THE WOUNDED HEALER
David Robb
September 1, 2002
For the past two weeks we have been exploring a famous passage from the New Testament. It is a familiar story to most of us, the story we have come to know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Two weeks ago I started with the context of the story as it is presented in Luke’s Gospel. It begins as a dialogue between an unnamed lawyer and Jesus when the lawyer poses his first question: "Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" I said at the time he begins with a religious question.
Last week we explored the opening phases of the story and the question that prompted it: "Who is my neighbor?"–what I called the ethical question. I invited you to enter the story by trying to listen as Jesus’ original hearers might have understood it, not as a melodrama with obvious villains and a hero, but as a complex story, one that is more subtle than we have usually appreciated.
Today we turn to the main body of the text, to the part that almost everyone
remembers. Even people who have never been to church know this story. We even have laws in most states–"good Samaritan laws"–named for this story. Those are the laws we had to invent to protect decent well-meaning people who stop to help others in distress only to find themselves up to their ears in litigation because the person they tried to help had an attorney who resembled Godzilla with a lot of time on his hands.
So when we hear this story it probably does not have the same bite as it did the first time it was related. Now it is probably true with stories as with relationships, that familiarity tends to breed contempt. Not necessarily the kind of contempt that creates cynicism or ridicule. But the kind of contempt that believes we already know what this story means without having to think about it very much. In this particular case we have come by our point of view honestly. That is because almost from the beginning the church has pushed us in the direction of a kind of friendly contempt. It did not do this out of meanness. It did this by assigning this story a title, namely "The Good Samaritan," that programs us toward the message by announcing it right from the get go.
Well, I don’t know about you, but whenever I sense that I am being hit over the head with the answer even before I have started to investigate the problem, I get just a bit peevish. Maybe the devil just gets into me, but I tend to resist going where I think some-one else wants me to go. I know for sure that Jesus did not give titles to his parables. Only the church in its infinite wisdom did that. So I think I am pretty safe in revealing to you that Jesus did not call this story the "Parable of the Good Samaritan."
Keep in mind one thing about parables. Virtually every one that we have preserved contains some shock, some offense to its original hearers. And if we are to recover the insight, we have to recover something of that offense as well. In the case of this parable, it would have been within the realm of acceptability if Jesus had designated the anonymous wounded man as a Samaritan. Then he would have become the object of a decent Jew’s concern. But to his original audience it would been a terrible shock that he instead makes a Samaritan the principal actor in his story. They would have been appalled and angry.
In order to understand this we have to recover a little bit of ancient history, but information that all of Jesus listeners would have readily known. After the glory days of the Kingdom of Israel under the leadership of the great kings Saul, David, and Solomon, the kingdom split into two parts: a northern kingdom (Israel) with its capitol in Samaria, and a southern kingdom (Judah) whose capital was Jerusalem. In 722 BCE the Northern Kingdom was attacked and succumbed to the warlike Assyrians who soon after began a program of colonization. Over time Jews and Assyrian colonists became assimilated. They married one another and began to combine their different religious traditions. The offspring of these mixed marriages were Samaritans.
Over a century later the southern kingdom also was attacked, and fell to the armies of Babylon. The sacred Temple in Jerusalem was sacked, and many of the Jews were taken into exile to become servants to the Babylonians. There they maintained their ancient traditions in the face of great persecution and efforts by the Babylonians to force them to relinquish their faith. After 85 years of this Babylonian captivity, the armies of Persia too overran their captors, and their leader, Darius, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. There they went and eventually reconstructed the great Temple of Jerusalem.
To those who had survived the Babylonian captivity, Samaritans were a great symbol of compromised faith. They were universally despised as traitors to the authentic faith, as religious syncretists, and as racial half-breeds, a type of those tragic peoples throughout history who can identify clearly with neither one culture nor another. So Jesus in telling this story deliberately makes use of the structures of racism in his world. He deliberately plays upon the racial and religious prejudices of his hearers to conjure his message. If we were to look for current analogies, we would have to look at the bitterly divided communities of Northern Ireland or the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be as if in telling this story to us he might have made the one who behaves in such a caring fashion someone like Osama Bin Laden. Then what would we have had to call it? The Parable of the Good Terrorist?
Now we come to an important realization. How many times have we heard this story as an invitation to emulate this so-called "Good Samaritan?" But if Jesus deliberately chose the most improbable kind of person imaginable to carry the freight of his most significant message, then we would have to conclude he certainly has not made it easy for his audience or for us to make this leap. That is, he does not allow any of us to make a cheap identification with the supposed "hero" of the story.
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Let us assume that Jesus does intend to draw us into the story so that we see ourselves in some way. But if that is so, then what is the point of entry? It cannot be, given the prejudice of his original audience, that he assumed the point of entry would be the Samaritan. So where is it that he believes we might identify?
There is a rule in storytelling, in myths, fables, fairy tale, and children’s stories of all kinds. We tend to identify with the character about whom we know the least, into whom we can pour all of our own attributes. If we apply this rule to this parable a surprising conclusion begins to emerge. Jesus intends to draw us into the story by our identification not with the priest or the Levite, and least of all with the Samaritan. Rather we are drawn in by identification with the one figure in the story who is truly anonymous, the unnamed wounded man. And that is truly fascinating, because if this is the case, then it turns the interpretation of the story completely inside out.
But think for a moment if it is not true. Each one of us has been beset by robbers and thieves. We have been treated unfairly. We were denied as children something which we rightly deserved and ought to have had. Many of us have faced the death or absence of a parent. We have been denied a position or the recognition we have believed we deserved. Some of us have been betrayed by one whom we loved and believed that we could trust. Those are wounds–wounds to the soul that no amount of denial or excuse can ever completely close.
I am reminded of that splendid poem by the English novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence that he called simply "Healing:"
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of parts;
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul–to the deep emotional self.
And wounds to the soul take a long, long time–only time can help,
And a certain difficult repentance:
A freeing oneself from life’s mistake,
And the endless repetition of life’s mistake
That mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
And let us be honest about this. Let us never forget that we too have inflicted wounds, that we too are robbers and thieves. We have not given our children all that they needed or deserved. We too have walked by on the other side in the face of terrible hurt. We have grown callous or indifferent in love. We have betrayed the trust of another. And those too are wounds, not only to others but also to ourselves, to our own souls as well. And so it is true: each and every one of us has been beset by robbers and thieves. And the only interesting question is this: what will we do with that knowledge?
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There is one final question with regard to this story. Why is it that the Samaritan is the one who shows mercy, and not the others? Remember how this began: the lawyer asks Jesus "Who is my neighbor?" He is asking a question about the neighbor as an object. All through the story we assume we are being asked to consider the wounded man as our neighbor. But at the end of the story Jesus turns the question back upon itself by using the word "neighbor" as a subject: "Now which of these three proved neighbor to the man?" From passive recipient to active initiator. Nothing in all Scripture is quite so adroit as this turn around from neighbor as object to neighbor as subject. And when the lawyer identifies the Samaritan as the one who showed mercy, Jesus says to him simply: "Go and do likewise." That is, stop trying to decide who qualifies by law as ones for whom you are responsible, just be a neighbor by practicing mercy.
But in telling the story with these specific characters Jesus also points us in the direction of what allows us to do this. It is not just that he enjoins this lawyer or any of the rest of us to just be a decent person, to be kind whenever we have the opportunity. That would be of little interest. No Jesus uses the Samaritan, this mistrusted and despised person to carry the message. This person responds because he too is a wounded man, the victim of class and racial hatred, hated, a pariah, an outsider. We have come to know this story as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I think Henri Nouwen was right. A much better name for this story would have been the Parable of the Wounded Healer.
One of the facts of our city, a part of the New York City experience, is that we rarely go a day without meeting up with several destitute people entreating us to share with them our spare change. Like most of you sometimes I share something with them; most of the time I do not. I am never quite certain what kind of help I am offering. On occasion a panhandler makes me laugh. Like the young man who said, "Come on folks, I just need $5.00 more and I can put a down payment on my condominium." Or the enterprising homeless woman in a New Yorker cartoon who approached a very buttoned up three-piece-suited Wall Street type with the request: "Mister can you spare $37.50 so I can renew my subscription to the National Review?"
A few years ago I did respond to an older man on a subway car. He stood in the middle of the car. There seemed to be no guile. He spoke clearly and with dignity. He said that alcohol had nearly ruined his life, but that he had been sober for five years. "Today, he said, is a special day. It is my 60th birthday. I would like to spend tonight in a hotel room. I can get one for ten dollars down in the Bowery." Well, I responded with a contribution that day. So did several other passengers. And I think our response had little to do with charity in our usual sense of the word. I responded because I wondered to myself "Where will I be spending my 60th birthday." It is the difference between charity and empathy, between charity and compassion.
Compassion for another proceeds not from our strong side, or our decent side. It proceeds from that part of us that has been wounded, that part about which we might even feel ashamed. "Charity" as we usually understand it means the response of the relatively strong for the relatively weak and needy. Often charity in this sense makes the giver feel good but the recipient feel terrible ad resentful. Then we wonder how it is that they can be possessed of such ingratitude.
But there is no room in Jesus’ teaching for charity of this kind. To be a neighbor signifies the outpouring of compassion. And compassion always proceeds from that part of us that has been wounded, feels alienated, even despised. That is the part of us that is able to reach out to another’s hurt and pain without being superior or judgmental. That is the part that ministers an authentic power of healing. That is to say, we are all Samari-tans; we are all potentially wounded healers.
And so this parable says to each of us: Do not despise the wounds that you have suffered, or even the ones you yourself have inflicted. It is there where your real humanity lies. Neither deny on the one hand, nor cultivate on the other. Fort it is possible to nurture our grievances in such a way that we turn in on ourselves in bitterness and self-pity. Do not despise what you consider to be weak and unworthy in yourself. For as Jesus reminded us, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
That is the image of a wounded healer. It is the image beautifully portrayed in the passage we read earlier from the writing of the prophet Isaiah, the description of the Suffering Servant:
Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,
Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities,
Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
And with his stripes we are healed.--Isaiah 53:4