What Does It Profit…
Miami is crisscrossed by expressways connecting far southwestern suburbs and downtown Miami’s medical, court and entertainment centers - the go-to favorites of the Lexus-Beamer-Mercedes super self-important pack. They are also some of the most dangerous roads in South Florida, especially in the before-sunrise-after-the-clubs-have-closed hours.
In the Fourth Chapter of the Gospel of Verbum Dei et Veritas de Miami, Jesus tells his disciples:
“In the pre-dawn hours, a man was travelling between the clubs on Miami Beach and South Miami-Dade when he was cut off by a car that had been following him for miles. After he was forced him off the highway, he was attacked with cudgels, severely beaten and shot in the arm; his expensive watch and jewelry, his wallet and cellphone were stolen and he was left half-dead.
“A neurosurgeon passed by the wrecked car and thought he might have seen a body on the ground by the driver’s side. But he was already speaking to his operating room staff and giving directions for the preparation of his first patient – a deeply embedded tumor that would require all of his skills. By the time he finished the conversation, he had forgotten about the injured man and continued on.
“Minutes later, a federal prosecutor on his way to closing arguments in a major murder-for-hire case sped passed the accident/injury scene, repeating over and over his most powerful final lines. He was determined to deliver them with force and, while he noticed the accident on the opposite side of the six-lane road, he did not stop and never thought to call police.
“Then, just as the sun cleared the horizon, a beaten-up Ford flatbed carrying six undocumented migrant landscape workers passed by. The men stopped and, recognizing that the victim was in danger of death and that others had paid him no heed, with the gentleness of a parent cradling a sick child, pulled him to safety and called 9-1-1.
“They did not question whether or not to be involved. They knew that, if the police demanded IDs, they could be held for ICE; they might never see their wives or children again. They knew they might lose hours’ or a day’s pay. But they waited for the police. They waited for the ambulance and, as it pulled away, they signed themselves and commended the injured man to God. They risked everything for a stranger who had probably payed more for his watch and certainly more for his Beamer than they would earn in months of hard labor in the South Florida sun.
“The man who had fallen victim to the thieves was taken to a trauma center where his fractured orbital socket was repaired and his eye sight saved by a young DACA surgeon, who had lived his entire conscious life fearing that he would be expelled from the only home and country he had ever known. He’s ‘as American as they come.’ His team included a LGBT anesthesiologist, a lead surgical nurse from the Philippines, and others waiting for their green cards so they can be reunited with their families.
“Who among all of these,” asked Jesus, “proved themselves neighbor and brother or sister to the stranger who fell victim to the thieves?”
I remember little from seminary lectures, but I fondly remember Rabbi Asher Finkell, who taught us that it was “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37) that sealed Jesus’s fate. Religious law proscribed contact with bloodied persons. [Thus, the story of Birth of Jesus in the Stable, rather than the Holiday Inn of 2000 years ago. The bloody experience of childbirth would have left the room ritually impure and requiring a purification ritual before it could be rented again.]
In the same way, the priest of Jesus’s parable would have been made ritually impure by contact with the “man who fell into the hands of thieves who beat him and left him half dead.” He would have been made unable to “work” in the Temple and his wife and family – and credit rating - would have suffered. Similarly, the Levite who “saw the beaten man and passed by on the opposite side” would have been contaminated and unable to work.
In the end, the Samaritan was an upright and honorable man with nothing – and everything - to lose. He was already hated and despised because of his ancestry and religious “heresy” (my word not the Rabbi’s), because he was different.
The legalistic truth is that the priest and Levite did the politically correct thing. They saved their own interests and adhered to the Letter of the Law. The Letter of the Law. Not the Spirit of the Law. Jesus was, in fact, telling his listeners that when the Letter of the Law prevents us from being kind and good and doing justice, we must ignore the demands of the Letter and conform to the Spirit. He was arguing for the overthrow of the Letter of the Law. And it was because of this parable, argued Rabbi Finkel, that it was necessary for the social, political and religious powers of the day to silence him.
The undocumented immigrant landscape workers knew the Letter of the Law. They and their families – their “documented” and “undocumented” children and spouses – know the Letter of the Law better than most Americans. But, time and time again they place the Spirit of the Law above all else.
Isn’t it strange that Jesus tells us “Go and do likewise?”
In the Fifth Chapter of the not-so-ancient Gospel of Verbum Dei et Veritas de Miami, Jesus “called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must give-up their fear of being primaried or having someone run against them from their far right or the Tea Party or backed by the Koch Brothers. Whoever wishes to be my disciple must be courageously honest with the People of God.
“Whoever wishes to be my disciple cannot use armed forces and chemical weapons against the People of God so that they can be photographed with a borrowed copy of MY Word. Whoever wishes to be my disciple must abandon the delusion and the lie that they run for public office because “I am a far better choice than anyone who might run against me.’”
Jesus continued, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to save their professional and personal soul must be willing to lose the next election because they dare to be honest and incorruptible.”
Then, Jesus looked each of the politicians gathered in front of him and asked, “What good is it for someone to gain election and repeated reelection, lining his or her own pockets and those of their friends and family, while suffering the loss of his historic reputation and his or her immortal soul?
“What made you think you could go on four-day Congressional vacation weekends while millions and millions of Americans have lost their jobs and are being evicted from their homes, while you who are payed $175,000 per year to represent them are saying to jobless parents ‘live on $200 a week.’ Or what can anyone give you in exchange for your soul and the ability to look into the eyes of your children and grandchildren and say, ‘From beginning to end, I was honest – a good and faithful servant?’”
And Jesus said to the corporate officers who had gathered around him, “My Father entrusted to you the safe keeping of the world He created and the world He saw ‘was very good.’ Yet you polluted its streams and rivers, poisoned the great whales with your plastics, and melted the great polar ice caps my Father carved and formed in their beauty. You besmirched my Father’s mountains by building your third and fourth giant homes to feed our egos, while refusing to pay fair salaries to your employees. You polluted the air and imposed pain and illness on the poor in the name of corporate profits and your bonuses.
“You claim to love Me and my Father but your actions cause us shame because you are an adulterous and sinful people. We are ashamed of you now. Change your lives while there is still time that we will not be ashamed of you when the Son of Man comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
Finally, Jesus dismissed them with two questions: “What does it profit a politician or corporate executive to gain the whole world and the roar of the crowds and yet suffer the loss of his immortal soul? What does it profit a people to elect immoral and dishonest, perpetually lying, selfish and soulless cowards to positions of public trust and service?”
