Go and Do Likewise

For three days now Luke has been doing one thing over and over, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. He keeps drawing a circle, and then drawing it wider.

It starts before Jesus is even born. Mary sings that God has brought down rulers from their thrones but exalted the humble, filled the hungry with good things but sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53). Then Jesus stands up in His hometown synagogue, unrolls Isaiah, and says the Spirit has anointed Him to preach good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, release to the oppressed (Luke 4:18-19). When the religious experts complain that He eats with tax collectors and sinners, He answers that it is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick, and that He came to call sinners, not the righteous (Luke 5:31-32). He blesses the poor, the hungry, the weeping (Luke 6:20-21). He lets a woman with a reputation wash His feet with her tears and tells her, in front of everyone, that her sins are forgiven and her faith has saved her (Luke 7:47-50).

This is Day 4. The teaching is not new information. By now you know what Luke’s Jesus is like. The poor, the sick, the sinner, the foreigner, the woman, the outsider – the ones everyone else steps around – keep ending up at the center of His attention. Today the question is no longer who is inside the circle. Today the question is what you are going to do with your own two hands.

There is a stretch of road most of us know – maybe a literal off-ramp, maybe a hallway at work, maybe a name in our phone we let ring out. A place where need is visible and inconvenient at the same time.

A friend told me once about the morning he drove past the same man at the same intersection for the third week running. He had perfected the small theater of not seeing: eyes forward, a sudden interest in the radio, the light mercifully turning green. He was not a cruel man. He gave to causes. He had reasons – he was late, he was unsure it would help, he had heard you should not. And all of his reasons were the reasons of the priest and the Levite, who also saw, and also had somewhere to be, and also kept moving.

Then one morning the man at the intersection was holding a cardboard sign that said only a first name and the word son. My friend said it was the word son that undid him – the reminder that this was someone’s child, the way he was someone’s child. He pulled over. He was clumsy about it; he did almost everything wrong. But he had stopped lowering the window of his heart, and that was the whole turn.

A traveler in Jesus’ parable (Luke 10:25-37), belonging to a people Jews regarded as heretical half-breeds. Where a priest and a Levite saw a beaten man and crossed to the other side, the Samaritan came near, was moved with compassion, and spent his own time, oil, animal, and money to save a stranger who would likely have despised him. Jesus made him the hero precisely because his hearers would not have.