Maybe he did something to provoke it. MLK then shifts to the Samaritan, the man of a different race, and says he reverses the question. This question cuts me deeply. It is like I see a flashback of every moment in my life where I chose to stay in my lane and avoided speaking out against injustice. How often do we see someone mistreated as we sit there quietly? How often do we use the promise of a restored world in the future to justify our inaction in the here and now? I feel shame for not asking myself this question—for not even thinking it until I heard this speech.
This teaching led me to another truth about the gospel of Jesus. Once I started putting myself in the shoes of the beaten man, I realized that I have been that person all along. In fact, we can all identify with the beaten man. The power of sin has left us all robbed, beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. The Bible tells us that the wages of sin, the payment for disobedience, is death.
And we are all guilty of disobedience and deserving of this beating. And God being Holy cannot associate with us, and that is why we are forever separated from Him.
It is because of His great love that I am able to love my neighbor 1 John I am thankful for MLK and his pursuit for equal rights for all people.
True neighborliness requires [ strikeout illegible ] personal concern. The Samaritan not only eased the hurt of the used his physical hands to bind up the wounds of the robbed man's body, with his physical hands , but he released an overflowing love to bind up the wounds of his broken spirit.
Another expression of the excessiveness of the Samaritan's altruism was his willingness to go far beyond the call of duty. Not only did he bind up the man's wounds, but he put him on his beast and carried him to an inn. On leaving the [ strikeout illegible ] inn he left some money and made it clear that if any other financial needs arose he would gladly meet them. He went not only the second, but the third mile. Harry Emerson Fosdick has made a most impressive distinction between enforceble and unenforceable obligations.
These are the obligations which are spead out over spelled out on spelled out on thousands of law book pages, and if they are the broken breakage of which has filled numerous prisons. But then are those unenforceable obligations which the laws of society cant reach. They deal with inner attitudes, genuine person-to person relations, and expressions of compassion which law law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. They are obligations which can be dalt dealt with only by ones commitment to an inner law, a commandment written on the heart.
Man made laws are needed to assure justice, but a higher law must is needed to produce love. No code of conduct ever written by man can make a father love his children and a husband have affection for his wife. The law court may compell him to provide physical bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love. A good father must be obedient to the unenforceable. The good Samaritan will always remain the conscience of mankind because he was obedient to that which could not be enforced.
No law in the world could have made him do what he did. No made man made code could have produced such unallayed compassion, such efflorescent love, such thorough altruism. In our nation today a mighty struggle is taking place. It is a struggle to conquer the reign of a evil monster called segregation and its inseparable twin called discrimination—a monster that has wandered through this land for well-nigh one hundred years, stripping millions of Negro people of their sense of dignity and robbing them of their birthright of freedom.
A great deal of our so called race problem will be solved in the realm of enforceable obligations. Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees can play no major roll in bringing about desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.
Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it [ strikeout illegible ] can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits if not the hearts of people have been and are being altered everyday by legislative acts, judicial [ decisions? It is already being ended by legislative and executive acts already presently in effect.
But acknowledging this we must go on to admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the ability of men to be obedient to the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcement agencies agencies will be of inestimable value in achieving desegregation. But desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the ultimate goal which we seek to realize.
Desegregation will break down the legal barriers, and bring men together physically. But something must happen so to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together because it is natural and right. In other words, our ultimate goal is integration which is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living. Only by producing a nation committed to the inner law of love can this goal be attained. A vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws can bring an end to segregated public facilities which stand as barriers to a truly desegregated society, but it cannot bring an end to the blindness, fear, prejudice, pride and irrationality which stand as barriers to a truely integrated society.
These dark and demonic responses of the spirit can only be removed when men will listen to decency become possessed if by that invisible, inner law which says will etch in their spirits hearts the convictlon that all men are brother and that love is mankind's most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will come only when men are true neighbors, willing to be obedient to unenforceable obligations.
Today more than ever before men of all races and men of all nations are challenged to be neighborly. The call for a good neighbor policy on the part of the nations of the world is more than an ephemeral shibboleth, it is the call to a way of life which will transform our almost cosmic elegy into creative fulfillment. Such folly was once moral failure; today it can lead only lead to universal suicide. The alternative to a world of brotherhood to match [ strikeout illegible ] its geographical neighborhod may well be a civilization plunged into an inferno more devastating than anything Dante could ever envision.
As you leave this place of worship my friends go out with the conviction that all men are brothers, tied in a single garment of destiny. In the final analysis I must not ignore the wounded man on life's Jerico Road because he is appart a part of me and I am apart a part of him.
His agony diminishes me and his salvation enlarges me. In our quest to make neighborly love a reality in our lives we have not only the inspiring example of the good Samaritan, but we have the magnanimous life of our Christ to guide us.
His death on the Cross of Calvary was a single event expressing a threefold altruism. He died for all men, which made his death a universal altruism. He died in excruciating pain which was an expression of his willingness to engage in the most dangerous altruism. Mankind had been robbed [ strikeout illegible ] of his virtue by demonic forces, and left inflicted with deadening wounds of sin.
He lived his days in a persistent concern for the welfare of others. His altruism was universal in that he saw all men as brothers. He was a neighbor to the publicans and the sinners.
His altruism was willing to travel dangerous roads in that he was willing to risk [ strikeout illegible ] popularity relinquish fame fortune and even life itself for a cause he knew was right. Buttrick, The Parables of Jesus , pp. Buttrick, The Parables of Jesus , p. He set it down on a dangerous road in Palestine! The twenty miles between the cities wound through mountainous country, whose limestone caves offered ambush for brigand bands, and whose sudden turns exposed the traveler to unforeseen attack.
The real tragedy of such narrow provincialism is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness.
A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We fail to think of them as fellow human beings made from the same basic stuff as we, molded in the same divine image. The priest and the Levite saw only a bleeding body, not a human being like themselves. But the good Samaritan will always remind us to remove the cataracts of provincialism from our spiritual eyes and see men as men.
If the Samaritan had considered the wounded man as a Jew first, he would not have stopped, for the Jews and the Samaritans had no dealings. He saw him as a human being first, who was a Jew only by accident. The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers. The Samaritan possessed the capacity for a dangerous altruism. He risked his life to save a brother. When we ask why the priest and the Levite did not stop to help the wounded man, numerous suggestions come to mind.
Perhaps they could not delay their arrival at an important ecclesiastical meeting. Perhaps religious regulations demanded that they touch no human body for several hours prior to the performing of their temple functions. Or perhaps they were on their way to an organizational meeting of a Jericho Road Improvement Association. Certainly this would have been a real need, for it is not enough to aid a wounded man on the Jericho Road; it is also important to change the conditions which make robbery possible.
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary. Maybe the priest and the Levite believed that it is better to cure injustice at the causal source than to get bogged down with a single individual effect. These are probable reasons for their failure to stop, yet there is another possibility, often overlooked, that they were afraid.
The Jericho Road was a dangerous road. When Mrs. The descent is made in less than twenty miles. Many sudden curves provide likely places for ambushing and exposes the traveler to unforeseen attacks.
Long ago the road was known as the Bloody Pass. So it is possible that the Priest and the Levite were afraid that if they stopped, they too would be beaten. Perhaps the robbers were still nearby. Or maybe the wounded man on the ground was a faker, who wished to draw passing travelers to his side for quick and easy seizure. Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or will I be jailed? The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life. The Samaritan also possessed excessive altruism.
With his own hands he bound the wounds of the man and then set him on his own beast. It would have been easier to pay an ambulance to take the unfortunate man to the hospital, rather than risk having his neatly trimmed suit stained with blood. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to sympathize. Our missionary efforts fail when they are based on pity, rather than true compassion.
Instead of seeking to do something with the African and Asian peoples, we have too often sought only to do something for them. An expression of pity, devoid of genuine sympathy, leads to a new form of paternalism which no self respecting person can accept. Millions of missionary dollars have gone to Africa from the hands of church people who would die a million deaths before they would permit a single African the privilege of worshiping in their congregation. Millions of Peace Corps dollars are being invested in Africa because of the votes of some men who fight unrelentingly to prevent African ambassadors from holding membership in their diplomatic clubs or establish residency in their particular neighborhoods.
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