I first
heard of him when I was studying The Law.
Rumors floated that when he was a child he was a prodigy. They said he had come into the middle of a
gathering of learned lawyers and teachers when he didn’t even have a beard, and
had stunned them with his insights and intelligence. People would have forgotten about it had he
not turned up running around the countryside, saying outrageous things,
subverting our national traditions, embarrassing people who have poured money
and years into their professional legal careers. “Isn’t this the guy who’s always been the
know-it-all?” people sometimes
wonder. “That’s him; that’s the one,”
the old folks say. He is an agitator, a
rabble-rouser. It is clear that his
agenda is either to incite a riot or cause his followers to. That is why he had come straight into the
capital, as any fool could plainly see.
We grew up
not far from each other. My parents knew
some of his cousins. They said that
family members really were afraid of him.
Said he was touched in the head, out of his gourd, just plain
weird. Long before he got to be really
popular, some of the local leaders approached me, concerned about the political
risks he was posing in some of his rallies.
They argued that he was on track to attack the religious establishment
with his radical ideas of giving money to the unemployed, flouting the very
laws that everyone knows hold civilization together, empowering the
underclasses, including illegal aliens.
They put it to me. Was I willing
to follow him around, tail him, pay attention to who he talked with and who he
was close to? They wanted to be sure
that when the moment came they would have enough evidence to convict him should
it come to that.
So that is
how I came to be there on that day. He
had been giving one his favorite speeches.
He had organized some of the people to campaign in places where he was
planning on coming and speaking. Groups
of them had gone out—I know because I was there when he dispatched them—and
came back all bubbly about the support they had discovered. To my thinking, it was no surprise. People are always ready to go nuts about a
religious populist, and that is pretty much what he was. So I heard the reports. I waited for his reaction, got up close so I
could be sure to get it all. He
surprised me. He mounted the little
platform off to one side, seemed to get himself a bit worked up, and then
delivered the speech that seemed to set his base on fire but did nothing for
most of the others, including me. It was
about how the ones who think they know something know nothing, and the ones who
think they are powerful are really powerless, and the ones who are helpless
have everything and the ones who can see are really blind.
It made me
sick.
He turned
to some of his leadership circle and told them that they really were lucky to
be a part of everything that was happening, because generation after generation
had wanted it all to come about but nobody, but nobody, had seen what they were
seeing or hearing what they heard.
And that is
when something like a fiend seized me.
The words were coming out of my mouth as fast as the color was flushing
my cheeks. “Teacher,” I said, “what must I
do to inherit eternal life?” To my knowledge he had never seen me, never
paid any attention to me, knew nothing about me. But he looked straight into me with his
piercing eyes, smiled a little—or smirked, it seemed to me—and just stood
looking.
“What is in
the Law?” he asked. Did he know I was a lawyer? “How do you read the Law on that?”
I cleared
my throat and answered with the Shema.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And 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 yourself.”
He lowered
his voice and said, “That is the right answer.
Do that and you will live.”
Understand
this now, I’m telling you. There was
nothing about any of this that I did not know.
The only thing that surprised me is that he actually agreed with
me. That threw me, it did. But just having heard him in effect indict
the entire tradition of Israel with his malarkey about how nobody knows the
Father except the Son or the Son except the Father and blah blah blah, I set
him up. I asked him who my neighbor
was. I expected him to tell me that my
neighbor was one of the whores that went around with him, hanging on his every
word. Or one of the poor who he seemed
always to favor. Or maybe one of the
sinners that clung to him like flies eating honey. But he didn’t say anything like that. He told a story.
A certain
man, his story went, was going from Jerusalem to Jericho. And on the way he fell in the hands of thieves
who robbed him and beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. Now a priest by chance was going down that
road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
Stop right
there. Of course the priest passed by on
the other side. Priests don’t have
contact with corpses. But I listened to
see what was coming.
Likewise,
he said, a Levite, when he came to the place, saw him and passed by on the
other side.
But a
Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with
pity.
Do you have
any idea of what the mere mention of a Samaritan did to me? You have in your life people that don’t even
deserve to live, let alone assume the place of modeling behavior. Take your miserable ethnic minorities, your
lice-infested addicts, your stinking street alcoholics, your moral cripples,
your urine-soaked beggars, your dope pushers, child abusers, even the members
of your Congress that you loathe and despise because they oppose everything you
stand for. Roll them up into one
miserable excuse for a human being, and that doesn’t begin to match what in a
Samaritan makes me want to vomit.
So I
listened, my stomach turning. What was a
Samaritan doing on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho in the first place, I
wondered. The story went on. The Samaritan went to the half-dead man, bandaged
his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.
Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care
of him. The next day he took out two
denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I
come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’
I admit
it. All of this stunned me. I was beginning to catch on that this was a
fiction, not a true story. No real
Samaritan would have done such a thing for a Jew. So when he asked me which of
the three men in the story proved neighbor to the man who was robbed, I did not
want to answer, because I knew what answer he wanted. I kept my mouth shut. By this time everybody within a hundred yards
had gravitated towards him, listening to what he was telling. If there was one there must have been ten
dozen pairs of eyes, all of them now fixed on me. I had no choice. “The one who showed him mercy,” I said.
He looked
at me. I thought for a second he
probably knew me. His jaw shifted
slightly to the right, a characteristic he has when he is about to say
something thoughtfully. He pursed his
lips, nodded slightly, then walked straight towards me. He stretched out his arm and I drew back,
thinking he was maybe going to punch me.
He bent over, motioning for me to get close enough to hear him. Then he spoke in a tone slightly above a
whisper. “Go and do likewise.” He put his hand on my hand. When I looked up his eyes were twinkling.
I can’t
quite describe what I felt. Was it
relief? It felt a little like relief. I
sort of want to say I felt something like—like attraction to him, but I
wouldn’t go quite that far. I can say
that I felt something escaping from me.
I halfway expected him to ask me my name, or what I thought about what
he’d just said. But he and I just stood
there for a bit until a wave of bodies passed between him and me, and within a
few seconds I couldn’t see him. He was off
to somewhere else and I was soon there by myself.
What
happened after that is hard to say because, to tell you the truth, it is still
going on. I keep remembering his walking
up to me, his arm reaching out to me. It’s
kind of funny—and a little embarrassing—that I thought he might be going to
punch me. He would have had every right
to, certainly if he had known what I was up to.
I was his enemy. His enemy! I don’t know what he did and didn’t know, but
if he had had any idea of what I was up to or why I was there or who I was
working for, well, I don’t imagine that even somebody as peace-loving as he’s
supposed to be would have passed up the chance to humiliate me at the least, or
maybe expose me, or, as I had momentarily imagined, simply haul off and land me
one right in the face.
So am I the
one befriended by an enemy who treats me as a neighbor? Was he all along the Despised Samaritan,
reaching out to me though I would have stuck a dagger straight into his heart
and twisted it? Why did he look at me as
if he knew me, understood me, even liked me?
Maybe I am the man of wounds, battered though I don’t feel it, blind
though I see, half-dead though with my spirit at full mast, waving like a curtain
in the breeze, hoping to God that somebody will come by and look on me and love
me and heal me.
But that is
not what he said. “Go and do likewise,”
were his words. He did not see me as
half-dead or entirely dead. He seemed to
think that I could do it, that I could be a neighbor. Why else would have he have told me to go and
be one?
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013
