Disgusting Freaks

Luke 10:25-37

Many of the students with whom I work at the Faison Center will take leisure breaks on classroom computers or iPads to watch YouTube videos. Many of these kids have a tendency to watch the same short segment of their selected video over and over again, they click the scroll bar to bring the playback cursor to the same spot time after time. It’s like listening to a record skip...but making it happen intentionally. In the classroom, we encourage students to use headphones when they’re at the computers so that the ongoing classroom instruction isn’t interrupted by the repeating sound of Beaker the Muppet’s high-pitched “meeping.”

One student is being monitored for safe behavior in a demand-free environment, meaning his only expectation is to spend an hour in a chosen location without engaging in self-injury or aggression towards staff. I was with him during this hour-long block one day and he was passing his time as I just described, watching a YouTube clip over and over again on his iPad. Only, he had no headphones connected...so I got to listen to the same 5-second excerpt of Pixar’s Toy Story...for an hour.

The scene-du-jour featured Woody the cowboy, voiced by Tom Hanks, shouting “Go away, you disgusting freaks!” Out of curiosity, I went back later that afternoon and watched the full scene . A little backstory, for those who haven’t seen it: Toy Story tells the story of toys who delight in being played with and loved by their owner, a young boy named Andy. The toys come to life when no one else is around and have a behind-the-scenes life of their own. Andy’s toys are led by Sherrif Woody, a plush cowboy doll who speaks when you pull a cord on his back. Woody is Andy’s favorite toy...favorite that was until Andy’s birthday party when his mom surprises him with a Buzz Lightyear action figure: lasers, buttons, retractable wings...this toy’s got everything! Woody is notably jealous, and a series of plotting, unfortunate events, and fights lead to both Woody and Buzz being lost...and then found by Andy’s next-door neighbor, Sid, a boy who is well known for toy-abuse: dissecting and reassembling, smashing, blowing-up, and destroying his toys for fun. Sid’s mutant toy creations are strewn throughout his room, house, and yard...and are quite frightening: squeaky toys and G.I. Joes impaled by nails, babydoll bodies with dinosaur heads, babydoll heads with tinker-toy bodies, a fishing rod with Barbie legs…

In an attempt to escape Sid’s house, Buzz Lightyear leaps from the second floor landing towards an open window, believing he can fly to freedom. Buzz learns the hard way that he is a toy and dislocates his arm when he crashes into the linoleum floor below. In the scene my student was watching over and over again, Buzz and his arm have been found by Woody and brought back to Sid’s room where they are approached by Sid’s mutant toys. They peek out of the dark from under the bed and creep out of the closet...voiceless, limbering, arms outstretched...like a scene from a zombie movie. Woody attempts to fend them off with Buzz’s detached arm… “Go away, you disgusting freaks! Back! Back, you cannibals!” he shouts to no avail as he is overwhelmed by the mutant toys, Buzz’s arm is snatched from his grasp, and he is flung aside, where he watches, upside down and helpless, as the group surrounds Buzz and doubtlessly prepares to dismember and devour him.

Woody gets back on his feet and charges in, again, “He is still alive and you’re not going to get him you monsters!” Throwing toys aside to get to his friend only to find...Buzz opening and closing the fingers on the hand of his newly reattached arm. Woody stands speechless as reality dawns on him: these “disgusting freaks” have just fixed his friend. They’ve done something Woody couldn’t do...or at least something that he didn’t do.

The heroes of this scene end up being the ones Woody had written off as “cannibals” and “monsters.” I’m not sure what the appropriate term would be for “dehumanizing” a toy, but by assuming them to be “disgusting freaks,” Woody is giving voice to his fear...he’s describing his own experience from his own perspective and influenced by his own prejudice, but he is not describing the reality of the bigger picture. Woody’s misperceptions of these neighborhood toys caused him to harbor hatred and foster fear towards them. Buzz’s arm isn’t the only thing repaired in this scene. Woody’s relationship with his neighbors is reconciled.

Having heard this scene played over and over again by my student, you probably won't be surprised if I told you that it continued to echo through my mind as I sat down with the VBS curriculum and read Luke 10:25-37. The lawyer, who asks Jesus a question about inheriting eternal life, is kind of like Woody...the one whom Jesus flips upside down as he tells a story of a Samaritan who helps an injured traveler when a priest and a Levite will not.

For many of us, we have only ever heard “Samaritan” with the adjective “good” fixed in front of it...and we miss the point of the story if we assume that the lawyer to whom it was first told would have made the same word association between “Samaritan” and “good.” More likely, the lawyer would have perceived the Samaritan as Woody perceived SId’s toys...a disgusting freak. A bit harsh, perhaps...but it captures the shock value I think Jesus wanted. The shock this lawyer felt being told to model his compassion after a Samaritan is likely not far from the shock we feel in being told that we should love our enemies.

Prejudice against Samaritans is even held among Jesus’ own disciples, as evidenced in the previous chapter of Luke when a Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus as he made his way to Jerusalem. Most Jews would have made a wide detour around Samaria, but Jesus demonstrates his lack of prejudice by traveling through. The refusal of hospitality by the Samaritan village is just as much an indication of Jews being inhospitable toward Samaritans as it is of Samaritans being inhospitable towards Jews. Case in point, when James and John hear of this they are livid. “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” they ask. You can pretty seamlessly replace “them” with “those disgusting freaks.”

Jesus rebuked them, and then, a few verses later, tells a story in which a Samaritan is the ideal model of hospitality.

In John’s gospel, there is a parenthetical side-note in the story of the woman at the well, a Samaritan woman who is shocked that Jesus would ask her for a drink of water, the author explains: “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”

How did things get that way? How did Jews and Samaritans become so suspicious of one another? Samaritan refers not only to people from Samaria, but to a religious community. Samaritans and Jews share a lot in common, even their Scriptures (the first five books of the Torah, known as the Pentateuch), but the Samaritans had their own priests and temple, in Samaria, which they believed to be the true temple (not the one in Jerusalem). The split between these two cults likely occurred while the “Jewish Bible” only consisted of the five books of Moses. The term “Samaritan” is understood to come from the Hebrew word “shamar” which means to keep. They believed themselves to be the ones who “kept” the Torah. After the exodus when God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, they originally worshiped in Samaria, but under Kings David and Solomon, the cult moved to Zion (which is Jerusalem), and the Samaritans believed that this was never God’s intent. Thus the “true” place of worship was the primary “bone of contention between Samaritans and Jews.”

Like most serious disagreements, the animosity between these two communities was further fueled by rhetoric that framed the “other” as a threat. Not only are they different from us, but they’re wrong, and they’re dangerous. “They” are ritually unclean...disgusting freaks.

Ritual purity was of great importance to the Jewish faith, as further evidenced in the story Jesus tells by the actions of the Priest and the Levite. They do not avoid helping the half-dead man because they are terrible people. “While behavior was certainly not commendable, neither was it without reason,” points of Fred Craddock. “Contact with a corpse would have defiled the priest and the Levite and disqualified them from their temple responsibilities. When they saw they victim, theirs was a choice between duty and duty.” They made the choice to maintain their ritual purity and serve in the temple that day.

Samaritans, sharing the same scriptures, also shared the same purity laws. When he approached the injured man, presumed to be dead by the priest and Levite, he was risking the same defilement they had avoided--he was risking breaking the same laws that they made sure to keep. Joseph Fitzmyer highlights the “law-breaking” loving kindness shown by the Samaritan in this story as “a concrete example of the love of one’s neighbor [that] is an essential part of the way to ‘eternal life’.” “The priest and the Levite were not lacking in their love of God,” he mentions, as their choice to remain ritually clean demonstrates. They believed their faithfulness to the Law to be an indication of their love for God. “But their love of neighbor was put to the test and found wanting.”

It would seem that Jesus tells this story, in part, to link love of God and love of neighbor and give an example of how rigid adherence to the law can sometimes hinder the kind of love to which God wants us to be faithful. Let’s remember Jesus is telling this story to a lawyer. “You can know the law backwards and forwards and still miss the point,” he’s saying. I don’t think Jesus is telling this story to be mean to this lawyer, or to publicly humiliate him. I think Jesus is genuinely concerned that this lawyer and all who are listening understand the limitations of the Law: it may have been inspired by God, but it is trapped in human words, and tampered with by human interpretations. We can easily twist Scriptures to justify what we already believe, as Luke suggests this lawyer was trying to do. “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” I’ll love my neighbors, so long as you’re not trying to tell me that those disgusting freaks over there are my neighbors, too.

That’s exactly what Jesus is trying to tell us. “Disgusting freak” is not a category of creation termed by God. God doesn’t create “disgusting freaks”...we do. And we create them in our hearts and minds, by the opinions and prejudices we allow to fester. If my heart and mind allow me to look at a child of God and think, “What a disgusting freak”, then my heart and mind have become like the traveler in Jesus’ story: they have fallen into the hands of robbers, robbed of righteousness and compassion, beaten and bruised by selfishness and the sinful ways of this world, left for dead on the side of the road...no longer able to travel the way that leads to eternal life.

Jesus came to seek and save the lost, those left for dead on the side of the road, to heal, and redeem, and set us back on the righteous path. And he does this by telling stories that, much like Sid’s toys did to Woody, flip us upside-down. When we truly pay attention to God’s story, not just to the words but to the love and intention behind them, then we are flipped upside-down and our eyes are opened to see the reality of the bigger picture. God’s love heals our heart and mind and soul and opens them so much wider than our prejudice would ever permit. Remember our reading last week from Romans 5? Verse 8 goes on to say this: “The proof of God’s amazing love is this: even while we were disgusting freaks, Christ died for us.” Since we have been washed clean by the love of God in Christ Jesus, so too let our hearts and minds be washed clean of anything that would restrict our love so that we might see Christ’s example and then heed his words: “Go and love likewise.”