Over the years, I have frequently urged you to read the Gospel at home. Even if you attend church every Sunday, you will never hear the whole story in the short passages we read in worship. Without reading a whole Gospel through from start to finish, you will not grasp the flow of events, or understand the interaction of Jesus’ teaching and actions. You may never realize the significant differences among the portraits of Jesus presented in the 4 Gospels. And if you don’t read the Gospels, how will you draw your own conclusions about who Jesus is, as the Reformation heritage enables you to do?

Well, there is an alternative approach, but in the end it will compel you to go back to the Gospel texts. Over the centuries, many philosophers, theologians and historians have written books about Jesus, in which they attempted to capture the essence of what Jesus taught, and who he was, and who he is. I bought such a book last week, called Jesus: Uncovering the Life of a . . . Religious Revolutionary (Marcus Borg Harper, San Francisco, 2006), and there are hundreds of others: Jesus the Healer (Stevan Davies, Continuum, 1995), Jesus the Compassion of God (Monika Hellwig, Michael Glazier, Inc, 1983), Jesus and the Disinherited (Howard Thurman, Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1949), each one interpreting the life of Jesus from a different perspective.

We can trace through the centuries some of the principal themes of these works. In the early church, the focus was on Jesus the Divine Son, the Logos or Wisdom of God. In the Middle Ages there was a shift toward the crucified Christ, and the development of a mysticism that spoke of Christ as the bridegroom of the soul. St. Francis in the 13th century, was the person who brought attention back to the humanity of Jesus, both by his insistence on living in poverty as Jesus did, and also by his invention of the Christmas crèche, with the Baby Jesus, in 1223. When the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries caused many people to doubt the miracles in the Gospels, a new chapter of interpretation began. In 1778 Hermann Reimarus published an essay “Concerning the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching”, which set off a debate still going on, about the authentic message and purpose of Jesus. Albert Schweitzer described Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet (The Quest of the Historical Jesus). The Russian author Leo Tolstoy wrote about Jesus as the Liberator, and emphasized the connection between his teaching of love, and the practice of non-resistance to evil. As you are probably aware, Tolstoy’s interpretation deeply influenced Mohandas Gandhi, and they both influenced Martin Luther King. More recently, John Dominic Crossan has interpreted Jesus as a wandering Cynic philosopher, a teacher of wisdom (Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography, Harper, 1994). Several scholars have proposed he was a prophet of radical egalitarianism.

These portraits of Jesus are not widely known, but every now and then a new interpretation of Jesus does reach a wider audience. Last year, Garry Wills published a book called, What Jesus Meant, which some of you may have read. It is short (143 pages); it has no footnotes, and is quite readable. As a scholar of Greek, and a professor of classics, Wills certainly is qualified to provide some unique translations of particular sayings. Wills is also a Roman Catholic, but quite a critical one: his previous book was about Papal Sin. The Newsweek reviewer, David Gates, said that Wills has managed to offend the Christian right, the Christian left, the pope, the mega-churches, and everyone wearing a What Would Jesus Do bracelet.

The first reason I am talking about this book, What Jesus Meant, is to encourage you in your reading about Jesus. Because the author takes some strong positions about Jesus, I think it is very likely that if you read the book, you will want to check out his interpretation by reading one of the Gospels. The second reason for talking about the book is to use it to interpret today’s Gospel reading. When we hear about the lawyer asking his question, and listen to the parable Jesus told, we want to know, what did Jesus mean? Is the point of the parable about compassion for an injured man, or, is it an attack on the purity code, or, is it about giving up our prejudices against people who differ from us religiously??

The setting for the parable is one of the many times when Jesus was questioned by a scribe or Pharisee. The Greek text actually says he is a lawyer, probably because Luke was writing for Gentile readers. This questioner, however, would have been a devout and well-educated Jew, not a member of the legal profession, but a scholar of the Torah. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark both include a question about which commandment is greatest, but the story told by Luke is different. First of all, the lawyer’s question seems more personal: “What must I do to attain eternal life?” A second difference is that the Parable of the Good Samaritan is only reported in the Gospel of Luke.

After Jesus asked the lawyer’s opinion, and the lawyer cited the great commandment, Jesus agreed with him, saying, “do this and live”. But the lawyer wanted a more precise definition of neighbor, and this was the real test. The correct answer, from the lawyer’s point of view, was that the Jewish people are my neighbors, or perhaps only righteous Jewish people. The lawyer would not have included Romans, Greeks, Samaritans or Syrians in the category “neighbor”. So the lawyer’s intent was probably to discover whom Jesus would include as neighbors. It was in response to this issue, that Jesus told the parable.

At first hearing, Jesus seems to be saying, your category neighbor is too small: you must expand your definition of who a neighbor might be. But Jesus was doing something more subtle than that. In his entirely plausible story, the priest and the Levite valued their obligation to remain ritually pure, more highly than their obligation to care for a neighbor in need. The Samaritan, however, did just the opposite, valuing the commandment to love the neighbor more highly than the obligation to remain ritually pure. Then comes the devastating question: “which of the three proved to be neighbor to the man?” So Jesus changed the issue entirely, from “who qualifies as a neighbor?” to “when and how will I be a neighbor?” This is the question that you and I need to ask ourselves. As long as we focus on excluding some people from the category neighbor, we will be like the priest and the Levite. We are only following Jesus when we have shifted our focus to trying to be a neighbor. Now we come to the question asked by Garry Wills: what did Jesus mean? How does this parable fit into Jesus’ ministry, and what might it possibly mean for us? Wills says that Jesus opposed all formalism in worship, by which Wills means the purity code, the Temple, the sacrifices, the observance of the Sabbath, and “external prayer” (page 59). Wills says “Jesus called authentic only the religion of the heart, the inner purity and union with the Father that he had achieved, and was able to share with his followers”. For Wills, this meant that Jesus rejected the whole system of sacrifice, as well as the Temple and its priests. He discusses the parable of the Good Samaritan in this context. He says that Jesus was sympathetic to the Samaritans because the high priest from Jerusalem burned down the Samaritan temple almost 150 years earlier. But mostly, in this p arable, Jesus was attacking the purity code, which the priest and Levites observed, and used as an excuse to ignore the injured man.

Turning now to what this means for us today, Wills says that Jesus was rejecting all elaborate religious buildings, from St. Peter’s in Rome to the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles, along with all self-righteousness, all judgments of others, and every kind of religion which neglects the poor, and allies itself with the rulers. This is an interesting argument about the meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan, but it is probably a somewhat different emphasis from what you have heard before. Either from me or other interpreters, you are more likely to have heard that the parable is about learning to be a neighbor, about caring for people in need, and about refraining from judging people of other ethnic groups. You may even have heard St. Augustine’s interpretation, that the traveler is Adam (every human being), and the S amaritan is Christ, who takes tender loving care of wounded and broken travelers, arranging for them to stay at an inn, the church, where they may rest and be refreshed. How will you decide which interpretation matches most closely with the life, and the other teachings, of Jesus?

The reason I am asking you such an uncomfortable question, is the reason I stated at the beginning. I want you to read the Gospels for yourselves. You might want to read Garry Wills book, What Jesus Meant, as well. Our librarian Carol Campbell has this book in our Library, and there are many other worthy books about Jesus. I, for example, agree with Wills that Jesus taught a religion of the heart; coming to church is merely a veneer if you are not seeking God within your heart. But I disagree with Wills that following Jesus means only the religion of the heart. I think following Jesus necessarily means learning how to be a neighbor, not only to the one individual who needs help, but also to groups of people who need help, regardless of whether those groups are homeless men, or hungry families, or the mentally ill, or the lost boys of the Sudan. I think the parable of the Good Samaritan is a call to recognize our common humanity, and our responsibility to create communities where no one is beaten and abandoned by the roadside. And I think the parable is a warning to all religious people, that our religious rules have no absolute value in the face of a human being in need.

What did Jesus mean when he told this parable? What do you think?