The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.
The man had been badly beaten and bruised. The priest saw him lying there in pain, but then moved away, crossed to the other side of the street and went on his way.
Then the Levite saw him, and moved away, crossed to the other side of the street.
But the Samaritan saw him, and he did not move to the other side of the street. Instead, he was moved with compassion.
The Greek word Luke uses here for being moved with compassion is splangnizomai. The splangna are the entrails of the body, the guts. When the Samaritan was moved with compassion, he felt something deep inside his own guts. This was not some abstract issue, the kind of thing you kick around inside your head, or spar back and forth with friends over beer in a stimulating discussion. For the Samaritan, this was a profound, transformative moment.
The Samaritan saw the beaten man and was deeply moved, felt it in his guts. In our own cultural imagery, we might say his heart was broken. He would never be the same again.
This is really where the story begins, with a man who does not move away from the one in pain, who has a heart willing to be broken by what he sees. Who is transformed.
The rest of the story is a series of verbs: Out of his own broken heart, he goes to the beaten man, bandages his wounds, pours oil and wine on them, hoists him on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and takes care of him. The next day he takes out two silver coins, gives them to the innkeeper, and says to the innkeeper, “take care of him…”
The Samaritan saw the beaten man, and rather than moving away, he let his heart be broken by what he saw, and out of that broken heart, he began to act.
Could this be a model for us after a horrific week like this?
After the trauma and tears of Orlando, after seeing the horrific videos of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, after the news reports of the five officers killed in Dallas, we have to choose:
- We can, like the priest and the levite, turn away from those in pain as has happened too often in our country’s past, and cross to the other side of the street, and continue with life as usual.
- Or we can, like the Samaritan, allow our hearts to be broken, and out of our own broken hearts, begin to act, bringing about the justice that can eventually lead to healing.
A few weeks ago, we held a press conference here at St. John's for Luis Gongora Pat, the unhoused man recently shot and killed by police up on 20th and Shotwell. In that press conference, his family was announcing their filing of a civil suit against the City.
The TV and radio stations were hauling in their equipment, and I was setting up chairs. An attorney approached me. She said that during the press conference, they needed to show some troubling photos of Luis’s bullet-ridden body. One photo was especially graphic.
You see, after police had fired several bullets at Luis, he was seriously injured and fell face down on the ground. But then the officers simply lowered their guns and continued shooting at him. The final shot, the one that finally killed him, entered through the top of his skull while he was face-down on the ground. The attorney wanted to know if it would be OK to show in church a graphic photo of his shattered skull.
I said it would be no problem. Because, a central image for us Christians is of a man’s broken body hanging from a cross--a graphic and violent image if ever there was one. So, showing such images of Luis would not be a problem here.
This is the central mystery in which we live, the truth at the very center of the universe: that God is with us in all our unspeakable nightmares. That God saw us with all our violence and pain, the bullet-riddled corpses on our sidewalks, our hatreds and fear and rage, our helplessness and tears--and did not move away, did not go to the other side of the street. Rather, like the Samaritan, he let his own heart be broken, and drew even nearer to us, took on our flesh in Jesus, entered into all our pain, embraced it, become a victim of it himself.
In that way he transformed all that pain and trauma and helplessness into life. Out of all that pain and death, God brought life. “By his wounds we are healed,” our scriptures tell us.
Can this be the model for us in this time? Can we do as the Samaritan did, follow this divine rhythm? Can we let our hearts be broken, stay with the pain, the tears, the lamentation? Can we let our own broken hearts be the seedbed out of which new life can spring?
Hard thing to do. We’d rather push all of that pain aside, find some easy workaround. All that ugly hateful racism that is the original sin of our country. It would be so much easier to cross to the other side of the street, pretend we never saw those videos, pretend we never heard Philando’s little girl crying to her mom after she saw her dad killed, “It’s OK, Mommy. I’m here with you.”
If only we could get that little girl’s screams out of our heads.
Can we let our hearts be broken, and not run from this horrible, horrible nightmare?
In our country, we have never really stayed with this pain. We’ve certainly had previous moments of it, such as Bloody Sunday during the Civil Rights movement and the explosive days after the Rodney King beating in LA. But sadly, instead of staying with the pain of racism and standing with those bearing the brunt of it, our country took what seemed at the time like an easy way out: law-and-order crackdowns, a bogus war on drugs, mass incarceration of people of color. As though the problem was people of color and not our own racist systems.
The result? Since the 1980s, California has built 22 prisons but just one University of California campus. It’s not hard to do the math here. Some historians call it the largest prison construction project in the history of the human race. And our country is the most incarcerated in the world today. Even the most conservative public leaders are beginning to recognize: We can’t solve the nightmare of racism simply by throwing people of color in jail.
Can it be different this time?
If we as citizens were to stay with the heartbreak and pain and not avoid it, could it be different?
I can’t say specifically what kinds of solutions might emerge, but I’m quite sure that if we move away from this pain and go on our way like the priest and the levite, we’ll never find a solution. If we try to find an easy way around it--if we say, well, I’m not personally a racist myself, so it’s really not my problem--we’ll never end this nightmare.
The only viable path is that of the Samaritan: to stay with the pain and the tears and the heartbreak, move closer to those bearing the brunt of it, stand with them, listen to their stories--which are likely to be very different from those of us who are white, especially when it comes to their experiences with the police.
And then, like the Samaritan, perhaps with tears still in our eyes, we can begin to act.
And it seems so overwhelming. This god-damned racism is so deep in our DNA as Americans, how do we change it?
I spent part of my youth in Eastern Washington where it snows a lot in the winter. And I remember sometimes in the middle of the night waking up to the sound of huge tree limbs crashing to the ground under the weight of all the snow.
How did that gently falling snow become so powerful that it could topple such mighty tree limbs? Well, it was one small snowflake followed by another and another and another through the long dark night until so much snow had accumulated that finally one last snowflake fell. And it was enough to bring the huge limb crashing to the ground.
I wonder if the dismantling of our racist systems will be like that, one snowflake at a time. A letter to a congressperson here, a vigil for Amilcar there, a Nightwalk, a phone call, a conversation with a coworker, a meeting with a public official. One snowflake after another.
So i have no magic solution to our inherent racism, but I’m quite sure that out of our broken hearts, and only from there, will the dawn begin to break and solutions begin to emerge. All of us, black and white and brown, in tears, and working together.
Here’s a poem about a man carrying his son across a busy street in the rain. It’s called “Shoulders” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and I’ll close with this.
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
