25-37 by Nathan Nettleton

Paul Kelly, in his song “Everything’s Turning to White”, tells the story of four men who set up camp beside a mountain stream for a weekend of fishing and drinking, and then find the body of a young woman dead in the stream. They face a dilemma. Do they give up their cherished weekend to report the body immediately, or do they stow her body safely behind some rocks and report it at the end of the weekend. Figuring that it is not going to help the girl one way or the other, they decide to have their weekend of fishing and drinking first. If you don’t know the song, the story is told through the eyes of the wife of one of the men as she finds herself increasingly repulsed and distanced from him as she comes to terms with his decision to put his blokey weekend ahead of reporting the girl’s body. The particular perspective is what gives the song its raw emotional power.

It is only possible to do what those men did if you stop yourself from recognising the humanity of the dead woman and thinking about the needs and feelings of those who are frantically waiting for some news of her fate. Only by turning the young woman and her family into nobodies can you decide to just pass by on the other side of the stream and worry about them later. And of course, the same thing is going on in the gospel story we heard tonight where Jesus answers a question by telling the story of the good Samaritan. What I am about to do with this story may prove to be a misguided failure to choose which of five different sermon ideas to preach from it, but what I want to do is briefly look at this story from the varying perspectives of five major characters.

The first perspective is that of a character who is within our gospel story, but who is an outsider to the parable. This is the person to whom Jesus tells the parable, the religious lawyer who has sought to get Jesus tangled up in a controversy over the religious law. He puts a fairly conventional religious question to Jesus, not because he is searching for an answer, but because he suspects that Jesus might give an unorthodox answer and get himself into trouble. But the lawyer’s personal slant on the question is revealing. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Not “what must I do to gain, or receive or even earn eternal life”, but “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” You only inherit if you are an heir. So there is an assumption by this lawyer that he is already on the inside track with God. There are somebodies and nobodies, and he is a somebody. And this is further unmasked when, disappointed at the completely uncontroversial answer that Jesus gives — love God and love your neighbour — he pushes a bit harder to try to get Jesus into hot water. “Who is my neighbour? Define neighbour.” Or in other words, where are the limits of my responsibility to treat others with love, care and respect? Where is the line that separates those I must treat as somebodies, and those I can freely treat as nobodies? Whose plight can I safely ignore? Who are the people whose religion or ethnicity or immigration status or lifestyle or behaviour or just distance from me and my circle of loved ones gives me justification to ignore their humanity and deny their status as my neighbour? Whose inconvenient body can I leave behind the rocks while I enjoy a weekend with my mates?

In a rather gentle way, Jesus suggests with his story that the lawyer’s attitude may not be that different from that of those who have our second inside perspective on the story, and that is thugs on the road who viciously bash and rob the lone traveller on the Jerusalem-Jericho road. It is through their eyes that we really see how the world begins to look when denial of the humanity of others goes all the way. Anybody with whom we don’t have a personal relationship, anybody who is not one of our own somebodies, becomes just a nobody who has no claim on our respect or care. They can be seen merely as opportunities that can be exploited for our own benefit. If they have something we want, we can take it. If they know things that could be inconvenient to us, we can simply dispose of them. If physical violence turns our crank, we can use them as our targets, our victims. Not only is our world divided into somebodies and nobodies, but the nobodies are completely expendable. Of course, not all of us who see the world through these eyes go around bashing people in the street. Some of us force underpaid labourers to work in cramped unsafe sweat-shops. Some of us tow boats of asylum seekers back out to sea to win votes. Some of us pay pornographers to viciously degrade women, men and even children, in producing material for our cheap and distant sexual gratification. All of us have regarded people who were made in the image of God as expendable and exploitable nobodies. All of us have turned people who Jesus loved and died for into nameless and meaningless victims. All of us have driven nails into the hands and heart of the crucified God who is left bobbing on the sea or half dead by the roadside or stowed behind a rock while we went on fishing.

It is unlikely that our lawyer would have identified himself with the thugs who did the bashing, but it would have been impossible for him to miss the implication that he was perhaps like those who held the third perspective in our story: the two passers-by. We are told that they were a priest and a Levite, so both of them are religious professionals with official duties at the Temple in Jerusalem. And for that reason, they do face a rather heavier dilemma than Paul Kelly’s weekend fishermen. They are on a stretch of road that is rather notorious for these sorts of violent crimes, so stopping can certainly put them in danger themselves. And more specifically, they see a battered and unconscious body on the roadside, and they can’t tell from a distance whether it is dead or alive. Under their religious law, contact with a dead body will render them ritually contaminated or unclean for seven days, and as such, they will not be able to carry out their duties in the temple. So from the perspective of these two, the body on the road side presents a classic dilemma. What is one to do when the laws of purity conflict with the law of love for neighbour? Even without such a purity code, many of us have probably experienced similar dilemmas. I can remember witnessing a horrific car crash and driving on by because at that moment it was too complicated for me to stop and help. I can offer various mitigating factors, but I know in my guts that I was absolutely no different to this priest and levite. A lot of us have faced dilemmas that raised the purity issues too. Times we could have helped but didn’t want to risk being seen to be associated with victims who were part of some group that our kind of people refused to be associated with. So we choose not to see their humanity. We tell ourselves that they brought this on themselves, and that there is really nothing we can do to help. We can’t risk getting involved with all the possible consequences. We keep them as nobodies in our minds, so that we can pass on by on the other side of the road or the other side of the stream.

There is a fourth perspective in the story that is often overlooked. It is the perspective of the victim, the bashed man lying at the side of the road. Perhaps learning to look at the world from this perspective is the most important lesson of all. I’ve had the experience of being bashed a couple of times, but I don’t know what it is like to be bashed unconscious and left for dead without help. Fortunately, I’ve not been in that position. But all of us have, at some time or another, had the experience of being treated as nobodies, as people whose needs and rights could be dismissed and treated with complete disrespect. For most of us, that has been a fairly rare experience, but it is an experience that is extremely valuable to remember and learn from. Can we hold on to the memory of what it is like to be completely dependent on the mercy and help of others, quite unable to save ourselves, but to be seemingly invisible and repeatedly passed by as though we were nothing and nobody? What is it like to be perceived by others as deserving of our fate, or as an outsider, a non-neighbour, an enemy, or perhaps as unclean, contaminated, someone to be avoided, someone who can be nobodied, dehumanised and passed on by? This is the perspective from which God looks at the world, having willingly entered that place in Jesus, allowing himself to be attacked as a perceived enemy and left for dead, passed by even by his deserting friends. And it is from that place of solidarity with the worst we can face that Jesus reaches out to us with the wounded hands of love. And surely it is that perspective that our lawyer friend most needed. Surely if he could have stopped seeing himself as the privileged heir whose inheritance of God’s favour was coming to him on a plate, and seen himself as one who could only be saved if another graciously reached out the hand of mercy, then he would have been saved from his callous quibbling over the limits of neighbourliness. Surely from that perspective, we start to recognise everyone as a neighbour and the whole world looks different.

The final perspective in the story is that of the Samaritan man himself. This can be the most difficult one for us to recreate, because the popularity of this story has completely changed the way we hear the word “samaritan”. The word has come to be associated with admirable compassionate help for those most in need. We call such people “good samaritans” without any fear of possible insult. But the reason Jesus chose a Samaritan for his story is that the word meant anything but that to his original hearers. The Samaritans were the West-bank Palestinians, and the hatred and distrust between them and the Israelis is still simmering and flaring into violence two thousand years later. So Jesus tells the parable of the good Palestinian Islamic extremist, and uses him as the most unexpected possible model of what it means to be a neighbour, to live out the law of love. But of course, the fact that the Samaritan seemed to the Jews to be the one most unlikely to act as a compassionate neighbour also means that when the scene was looked at through the Samaritan’s eyes, the unconscious Israeli on the side of the road was the person most unlikely to be seen as worth showing compassion to. This is like an East Timorese widow seeing an Indonesian militia man wounded on the side of the road, or a clergy abuse survivor seeing the archbishop wounded on the side of the road. He would have every excuse to not get involved, to not regard the injured Israeli as a neighbour to whom he should show compassion and love.

And that, of course, is precisely the point Jesus wants to make. Asking who I am supposed to treat as a neighbour is the wrong question. A neighbour is one who treats others in a neighbourly way, not one who asks who they are allowed to treat as nobodies. If the whole world was to define who we will treat as a neighbour and who we won’t, who we will treat as a somebody and who we can leave behind the rocks while we go fishing, then we’d all end up being left for dead and ignored. Somebody has to break the cycle and disregard the boundaries and begin treating everybody as somebodies to be loved and treated with respect and compassion and care. Somebody has. Jesus has come down that road, and found us who have trashed his creation and nobodied billions of people he loves, found us wounded and dying by the side of the road, tended our wounds and carried us to safety and paid the price to see us safe and restored to wholeness. And those who imitate him, like this hated samaritan, ignoring any boundary lines dividing neighbours and nobodies to show mercy and compassion and love to all, are his true followers. That’s what following him means – doing as he does. “Go and do likewise,” he says. That’s all. Just go and do likewise. It is the “doing” of mercy that defines us. As he said at another time, loving those who love you doesn’t tell us anything about you. Anyone can do that. It is the courage to refuse to turn away from anyone’s humanity, to treat even those who wish you ill as neighbours whom you would willingly carry to the inn and pay the medical costs for that defines you as a follower of Jesus. It is the “doing” of mercy that defines the new world that is born in doing as Jesus has done. Let’s go, and do likewise.

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