My Brother’s Keeper

Back in the day when the earth had just been created… when sin first entered the world through the serpent… the apple… and Adam and Eve… when there were only two children running around on this great ball we call Earth, the first hate crime was committed.  The boys were brothers… the sons of Adam and Eve.  One day in a fit of jealousy, the older one killed the younger one over a perceived slight by Almighty God.  When God came looking for the younger brother, he asked the older brother where his younger brother was.  The older brother said, “I don’t know.  Am I my brother’s keeper?”    The correct answer to that question… though never voiced… was, apparently, “Yes.”  Because of the murder of his brother, God told the older brother that he would be cursed by the ground that received his brother’s blood.  He would be a nomad and a wanderer all of his days.    All because he had allowed his frustration… his anger… and his bitterness to lead him into sin. 

            “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is a question that comes up often as we go through life… for all along the way, we meet those who need our help.  Which ones are we obligated to help and which ones can we leave for someone else to take care of?    The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask.

            In the story of the Good Samaritan, there are several details we need to consider.  First of all, who was the Samaritan?    The answer, again, depends upon whom you ask.  If you ask a Samaritan, they will tell you that the Samaritans are descendents of the Israelites who survived the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE… the sons and daughters of Ephraim and Manasseh, two of the original twelve tribes of Israel.  The Samaritans are ones who were not deported when Sargon II took the crème de la crème of society off to northern Assyria, where they lived in exile on the River Habar in Gozan.  If you ask a Jew, the Samaritans are the conquered peoples of Babylon and other countries who were transported to Samaria to replace the Israelites who were transported to Assyria.    Both answers are probably correct at some level, but the perspective that is taken dictates part of the tension that existed between the Samaritans and the Jews in first century Palestine.  The Israeli Samaritans believed that the Jews perpetrated a sacrilege when they moved the high holy sanctuary of the Lord from Shechem to Shiloh, during the time of Eli, the priest… which, in essence, created an illegitimate priesthood and illegitimate place of worship … not to mention a schism in the faith.  The damage had already been done before the Temple was built in Jerusalem.  The Jews, on the other hand, believed that the Samaritans were no longer Israelites… that they had no claim to the faith… and that their only claim to the Israelite religion was the work of a single renegade priest.    Yes, they despised each other… but each believed that their feelings were justified… due, of course, to their own religious perspective.  Each claimed to be more righteous than the other.    The tensions between the two peoples… who had been united under King David… rose to their height in 128 BCE, when the ruling Jewish high priest… and appointed governor under the Romans, John Hyrcanus, took a battalion of soldiers to Shechem where he destroyed the Samaritan sanctuary there and virtually wiped out the town of Shechem.

            Why would a Samaritan, traveling east on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, stop to help a Jew?  (Long pause)  Oh, but wait… didn’t a Jewish priest come down that road first?    Wasn’t that priest given the responsibility before God to care for the people of God?  Hadn’t the Biblical image of a priest as a shepherd of the flock existed since the time of David?  With no king to care for them, wasn’t it the role of the priest to do so?   But he passed by on the other side.   I’m sure there was a good reason for him to do so.  Perhaps, he was too holy to be defiled by touching a Samaritan.  Perhaps, he was late to a business meeting in Jerusalem.  Perhaps, he had already done his good deed for that day.  Besides, there was no one around to see… and the man was in no condition to tell.  Then came a Levite.  Not as responsible as a priest, perhaps, but still a member of the tribe set apart by Moses to be a priestly people.    But no… he scurried by on the other side as well.  And I’m sure that he had a good excuse as well… 

Then came the Samaritan… a member of a race whose great-grandfathers had been massacred by the Jews… whose sanctuary had been desecrated and destroyed by the Jews... an alien traveling alone in a strange land, down an unfriendly road from an unfriendly town.  Why would he stop and help?    At this point, we should note that the Samaritan didn’t just bind up his wounds and leave him a canteen of water… he cleaned his wounds with oil and wine… he bound his wounds… he put the man on his own animal… he took the man to a local hotel… he cared for him for the night… and, the next day, when he left him, he gave the innkeeper the equivalent of two day’s pay and told him to keep a tab on all the man’s expenses… that he would pay them when he returned. 

Some have said that the Samaritan in this story is Jesus.    In fact, the early church often used this as an example of what Christ did for us… to save us from death itself… and restore us to life… whether we are Gentile or Jew… regardless of the magnitude of the sins that we carry that separate us from God and from our fellow man.    It may be true that this is an excellent illustration of what Jesus did, but that is not the point of the story, as Jesus told it to the lawyer.  The point of the story is that God expects us to fulfill not just the letter of the law… but to extravagantly live out the fullest interpretation possible in the boundless grace of God to all God’s people.    We are to live into – not what other human beings might expect from us… but what Christ himself would do. 

In this instance, no one would have faulted the Samaritan for passing by on the other side.  No one… not a Samaritan… and particularly not a Jew…would expect this lone traveler to stop to help a member of a group that had promulgated so much death and destruction to Samaritans… to one who despised them… and who, had he been conscious, might have rejected the help that he offered.  One might go so far as to say that it would not have surprised any of them if the Samaritan had spat on the man as he lay there… or kicked dirt into his wounds… or even finished the job that the robbers began.    But, instead of expressions of hate and malice, this man gave love… care… and respect.    It must have amazed the innkeeper at the place where he took the man for shelter. 

            Where does hate come from?   The infamous guru of comedy, Chris Rock, said, in an interview with the media, that all people naturally hate, but psychologists disagree.  They say that hate is a learned behavior.  Yet it can be found in pre-school aged children… having been learned in the family environment or picked up from others.  Most parents have no preparation or training to deal with prejudice or hate when it finds their own children.   You and I often have little in the way of explanations or recommendations that will ease their pain.  And children who have been the victims of prejudice not only suffer deeply themselves … they may also start causing others to suffer in return. 

On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, Jane Elliott's third graders in the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their "Hero of the Month," and they couldn't understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a lesson in the meaning of prejudice and discrimination. She wanted to show her students what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.   So, Mrs. Elliott divided her class by eye color… those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes.  On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter… nicer… neater… and better than those with brown eyes. Throughout the day, Mrs. Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks… and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Mrs. Elliott. On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown-eyed children were designated the preferred group.

What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise amazed both students and teacher. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students… performing poorly on tests and other work. In contrast, the students who received preferential treatment… students who had been sweet and tolerant before the exercise… became mean-spirited and seemed to enjoy discriminating against the "inferior" group.   It began with something as simple as name-calling on the playground at recess… and then advanced to the use of racial slurs… other disrespectful behavior.  In older children and adults, it can escalate to harassment… physical violence… and even murder… as we have seen so many times. 

Prejudice is contagious. When people are afraid or have actually been hurt, there is a natural response to want to hurt back.  But hurting one another only escalates the hatred and violence… and the differences don't go away.  We live in a world of differences… different races… religions… cultures… sexual orientations… and abilities.  At times, those differences can seem strange and overwhelming… or even frightening. In an effort to cope, we may all find ourselves wanting to stay with "our own kind"… avoiding people who are different… and, sometimes, resorting to hurtful words and actions to manage our fears.   Mrs. Elliott said, "I watched what had been marvelous… cooperative… wonderful… thoughtful children turn into nasty… vicious… discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes."  It was then that she realized that she had "created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom."

But prejudice is only one way of dealing with differences. An alternative is to learn to respect differences… to see them as a source of strength in our lives and in our society. In the place of prejudice, we can teach acceptance and understanding… even going beyond tolerance to welcoming and sharing.  But meeting this challenge requires both preparation and practice.  Fourteen years after the experiment in Riceville, those same students were reunited for an interview with the media.  The lessons of that day were still vivid in the minds of those children, now grown.  "Nobody likes to be looked down upon. Nobody likes to be hated… teased… or discriminated against," said one of Mrs. Elliot’s former students.

"After the exercise was complete… when the pain was over and all the children were back together again… we talked about how our world could be if we really believed all this stuff that we preach,” Mrs. Elliott said.  She continued, "The kids said over and over, 'We're kind of like a family now.' They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way and they refuse to hurt one another in that way again."   School children in Riceville, Iowa, in the 1960’s… and travelers on the road to Jericho in first century Palestine… residents of Stephenville, Texas, in the year 2007… we all confront the same issues… prejudice… hate… malice.    Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of these, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?"  The lawyer replied, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go… go and do likewise."  Amen.

Luke 10:25-37