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.