Resonance

This Sunday, I'm going to be preaching about the parable of the Good Samaritan for the first time at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church.  The sermon is going to be called Eponymous, because I'm a fan of REM and because, well, it just works.  But a close second for title would have been Resonance.  This is one of those posts that is going to be a bit of overflow material from stuff, I would love to cram into the service, and probably would if I was Rob Bell and had about 45 minutes and slick AV/Tech people to help out.
The Parables in general have a resonant quality.  Resonance can be a powerful force, the vibration of strings creates music from a violin and a guitar, the resonant qualities of brass instruments allow the player to transform a funny little thbbt shound into booming tuba notes or soulful trombone riffs.  Resonance can make crystal glasses sing as you rub your finger around the rim, and if you hit just the right frequency with sufficient decibels, you can shatter glass with sound.  Those are all audible examples, but there are other ways that resonance can affect things.  For instance, the Tacoma Narrows bridge.  The engineers could not have forseen that the exact length and stiffness of the center span would be a perfect harmonic for certain wind speeds, and that, because of resonance, thousands of tons of steel and concrete would vibrate like a blade of grass stretched between your thumbs when the wind really got going.  So this happened:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fhVHGuJk4eg#action=share

Resonance can destroy things that you think are solid.  The parables usually attempt to tear down something, some misguided human assumption, so that God can replace it with something better.  In the case of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was deliberately shaking apart the legalism and, as a matter of fact, the ethnic prejudice of his questioner.  The parable starts with the question: "Who is my neighbor?" and that is like plucking a string that starts building in volume and ferocity, until there's no room to hold onto your old assumptions of who is truly "good."
People won't move off of their prejudices until they're challenged.  If you grow up in a white family and you never have any black neighbors, and you never go to school with black kids, you are very vulnerable to becoming prejudiced, if not down right racist.  If you don't know any (enter the name of some group of people different from you) you will probably begin to de-humanize that group of people.  The word that is translated neighbor is used in a very special sense in this part of Luke's Gospel, it is used not just to indicated physical proximity, it is used to indicate mutual humanity.  Who is my fellow human?  Might be a better translation, but it sounds wonky, so we can stick with neighbor and just know that the word is meant to be interpreted in the broadest sense.
The resonance of this story ought to break down the excuses that many followers of Jesus use to hold on to their excuses for not truly working at being as open and fair to people of various sorts.  The specific example of a Samaritan being the merciful neighbor to the man in the ditch, was specifically pointed to challenge the racial, ethnic and theological assumptions of the teacher of the Law.  None of those reasons are really good reasons to neglect one's duty to be merciful and humane.  Convenience, purity, important other business; these are not acceptable excuses to ignore the plight of someone who has been victimized.
But this isn't just about being charitable or helpful, it's about being a neighbor, a fellow human, recognizing a commonality in the other, no matter how different they might be from you.
I have often heard this parable used as a sort of exhortation to help those who are in need, but I think it's bigger than that.  The resonant frequency of this story is meant to shake us out of our assumptions about who is and who is not our brother or our sister.  It is meant to challenge the notion that there are people out there in the world who do not have a rightful claim to be called and to call us neighbors.