Mercy: Give everyone a face
Jesus loves to answer a question by telling a story. His famous Good Samaritan story is prompted by the question, “Who is my neighbor?”
With this story Jesus is trying to get the man who asked the question to look at life through the lens of mercy so that he will come to see everybody as his neighbor.
Mercy is undeserved grace and love. Mercy is the gift that God has for all of us, and mercy is the gift God wants us to give to each other.
The section of Luke’s Gospel in which the Good Samaritan story appears is a fantastic stretch of scripture. Shortly before the scene in which he tells the story Jesus and his disciples went to a Samaritan town. The people there rejected them and the disciples wanted to kill them. By the time Jesus comes along Jews and Samaritans have had a 600 year history of being at odds. They are not friends. The disciples are sensitive to this long held feud and are hurt and angered by the rejection. They want to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritans. Jesus says, “No. You can’t do that. Let it go. Move along.”
So isn't it striking that the very next story Jesus tells has a Samaritan hero? I bet that really got the disciples’ goat. Jesus’ point is clear. He wants his students to turn their enemies into friends through acts of mercy.
Perhaps this example will put it on the street. Etty Hillesum was a captive of the Nazis before they killed her in Auschwitz. She wrote this in her diary about a German soldier who did something nice for her friend Liesl.
“When Liesl told me about his kindness, I knew at once:I shall have to pray for this German soldier. Out of all those uniforms one has been given a face now. There will be other faces, too, in which we shall be able to read something we understand: that German soldiers suffer as well. There are no frontiers between suffering people, and we must pray for them all.”
The Samaritan in Jesus' story was given a face. He was suddenly somebody instead of just another character in a long held feud between arguing tribes. Jesus has a way of giving people faces to teach us how to truly love, that is, love at the deepest level which almost always means loving people we would rather oppose. Not tolerating them, not simply including them,but loving them mercifully as God loves us and them.
If we read back through the Gospels I think we’ll find that Jesus is always, as Etty says, giving people faces. He illuminates your true face which reveals that your identity is not the sum of your poor choices or your last bad deed. All are God’s beloved. Everyone is your neighbor and worthy of mercy. Give everyone a face.