Justice and Mercy

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 18:20-32 and Luke 11:1-13.

It's a good thing we don't live in a world of superpowered or magical humans. As Lord Acton wrote, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If you can do anything, what keeps you from actually doing it? What keeps Superman from becoming a tyrant? In the comics Lex Luthor's opposition to Superman is that doesn't trust someone that powerful. Lex is a genius, though, and knows better than to, say, kill Lois Lane. The Joker does not and in an alternate reality, he kills Lois, her and Clark's unborn child and wipes out the city of Metropolis with a nuclear bomb. Then Superman does what Batman never could: he punches his fist clean through the Joker's torso. Gotta say it, though: the Joker totally deserved it.

A human being so powerful that he is essentially a living weapon would be a nightmare, as the recent “Superboy as monster” film Brightburn illustrates. And yet we love the idea of supermen protecting us, and, lacking real superheroes, we tend to give lots of power to people we perceive as strong. Italy and Germany were both in bad shape in the years after the first World War and the Great Depression so they chose "strong men" leaders like Mussolini and Hitler. Stalin ruled Russia with an iron fist and nationalist and military leaders pushed imperial Japan from democracy into totalitarianism. It doesn't take an historian to see how a world ruled by "strong men" who put national interests above everything else would result in war and genocide in the first half of the 20th century. Some see the rise of "strong men" leaders today as equally ominous. What nobody seems to realize is that real strength is seen in restraint. The person who cannot control himself is weak.

The usual take on God in the Old Testament is that he loves going all wrathful on sinners. And yet, in the story of Abraham, the father of our faith, there are some notable instances that go against that concept of God. One is the sacrifice of Isaac. In a world where people did not question sacrificing humans and even their own children to their gods, Yahweh illustrates his uniqueness with regards to this practice via an enacted parable. God stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac. And then God provides the sacrifice himself, something he will do even more powerfully in his son Jesus.

Another instance where we see the supposedly wrath-happy God of the Old Testament differently is in today's lesson from Genesis. God appears to Abraham as 3 men, which is interesting in the light of the New Testament data that led to the doctrine of the Trinity. Two go to Sodom to check out its reputation for sin. God tells Abraham that he needs to see if they are as wicked as it has been reported. “If not, I want to know.” (Genesis 18:21, NET)

Notice that this suggests that God hopes the outcry about Sodom is untrue. That's what he wants to know. He has not yet judged the city. God wants to be merciful. And Abraham seems to pick up on that.

Not that God has said what he will actually do if he finds out that Sodom is very wicked. That too Abraham intuits. God is just. He will not turn a blind eye to sin when he finds it. But he wants to see the evidence. Now we don't know what Abraham has heard about Sodom, but his nephew Lot lives there and so he probably knows a lot. But he doesn't have a God's eye view of the extent of the city's wickedness. So, for the sake of this story at least, it appears that God and Abraham are working without the full facts.

And Abraham brings up a pertinent point. Even if God finds a great deal of wickedness in Sodom, there is no way that absolutely everyone is totally evil. So will God wipe out everyone, good and bad? There might be as many as 50 righteous folks living in that place. Should they perish as well?

“And the Lord said, 'If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.'” The Hebrew word the NRSV translates as “forgive” is an interesting one. It literally means “to lift, to carry, to take.” It is most often translated “to bear.” What God is saying is he will bear with or carry the burden of the many wicked people for the sake of the 50 righteous ones.

What follows is Abraham showing a lot of chutzpah haggling with God over the fate of Sodom. What if Sodom is 5 short of 50 righteous folks? “Will you destroy the whole city for lack of 5?” “I will not destroy it,” says God. But Abraham, knowing he is but dust before the creator of the universe, keeps asking about lower numbers of good people. What about 40? How about 30? What if it's only 20? Maybe we are only talking about 10. What then? “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it,” says God.

Abraham knows that God is just but also that he is merciful. He has bought Sodom a great deal of leeway. They only need to have 10 righteous people in the whole place. Well, we know how that turns out. Only 3 people make it out alive, and they aren't exactly saints.

By the way, Genesis doesn't tell us what the sins of Sodom are. A lot of people think it is homosexuality but that's based on just one incident. The visiting angels were going to sleep in the town square until Lot persistently urges them to stay with him. And that night the men of the city besiege the house, asking that the visitors be sent out to them. The key word in the interchange that follows is that the men of the city want to “know” the visitors. The implication is that they mean this in the same way a pick up artist does when he tells a woman he'd like to get to know her. So this story is usually seen as showing that the men of Sodom want to rape the angels. And Lot offers his virgin daughters in exchange!

There is an alternate interpretation, according to the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. The men of the city might be suspicious of the visitors and want to know them in the sense of interrogate them and see if they are spies. Lot resists this idea because he knows that the interrogation will be rather unpleasant. (This is the Ancient Near East, after all.) And so he offers his daughters as hostages to be held as a guarantee that his visitors will not do anything bad. Still most commentators do not favor this interpretation.

Either way this is a gross violation of the Middle Eastern rules of hospitality on the part of the men of the city. So much so that Lot would rather surrender his daughters than betray his duty as host. By the way, Lot's gesture is one the original audience of this story would find equally repugnant, as seen in the similarly horrifying story found in Judges 19. Remember this is a culture where rape gets you stoned to death.

It's pretty obvious that Sodom is a very wicked place but it is not in Genesis that we are told precisely what their sins were. In Ezekiel it says, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49) Having an abundance of food but a contemptuous indifference to the plight of those in need is why God condemned them. And their well-known mistreatment of the poor is probably why Lot didn't want the visitors sleeping in the town square. They would be easy targets for men who had no regard for the rights of homeless strangers.

Besides telling us how God feels about arrogant people who abuse and exploit the poor, what else do we learn about him, especially from the passage in Genesis?

For one thing, if a disaster comes from God, he will disclose it beforehand. Just prior to where our passage begins, we are told, “Then the Lord said, 'Should I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? After all, Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations on the earth will pronounce blessings on one another using his name. I have chosen him so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. Then the Lord will give to Abraham what he promised him.'” (Genesis 18:17-19) God decides to tell Abraham in order to illustrate his ways to him and that it is vital that we follow his commands.

Why is this important? There are a lot of preachers who assign divine reasons to disasters, saying that this state or this city was hit by some natural phenomenon due to some action they took, which the preacher deemed sinful. But this story and the record of how prophets work in the Bible show that God would announce it beforehand, not after the fact. Preachers who only afterwards say a calamity was God's wrath are just declaring their own personal opinions. And both the book of Job and Jesus say that tragedies do not indicate that the victims were sinful, nor that they were more sinful than the average person. (Luke 13:4-5, John 9:1-3)

Secondly, God does not act on impulse. Again I think what we have here is an enacted parable. Does God really need to send angels to find out things for him? No. He is giving Abraham a glimpse into how he thinks. He is illustrating that he doesn't act in a knee-jerk fashion but with deliberation. He looks at the evidence. Which we should do as well, especially when we are judging the actions of others. Jesus said we should not pass judgment on people themselves. (Matthew 7:1-2) Only God is qualified for that. But we obviously can judge whether actions are moral or immoral, wise or foolish. And we should only do so based on evidence. Furthermore, we should do it with an eye to helping the person change his mind. (Matthew 18:15-17) That is literally the whole point of the book of Jonah. As it says in Ezekiel, “For I take no delight in the death of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live!” (Ezekiel 18:32, NET) God wants to forgive, not condemn. And he weighs the evidence before he acts, so that his judgment is true.

Thirdly, it is OK to question God. He will listen. He is reasonable. He will not change his mind about sin but may change his response, the way a parent will take into account whether a child understands and is sorry about hitting her brother or not. Returning to the book of Jonah, that is the prophet's problem with God: “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” (Jonah 4:2) Far from thinking God cannot wait to roast sinners, Jonah's beef is that God is too forgiving.

And finally from our passage in Genesis we see that we can intercede for others with God. We can advocate for them. We can pray that he shows them mercy. Indeed in our gospel passage, notice that in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer it says, “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” It is an acknowledgment that if we expect God to act in a forgiving way towards us we need to act in a forgiving way towards others. Jesus reinforced this in his parable of the merciless servant, who is forgiven a ridiculously large debt by his master but doesn't do the same to a fellow servant. In the end, the master treats the servant as he treated his coworker. (Matthew 18:23-35) Again the goal of Christianity is to become like Jesus, who forgave even those who arrested and crucified him. (Luke 22:49-51; 23:34)

Nobody wants a world where there are no rules for how to treat other people but no sensible person wants a world where there is no mercy for anyone who breaks the rules. We all fall short of what God expects us to be. We can be grateful that we have a God who is both just and forgiving. We also should emulate him. We need to pray for wisdom so we will know how and when to balance justice with mercy.

Sodom is a cautionary tale. It shows that God is not on the side of the bullies, the arrogant, the abusers, nor those who are complacent, who ignore the needs of the poor, the safety of the stranger, or the victims of injustice. They will pay, if not in this life. If you wonder why God doesn't rain down wrath on modern communities that reflect the callousness and indifference to suffering we see in Sodom, consider Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds. When a farmer awakens one day to find weeds growing up among his wheat, he is urged to pull out the weeds. “But he said, 'No, since in gathering the weeds you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At harvest time I will tell the reapers, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned, but then gather the wheat into my barn.”” (Matthew 13:24-30) Our lives are so intertwined that extricating relatively bad people (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, etc) could cause or exacerbate trauma in the lives of those who love them but are relatively good. It seems that Abraham realized this and Jesus articulated it by saying, “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be like your Father in heaven...” (Matthew 5:44-45)

And if Sodom gives us an example of what to avoid, this story of Abraham gives us an example we should imitate. Abraham is more concerned with the welfare of the innocent than in ruthlessly punishing the guilty. He is persistent in his prayerful conversation with God, as the man at midnight is with the friend who is in bed. We cannot be afraid to ask God for what we or others lack, to search for what is necessary to make things better, to knock on doors and seek help. God will give us, not necessarily all we desire, but what we need. And what we principally need is the Holy Spirit of the God who is love, the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, the Encourager, the Advocate. It seems we have a dearth of those qualities in this world.

Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” (Matthew 5:13) Salt at that time was the only preservative, the only thing that kept food from going bad. Jesus is saying we are like the 10 righteous who, had they existed, would have saved Sodom. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:14) Light reveals hidden hazards and leads people out of darkness. Our roles in this world are to preserve what is good and enlighten the spiritually and morally blind. Nowhere in scripture, not even in the book of Revelation, are Christians to be instruments of judgment and punishment. Only one wiser and more holy than we is qualified for that. And he is inclined to be merciful if at all possible.

God gave us a world of good gifts: water, food, life, and all our various qualities that enable us to affect the world. We can use them as God intended and help one another or we can choose to pervert their purposes and use them to harm others. We can use our intelligence, our communication skills, our sense of community and our collective strengths to make the world a better place or a worse one. We can cheer on its destruction or work for its redemption. We know which side Abraham and Jesus are on. Which side are you on?

Cosmic

The scriptures referred to are Colossians 1:15-28.

Disney continues its relentless campaign to remake its classic cartoons into flat live-action versions with lots of CGI but lots less magic. I haven't seen the new version of Aladdin so I can't criticize it but neither have I heard or read a single review that proclaims it to be better than the original. I like Will Smith but he's no Robin Williams. That said, from the trailers I know that it retains the genie's line, “Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!” And I was reminded of that when I read our New Testament passage today.

We can easily date the letter to the Colossians because in 61 AD an earthquake devastated the city and it was never fully rebuilt. So Paul had to have written it before that. He is writing from prison, probably in Rome. (Colossians 4:18) The usual date given for its writing is about 60 AD. That means it has only been 30 years since Jesus was crucified. People who knew Jesus were still alive and active in the church. And yet Paul feels safe in presenting this exalted picture of Jesus as not just the Messiah but as a whole lot more.

He starts with “He is the image of the invisible God...” Think of the best person you know. Would you claim they were the spitting image of God? Do you think even if you gave it thirty years you could convince people that your mom or your history teacher or your pastor was the image of the invisible God? No. But as early as 50 AD, in the first New Testament book written, 1st Thessalonians, the church is openly calling Jesus the crucified and risen Lord, who is frequently mentioned in the same breath as God the Father. And here Paul is saying if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

This is mind-blowing. People often picture God as a vast, vague and somewhat impersonal force, who is not necessarily interested in us or our welfare. But in Jesus we see this immense and frankly unimaginable God focused in the form of a human being. And he is definitely interested in us and in our good. In fact, he loves us and he does so to the extent that he is willing to suffer pain and sacrifice his life for us. That is the true picture of God.

Paul goes on to call Christ “the firstborn of creation.” Now this can mean the first in time or the first in place. In the light of what Paul says in Philippians 2 about Christ Jesus being equal with God and having the very nature of God, it seems unlikely that Paul is saying here that Jesus was God's first created thing. In fact, most translations render this “the firstborn over all creation.” [emphasis mine] In the ancient world to be the firstborn meant to be preeminent. And it is in this sense that Paul uses the term. Jesus is preeminent in all creation. This is the same way that Jewish writer Philo used the word “firstborn” when referring to God's personified Wisdom from Proverbs 8. And it's from Philo that the Gospel of John gets the concept of the logos, translated “Word” in John 1:1. The logos was the divine reason for creation and the organizing principle underlying it. John identified the logos with Christ and Paul seems to be working along the same lines.

So he says, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.” The “thrones, dominions, rulers and powers” were names for the hierarchies of angels in popular Jewish lore. They were thought to be the spirits behind the forces of nature and even the stars were seen as angelic. They also served as mediators between God and creation. In Colossians Paul seems to be fighting some kind of heresy, possibly a proto-Gnosticism mixed with Jewish mysticism. In this philosophy God was seen to be too holy and spiritual to have made or even be in direct contact with the material universe and so God has to be filtered through various emanations. But Paul is asserting that, as we see in Genesis, the physical world was created by God. And as God's divine Wisdom, Christ is the blueprint of creation, through which everything was made. Also it was all made for him as God's Beloved Son. So God and Christ are very invested in creation.

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” He is not part of creation but existed before anything was created. And everything is connected through him. As the New Living Translation puts it, “he holds all creation together.” The Good News Translation renders it “in union with him all things have their proper place.” I really love the way the Weymouth New Testament translates it: “through Him the universe is a harmonious whole.” Again the underlying idea is that Christ, the logos, is the pattern of how reality is designed to work.

Why doesn't humanity feel like a harmonious whole? Because we have been given our own wills. God wants us to love him and each other but real love is a choice. Yet having our own will means we can choose not to love. Every day we see what happens when people choose not to love God and not to love other people. We are the opposite of an harmonious whole.

What is the solution? Again it is Jesus. If we connect with him, we are connected to the pattern of creation. Thus Paul continues: “He is the head of the body, the church...” The pattern of interconnection, of people working together for the benefit of the whole as the parts of our bodies do, comes from Jesus. But we must let him be the head, the brains, so to speak. And since we now know both rationality and emotion originate in the brain, not the heart, this means we must follow his lead in acting lovingly.

“He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead...” Jesus is preeminent in the new creation as well as the old. And the new creation really kicks off with his resurrection. It shows that the rules of life have really changed. And it shows us the pattern God is following to address the ruining of his creation by sin. It will not ultimately end up dying but through him rising to new life.

And all this is “so that he might come to have first place in everything.” Because Jesus is the first principle of creation. Things go wrong when people forget and stray from their first principles. Hospitals were created to take care of patients, not to make profits. Our system of laws was created to ensure justice, not to protect certain classes of people from the consequences of their actions while punishing those without power. Our government was created to serve all the people, not to become an oligarchy or kleptocracy. The church was created to model the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus, not to make people feel comfortable or justified in perpetuating society's status quo. When we forget that Jesus should have first place in our lives, things go awry—or they just stay as they are: unredeemed.

“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Two rival ways of understanding the nature of Jesus arose in the early church and neither did credit to the relationship of his divinity and his humanity. One was to see his humanness as an illusion. Because the Gnostics saw the material world as evil, God could not have become a real flesh and blood man. So they said he only seemed to; Jesus was a kind of hologram. That means, of course, he did not really suffer or die on a cross. The other idea was that Jesus was a mere man whom God designated as Messiah. But that means God delegated to someone other than himself the redemption of the world through a painful death on the cross, making Jesus almost a patsy.

Both of these ideas diminish what God is doing in Christ. The church refused to oversimplify the unique nature of Jesus. It affirmed the great paradox: that he is fully God and fully human. When praying to or contemplating what Jesus said and did we are dealing with God, not someone imaginary or secondary. God is fully present in Jesus and it pleased God to do this himself.

“...and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Again Paul is saying Jesus had an actual body which actually bled on a cross, a death the Romans intended to be shameful. This was no shadowplay. It also means God in Christ knows what human suffering and death are, firsthand.

And the reason he underwent all this it was to reconcile all things to himself, to God. He was reconciling the way things have become to the way they should be, the way they were designed to be and will be again someday. And that was a painful process for the God who created them and modeled them on his Beloved Son. What happened on Golgotha was not just another martyr dying but God absorbing the evil we created when we chose to act in opposition to his pattern of love. On the cross a cosmic drama was taking place.

And it has ongoing consequences. “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him...” When I had my accident the first of my operations was to simply save and stabilize me. It was to put me firmly on this side of the divide between life and death. That's what Jesus has done for us on the cross. Through his death, he brings us back from spiritual death. His blood transfuses us with his life. He gives us his heart as a donor would. His dying gives us a second chance at living a real life.

“—provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel you heard...” When they wheeled me out of that first surgery into ICU, or even the 5 subsequent surgeries, I wasn't out of the woods yet. I had to do physical therapy. I had to follow doctor's orders so that I could walk again. I could have refused it because it was so painful and hard. And we can use our will to refuse to follow through on what Jesus has done for us. I think there are a lot of people in churches who aren't walking in the Spirit because it is too painful and difficult. In Ephesians Paul writes, “Walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us...” (Ephesians 5:2) Fear of loving people that much is what keeps a lot of Christians from truly following Jesus.

And that leads to them shifting from the hope promised in the good news. A recent article published by the daughter of a prominent Evangelical leader tells of how 14 years on, the kids she grew up with in a megachurch have in many cases drifted from or lost their faith. The catalyst was the suicide of one of their group, a girl who had the most fervent faith of all of them. And, yes, that will rattle anyone. Yet I can't help but think that at least part of the reason their friend's death shattered what they believed was that they were sold this theology that downplays suffering and sacrifice and promises them a pleasant and prosperous life. Much of Evangelicalism's version of Christianity is targeted to those who have it easy and tells them that is how things should be. The worst they can expect is to face some unpopularity because of their beliefs. Which is why real tragedy hits such people like a betrayal rather than the reason we have a God who has experienced betrayal, suffering and death. Christianity arose among those who had hard lives: the poor, the despised, women, slaves. In the old translation of the Apostles Creed, it says of Christ, “He descended into hell.” If you too have been there, the good news of Jesus speaks to you with greater power.

Paul suffered in bringing the good news to the world. He says, “I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel. I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” What does Paul mean when he says he is “completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions?” He is not saying that Jesus didn't suffer enough or that Paul is somehow acting as a co-redeemer of humanity. Rather since we are part of the body of Christ, the ongoing embodiment of God's Spirit, we can expect to share in his sufferings. As Paul says elsewhere, “My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death...” (Philippians 3:10, NET) In 1 Peter Christians are told to rejoice to the degree that we are partakers in Christ's sufferings. (1 Peter 4:13) If what Jesus did to redeem humanity was difficult and painful, we can expect that bringing that to a resistant world will be difficult and painful as well. Some even saw this as the birth pangs Jesus mentioned would precede the his coming again. (Matthew 24:8-9) It comes from being united with Christ. But pain is not all we receive. Paul writes, “For just as we suffer abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 1:5)

At the heart of this is what Paul calls a “mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints.” In the New Testament all believers are called saints, not because of any holiness we have achieved on our own but because Christ has saved and sanctified us. But what is this great mystery? “Christ in you,” Paul says. He has spent all of this time explaining how Jesus is not merely a man but the cosmic Christ, the divine first principle in all creation, who is also head of the body of believers. But the surprise is that not only are we in Christ's body but Christ is in us.

In the Old Testament God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle in the wilderness and later in the temple in Jerusalem. On occasion it was said that the Spirit of God filled certain people like leaders and prophets. But of the last days it says in Joel, “...I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.” (Joel 2:28-29) Peter quoted this on the first Pentecost. God has now entrusted Jesus' mission to us, the body of Christ on earth. And Paul says, to help us we have access to “the riches of the glory of this mystery.”

The riches Paul refers to are the spiritual blessings that we have because we are in Christ and Christ is in us. These include the fruit of the Spirit, direct access to God, unity with other Christians and our transformation into a new creation in Christ. It means to be spiritually alive and, like all living things, to grow. Because the goal of following Jesus is to grow to be like Jesus. Or as Paul puts it “mature in Christ.” It could also be translated “complete or perfect in Christ.” That's what we are aiming at. That's what we will one day become if we let the Spirit of Christ work in us.

And that's what made me think of the genie's words in Aladdin about cosmic power living in something small. Christ's phenomenal spiritual powers reside in us, who are neither the biggest nor the strongest nor the most numerous creatures here on earth. There are times when I even doubt we are the smartest. But Jesus has put his wisdom and the power of his love and grace and peace at our disposal. And while we do not get 3 wishes as in Aladdin, if we ask in his name Jesus promises us whatever we need to accomplish our mission.

And we have each other. When Paul says “Christ in you,” in Greek the “you” is plural. Together in Christ we are strong. We can share our gifts, our ideas, our experiences and our skills to do what the Spirit is guiding us to do. That way we can make a greater impact than one of us acting alone. That's what the church has done in the past. It has created schools and universities and hospitals and clinics and food pantries and homeless shelters and disaster teams and prison ministries and helped people in need all over the world.

And it has brought hope. Paul calls “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” When things are really bad, we can despair of it ever getting better. And when we are a big part of the problem, we can give up on ourselves. But in Christ, we have the hope of becoming like him. As it says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We know one thing: Jesus is glorious. And one day we will be too.

Lessons in Life-Saving

The scriptures referred to are Luke 10:25-37.

As much as I like the live action superhero movies, the best ones seem to be animated. Let's face it: these stories began as comic books and there are some aspects that work better if they are drawn than if you put them in the real world, no matter how much CGI you use. One of my favorites is Big Hero 6, the story of two brothers who are into robotics. The younger brother, Hiro, is into small robots that fight other robots for money, as in the real life TV show Battlebots. His older brother has created a robot named Baymax. To find the person who is turning his tiny fighting bots into a real weapon, Hiro turns Baymax and his tech-savvy friends into a superhero team. What is unusual is the fact that Baymax is an inflatable healthcare robot who cannot harm but only heal. In fact, when Hiro turns off the robot's prime directive he sees to his horror how destructive that can be. And in the end the resolution of the story doesn't involve pummeling or killing the bad guy but rescue and sacrifice. As a nurse, I like the fact that the pivotal character is a healer.

We are a violent species and we tend to react to wrong by wanting to harm the perpetrator. Yet in many cases we can't. For instance, the national clearance rate for murder is 61.6%. Nearly 40% of murders go unsolved. That's way below what you would think from watching cop shows or reading murder mysteries. The clearance rates for other violent crimes are even lower. One bright spot is that the current clearance rate for all crimes here in Monroe County is 15% higher than that of the rest of the state.

But more importantly, very few people die from violence. Worldwide the top ten causes of death are, with the exception of road injuries, diseases like cardiovascular disorders, cancer, respiratory disorders, infections and diabetes. At number 11 is the most common cause of death by human action and that is suicide. Murder, war and terrorism are even farther down the list. We don't need Avengers so much as healers.

That said, in today's gospel Jesus tells us about an unsolved crime. But his hero doesn't track down and punish the bad guys; he saves the life of the victim.

Let's backtrack a little. Our passage begins with an expert in the Jewish law asking Jesus what he needs to do to receive eternal life. And Jesus has a very rabbinical response: “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” Jesus, like Socrates, likes to ask us questions that make us think. He knows that an answer you come to that way will stick with you better than one spoonfed to you.

The lawyer says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as your self.” In the parallel accounts in Matthew and Mark, it is Jesus who furnishes this answer. Whether the lawyer came to the same conclusion independently or heard Jesus previously say this and repeated it back to him at this time, we do not know. But it is not that great a theological leap. That first command is part of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-5), the affirmation of God's uniqueness as Israel's sole deity, which was recited in morning and evening prayers and is supposed to be said by a Jew on his or her deathbed. Author Herman Wouk, while serving in the Navy in World War 2, was almost washed overboard one time and was amazed to find himself automatically saying the Shema while trying to grab onto something on the ship to save himself. So any Jew would likely say that the command to love God with all you are and all you have is the greatest commandment. The second command comes from Leviticus 19:18 and as the notes in the Jewish Study Bible say, “love your fellow as yourself was generalized in Jewish and Christian tradition to serve as a brief encapsulation of the Torah's ethics...and as a blanket command covering all ethical duties not specifically mentioned....” Indeed the Ten Commandments can be broken down into 4 commands on specific ways show love for God and 6 ways to show love for your neighbor. So one would expect an expert in the law of Moses to be able to come up with such an answer.

Jesus says that this guy is right. But then the lawyer does something very lawyerly and very human. He tries to figure out what is the least he can do and still obey the law. He asks, “And who is my neighbor?” And Jesus gives us what is his most famous parable.

It's interesting that we call this the story of the “good” Samaritan. Because the assumption by Jesus' audience was that Samaritans, which they considered heretic half-Jews, were bad. So the hero of Jesus' story would be someone despised. You might get the same effect today if you changed it to the “Good Muslim” or the “Good atheist.”

The setting to the story was well known to its audience. Jericho was a wealthy city and possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, with the oldest known protective wall. There are numerous springs in and around Jericho and it is described in the Bible as the “city of palms.” (Deuteronomy 34:3) Its name in both Hebrew and Arabic means “fragrant.” Jewish aristocracy would winter at this oasis town and Herod took over Cleopatra's estate  there and made it his winter palace. It was also home to thousands of priests and Levites.

The 17 mile road from Jerusalem on Mt. Zion wound down through the mountains to Jericho, which was on a plain. And because the wealth of the town, robbers liked to hide in the rocky defiles and ambush unwary merchants. So folks tended to travel in caravans but it seems the man Jesus tells us about didn't. Consequently he is robbed, stripped of his fine clothes, beaten and left for dead. So far, this would be a typical news story in Jesus' day.

First a priest and later a Levite come down the road. Each sees the man and either would normally be the hero of the tale. But each carefully goes around the victim, walking on the other side of the road. Why? They probably assumed the man was dead and touching him would make them ritually unclean. (Leviticus 21:1-3, 11) Some traditions said they would be unclean if only their shadow touched the dead man. If they touched a dead body, they would have to make a special sacrifice of a red heifer, wash their clothes and themselves and remain unclean for 7 days. (Numbers 19) It would be a real hassle. Mind you, they don't bother to check and see if the man is in fact dead. And since they are going down the road, they have likely finished their rotation at the temple in Jerusalem and would not be called to duty for a while. But they err on the side of personal convenience rather than compassion.

The Samaritan has no such qualms. He is moved with pity, though a better translation is “compassion,” a word generally used of Jesus. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said,  "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'”

The Samaritan goes to the man and starts offering him first aid. He cleansed the man's wounds with olive oil and wine, both of which have anti-bacterial properties, not that anyone back then knew why they helped. He bandaged them. Then he put the man on his animal, which was probably a donkey, and took him to an inn, because the only hospitals in the Roman world were for treating soldiers and slaves. So the Samaritan himself took care of the man, which meant changing his bandages and using wet compresses if he developed a fever. His care probably also involved prayer because there was no separation between medicine and religion back then.

After what had to have been a sleepless night, the Samaritan had to leave. So he gives the innkeeper the equivalent of 2 days wages with a promise of more, should he spend more than that on the man's care.

After telling this story, Jesus turns the question the lawyer asked back on him: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan, so he replies, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

The lawyer wanted the discussion to be about who qualifies as his neighbor. Jesus opened that definition to the broadest possible interpretation: anyone you encounter, regardless of race or religion or geographical origin or depth of need or the extent of inconvenience to you. Your neighbor is whoever God puts in front of you.

But Jesus' command at the end shows that he is somewhat less interested in telling us who our neighbor is than how to be a good neighbor. I can't be a Samaritan but I can be like the one Jesus describes. So let us look at the actions of the man Jesus tells us to imitate.

When he first sees the man beaten and left for dead, the Samaritan doesn't think about himself, his ritual purity, or even getting the man's blood on his clothing. He thinks about the man. He is moved by compassion. Though Jesus doesn't bring it in at this point, the Samaritan was probably motivated by the Golden Rule. If he were lying naked and bleeding in the road, he would want someone to come to his aid. So he empathizes and identifies with the victim. The mirror neurons in his brain are working, letting him understand what pain the man must be in.

But unlike today, the Samaritan can't just get away with taking a picture, posting it and putting a sad emoji next to it. He has to actually do something. He assesses the man (he has wounds) and does a quick inventory of what he has to offer (wine, oil, cloth for bandages, a donkey for transportation, knowledge of a local inn, and money to pay for the man's care). He uses what he has to do what he can to help the man.

We are in a different era and society, one that has taken the lessons of this parable to heart. We can take Red Cross Basic Lifesaver training online and carry a first aid kit in our car and use a cell phone to call 911. Though I haven't practiced as a nurse in years, I still have a nursing bag in my trunk that has come in handy when attending to injured bicyclists, pedestrians or motorists along US 1. One time my wife and I saw a bicyclist who was run over on a hotel driveway in Key West and by the time we pulled over and got out, there was a retired cop and off-duty EMT there treating him.

But you know what pays for us to have cops and EMTs and ambulances and public hospitals and clinics? Taxes. You know what pays for the Sheriff's air ambulance helicopters which fly people with life-threatening injuries like I had up to trauma centers on the mainland? Taxes. You know what pays for a public health department which monitors hygiene in restaurants and other businesses that sell food, oversees waste disposal, including biomedical waste, tests pools and spas, does rodent control and rabies surveillance, coordinates with other agencies in a disaster, tests for, tracks, educates about and prevents communicable diseases, like HIV, STDs, TB, and hepatitis, and provides vaccinations for school children and nurses among others? Taxes. 

The Samaritan paid two whole days wages to see to it a man he didn't know got care. And he was willing to pay more. Today, when we take such care for granted, we have people who balk at paying for folks who are not as fortunate as us to get healthcare. Yes, an ER has to see to everyone who comes into their doors but if you don't have health insurance they will try to treat you and street you as quickly and cheaply as possible. Meanwhile healthcare costs go up because we, alone in all the advanced countries in the world, allow for-profit insurance companies to essentially decide who gets healthcare, and what procedures, surgeries and medicines they get. We allow hedge funds to buy pharmaceutical companies and jack up the prices, even if the drug in question has been on the market for decades and is life-saving. And we prohibit Medicare from doing what our military does, which is negotiate lower prices for those they serve. Our system is so complicated with different prices offered to different patients with different healthcare plans for the same things that administrative costs in the US are 8% of healthcare spending compared to 1 to 3% for other countries. Thus, according to a recent study done by Harvard and the London School of Economics, we in the US spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy countries and yet get poorer population health outcomes. We don't even do well compared to countries like South Korea, Chile, Guadeloupe, Slovenia, French Guinana, Lebanon and Cuba, all of which have a higher life expectancy than the US. More than 42% of Americans diagnosed with cancer go through their life savings in 2 years. Fully 2/3s of Americans declaring bankruptcy are doing so because of medical bills and related costs. We are the only major industrial country in the world of which that is true.

In Jesus' day, most people couldn't afford doctors and doctors couldn't really cure much anyway. That's one reason Jesus was so popular. He could heal people. Today we take good health as a given, so much so that some benighted people think they need not vaccinate their children. They do not remember a time when half of all children did not make it to the age of 5. Yet over the last 200 years the average life span has doubled, from about 35 years to nearly 80, thanks in large part to public health programs.

Last week we spoke of bearing one another's burdens and thus fulfilling the law of Christ. Today it doesn't cost us much to be good Samaritans to those we encounter in urgent need. We have medical and social services we can look up and contact from our cell phones. But that infrastructure, that burden-bearing that we have built into our society, needs ongoing support. And yet we constantly hear calls to cut public spending on helping people, but not, heaven forbid, by eliminating profits, while increasing it on military spending. And sure enough we have the world's biggest defense budget. But our healthcare is ranked at 37^th and our life expectancy is 43^rd.

There is a comic book coming up I would like to see. It's called Second Coming and it is about Jesus moving in with a superhero. As you can imagine it has created a lot of controversy. In response, the writer, Mark Russell, said, “superhero comics are predicated on a rather dodgy assumption. That, ultimately, it is physical force that solves problems. 'Good' is simply a matter of using violence better than 'evil'. In a world where our problems are increasingly immune to violent solutions…no amount of drop-kicking people is going to solve global warming or get your sick mom the health care she needs…we need to start incorporating other solutions into the thought experiment. And that is why bringing Christ into a superhero comic made sense to me. He is the counterpoint to the assumption that you can fix the world with punishment. To me, that is the core of Christ’s mission to Earth…to show human beings that we could build a world immune to the threat of violence and to the seduction of bribery, if only we chose to be so ourselves.”

He is talking about the kingdom of God. And our king, Jesus, is about healing, not harming. Jesus is about going out of your way and taking on inconveniences in order to help others. Jesus is about putting your money where your mouth is. Go and do likewise.