HOMILY: "This Jericho Road"

A Meditation on the Parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)
Sunday, March 16, 2025

1.

Samaritan and Christ

Four Sundays from now we’ll be waving fronds, with a hundred and one “Hosannas,” and watching Jesus fallumping into Jerusalem on a donkey, or an ass. Brilliant street theater. Friends, disciples, the poor and marginalized—waving palms as he passes, tossing branches into the street, celebrating his particularly Jewish and decidedly nonviolent commitment to the kingdom of God. Or more accurately, perhaps, and more prophetically: the kin-dom of God’s children. The kin-dom of God’s children. Palm Sunday will be no military march, no victory parade. The Romans have that business covered. Buffed up generals and state-of-the-art weapons.

Jesus and his friends, though, they have a very different world in mind, a very different kind of faith. The confrontation of this new world and the old one will begin on that road to Jerusalem, with Jesus fallumping on a donkey. And a ragtag band of lovers lining the way with fronds and songs.

In a lot of ways, Lent is a season of practice, forty days of rehearsal, for the street theater of Palm Sunday. For the confrontation in the streets between the new world and the old one. We prepare ourselves—and our communities—through prayerful discernment, soulful reflection, honest confession. And we invite Jesus to take us, to mold us like clay; and then the kiln of the Spirit to fire us for service and witness. Lent is hardly a season of passivity or spiritual groveling. It is instead six weeks of disciplined partnership: in which God reminds us of our place in that kin-dom, and Jesus trains us for love-in-action, world-flipping creativity and sacrifice.

And if Lent is forty days of rehearsal, what we’re doing in worship every Sunday is something like workshopping the show. Puzzling through the themes and storylines. Embracing our roles. Blocking the scenes. It’s not the journey of the solitary soul, Lent; a way of winning ourselves back into the graces of a skeptical God. It’s a shared practice of mutual care, discernment, collaborative worship and compassion. Will we risk the kind of spiritual intimacy that breaks open our hearts to God and one another?

Will we weave into the fabric of our lives, into the heart of our churches, a life of such neighborliness that we meet Jesus face to face in one another? This kind of faith, this kind of practice, this kind of prayer isn’t just episodic—but the very substance of our lives. “Thy will be done.” “Thy will be done.”

2.

And what we have in today’s parable—one of Jesus’ most familiar—is a compelling reminder that spiritual intimacy is not to be downloaded from the internet, and certainly not to be decoded in a set of religious fundamentals. Lent is no retreat from the bewildering pain and angst of our time. Spiritual intimacy—for Jesus, at least—has something to do, maybe everything to do, with the nearness of broken bodies and the vulnerability of our neighbors. The temple is—for Jesus and for us—the human body, frail, mortal, bound by time and space. Which is to say, that we cultivate our awareness of the divine, our practice of reverence and awe, in our capacity to be broken together. To be vulnerable together. To be shaken and wounded and hopeful together. We do our best theology on the Jericho Road. We pray with our hands and feet on the Jericho Road.

The Levite and priest are no doubt well-intentioned, but so preoccupied with rules and ritual that each keeps his distance, crosses the road, avoids the badly beaten brother in the street. Could be that rules of engagement forbid one or the other from coming into contact with blood on a holy day. Could be that there’s a prayer service starting in an hour and no time to lose. Or it could be that there has been so much violence on the Jericho Road, there have been so many beaten and robbed—that it hardly makes sense to intervene in one life, when it surely changes nothing at all.

Then, however.

Then a despised Samaritan journeys by. And when he sees the bloodied brother in the street, he feels compassion for him. Why is he despised, this Samaritan? Probably because he worships in an odd way. Probably because he assigns different meanings to different texts. Probably because he lives across the tracks, in another world, and no one in their right mind dares going there.

But the Samaritan, he goes to the bloodied brother, and he stanches his wound, perhaps using his own shirt. And then he lifts the man onto his own donkey, walks them both to an inn nearby, and cares for him through the night. If the Levite and priest keep their distance, the Samaritan blurs every boundary and transgresses all the rules. This is a core lesson in our Lenten curriculum, as we prepare for Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter. Spiritual intimacy has something to do with the nearness of broken bodies and the vulnerability of our neighbors. To touch God’s face is to stanch his wounds. To hear God’s voice is to get close enough to hear her breath, her fear, even her gratitude. As you bandage her broken body. And get her the help she needs.

I’m remembering a rabbi who reminds me that in the Talmud—the great rabbinical commentaries of the first millennium--the rabbis of old insisted that the biblical injunction to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” is even more boldly understood this way. “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” How about that? “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” What the Samaritan sees in the street is not some random creature, some unfortunate traveler who wandered into a trap, the wrong fellow in the wrong place at the wrong time. What he finds in the street is his own spiritual kin, a brother, a sister, who reveals in all that vulnerability and madness the Samaritan’s own truth. “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” When he stanches that wound with his shirt, he falls even more deeply into the boundless love of God. When he lifts the man onto his donkey, he senses in his arms the density of divine being, the nearness of grace, the fullness of his own humanity.

3.

I was so moved this week to see videos of hundreds of Jewish friends, protesting the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student at Columbia University. There they were—Jewish elders, rabbis, descendants of Holocaust survivors, students, whole families—taking over the lobby at Trump Tower in Manhattan; singing, praying, submitting defiantly to their own arrest. Because they know that Mahmoud Khalil’s life is bound up with theirs. Because they know that Palestinian freedom is of a single piece with Jewish freedom. Because the heart and soul of their ethic, of their faith, is this: “Love your neighbor who IS yourself.” I dare say that Jesus would have been right at home, right at home, in that lobby and in that action, this week. When I love my neighbor, when I cross the road to tend to his wounds, I discover the kingdom—the kin-dom of God—that dissolves corrosive enmity and transcends tribal loyalties and offers us both our true selves.

And if you watched “Will and Harper” with us last weekend, you experienced the evolution of a friendship, the transfiguration (really) of a friendship between the actor Will Farrell and the writer Harper Steele. When Harper Steele writes to tell Will Farrell that she’s transitioned, after some difficult years, from male to female, the two decide to take a cross-country road trip—visiting favorite towns and sites, talking through new dynamics between them and learning to see one another and love one another anew. And, you know, the documentary begins as a story of Harper’s transition, but it quickly becomes a story of two friends—who discover themselves in one another. To be curious about another human being, to show genuine interest in a friend—this is to make yourself profoundly vulnerable to her needs, her pain, and (yes) her joy. And that kind of vulnerability reveals in your life, in your heart, nothing less than the Holy Spirit—the connective spiritual tissue that makes you human, that manifests the image of God that’s been in you and with you since the beginning of your beginnings. “Love your neighbor,” say the rabbis of old, “who IS yourself.”

Now “Will and Harper” may not have interpreted their cross-county jaunt in spiritual—much less Christian—terms. But the maturing of their friendship is exactly the thing Jesus anticipates in his beloved community. When the Samaritan kneels to tend the bloodied body of a stranger, when he abandons decorum to bind his wounds, both of their lives are changed. They become the prayer itself. “Thy will be done.” When Will Farrell takes the time to listen to Harper Steele’s story—shaped as our stories are by yearning and fear and desire—when Will takes time to listen to Harper’s story, something like the Spirit of God is roused in them both. Again, our prayer life is inspired, awakened, formed in the ways we love, in our capacity for vulnerability, in our commitments to solidarity. “Thy will be done.”

4.

My friend Zoughbi Zoughbi reminds me that the Parable of the Samaritan is, in some essential way, groundwork for the street theater of Palm Sunday and the resurrection project of Holy Week itself. When he first made this connection—between the parable and the procession—I experienced something akin to a conversion. It changed so much for me. There’s no way, Zoughbi says, to fully grasp what Jesus is doing on that donkey apart from the parable and the bloodshed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. There’s no way to appreciate Jesus’ confrontation with the ideology and violence of empire apart from the way the Samaritan straps the poor, beaten man to his own animal and leads him off to the innkeeper for care and convalescence.  If his Palm Sunday procession is a kind of street theater, it's meant to re-vision in real time the parable, the two of them, the joining of their lives on the Jericho Road.

In other words—and this insight comes from a gifted Palestinian theologian—Jesus recognizes that only compassion and mercy heal the wounds of a traumatized people. Jesus insists that only nonviolence and love reconcile enemies and restore hope and rebuild fractured trust. His way, this gospel way, is the way of the poor. His practice, this gospel practice, is the practice of the defenseless. And to choose Jesus, even to love Jesus, is to follow the broken Jesus, the poor Jesus, the defenseless Jesus into Jerusalem. Everything in these forty days, everything about Lent, points in that direction. And it requires our discipline, our courage and our devotion.

If Easter is the promise of resurrection, friends, even the celebration that love has already accomplished its task, and all that divides us is dissolved and dismissed, Lent is the gentle watering of seeds that stir even now in our hearts and will surely bloom. But even seeds must break free of their shells. And isn’t that what this great story, this great parable intends to do? To bust the myths of individualism and self-sufficiency that warp Christian imagination and frighten us so; and then, and then to till the ground of a new faith, a new practice, a new community—where your joy is my joy, where my hurt is your hurt, and where our broken hearts are healed in loving service to the common good. We turn to Jerusalem together.

Amen and Ashe.