This week John preached about accepting kindness. The text was the Good Samaritan, who is often the focus of the story. Yet there is also a character who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up half dead by the road. His journey had been from one of the highest points in Israel, which is Jerusalem, down three thousand feet toward Jericho. The journey itself symbolizes his descent from lofty ideals to being broken, and it is in this place of vulnerability that the Samaritan finds him. 

 

I have no context for understanding what it would be like for a Jew to receive help from a Samaritan. I've been told that they were bitter enemies, and I believe it. But it wasn't until I had an accident fifteen years ago that it resonated. I stood there crying, in a panic about how I had ruined our car when a stranger I would normally have a strong reaction to leaned over my steaming radiator for a closer look. I didn't know the term white supremacist then but he fit the description. 

 

"Your radiator is busted but it's an easy fix. You'll be fine." 

 

What? What's that you say? It is not irrevocably destroyed? Which is where my imagination landed. In that moment my heart rate slowed enough that I could talk to the police and call John. 

 

I am intrigued that God chose that man to offer reassurance to me. It would have been more predictable coming from a nun, one who knows engines, or a freckled athlete running by wearing a t-shirt saying Compassion Begins with Me. 

 

Some of us have been known to balk at the suggestion that we could use a leg up. Independence is king, and vulnerability implies a crack in that sovereignty. 

 

Yet all of us began life being perfectly at ease with copious amounts of assistance. I have never met a toddler who wrestled with any of the distracting emotions we oldsters are partial to. Guilt, a sense of being beholden, fear of being a burden simply don't come up.