Supernatural Therapy

One day, a religious expert decides to check the bona fides of this new rabbi from a Galilean town with a simple salvific question: How do I live forever?

 

Knowing this man was a studied authority of the Torah, Jesus responded with a question of his own: “What do you think Moses’ law says?”  

The man answers by conflating two verses from Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “’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 ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“Perfect,” Jesus says. “Do this and you’re in.”

In major faux-pas fashion, the lawyer asks, “So who is my neighbor?”

You know the rest of the story—it’s the classic Good Samaritan parable in Luke 10. And, of course, in the context of Jesus’ audience, a Samaritan would be considered the villain, the heretical apostate, the traitor of the traditions and most deeply held beliefs of the true faithful. The author whose books you should burn to protect your children. The writers of Bible subheadings even reinforce the ethnoracist stereotype: this guy is unique—he’s a Good Samaritan.

So Jesus pulls out his rhetorical whip, flips the proverbial tables, and makes that dissentient monster the hero of the story.

Enough said.

But I’d like to emphasize the odd therapeutic turn.

The religious leader is basically asking which humans are worthy of his attention as a neighbor. But with clever flourish, the story turns everything upside down: the receptor is not the issue. Identifying the neighbor is not the problem. It’s not even about proximity or cultural connection or settling a “charity-begins-at-home” issue. As a matter of fact, the neighbor is not identified as the “robbed and beaten man” needing assistance.

The story becomes a personal indictment. Who is my neighbor is not the problem; rather, I am the neighbor. It’s a classic Twilight Zone twist.

The expert’s problem is not solved by identifying who is in his bounded circle of concern. Instead, he’s left hanging with a midrashic responsibility: he is the neighbor.

And because two-thousand years later that same story enters our consciousness, we must wrestle with it too. In so many words, we’re simply told to “do likewise.”

As leaders and communicators, it behooves us to sometimes leave our audiences unsettled. The answer that “I am the neighbor” is only partially satisfying, because it leaves more questions for us to sit with. And that, my friends, is a good thing. Not because it’s easy, but because it demands a deeper moral inventory.

I love that. And I hate that. And that is how it should be, as humans who are undergoing divine therapy via the Spirit of God.

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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