NOTES for Luk 10:37
“Go and do likewise,” the Lord says today. Like the merciful Samaritan—for who are you, if not a Samaritan? You are a mixed person; there is no purity of faith in you. You seem to believe in God, but what God, how do you worship Him, and what rituals do you invent for yourself or copy thoughtlessly from others? Of course you are a Samaritan, and nothing else.
But it is worth looking at these words in another translation, that of one of the greatest philologists of our day, Sergei Sergeyevich Averintsev: “Step forth and act likewise.” What draws attention is that this great philologist suddenly seems to violate the rule of literary style that forbids such close repetition of the same root: in Russian, “stupai” and “postupai.” Yet he clearly did this under divine guidance, for it yields an abundance of new meanings.
“An act is a step along the vertical. It has no other meaning and no other consequences”—these are the remarkable words of another philologist of our day, Olga Sedakova. An act is a step. Here again is the same connection with walking. What did the Lord say to Sergei Sergeyevich, and through him to us, in these words that seem so “unmusical,” yet in fact sound so astonishing? Every day we take thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of steps, but we are fortunate if, between one confession and the next, we have managed to perform even one true act. Such closely related roots, and such mathematical divergence...
An act is a step along the vertical. It is clear that this is only a poetic image, though a very powerful one. But “it has no other meaning and no other consequences.” And what of the Samaritan? What are the consequences for him? If a Jew helped a Jew, he performed a deed pleasing to God, and God's mercy became the consequence for him. So people thought. But the Samaritan... he saved an outsider, someone who would later thank God in the “wrong” way, and therefore He might not even hear.
It may seem that we are reading too much into this. But we are only trying to sweep away the Christian-cultural Gestalts of our own time. The correlation is absent: the God of my people—a person of my people; I enter this bond and join myself to their wholeness. But the God of my people and a person from another people are in no way connected, and there is no wholeness to which I can join myself. I must join myself to a rupture, and that threatens to tear me apart as well.
This, as it appears today, is what a “step along the vertical” means: a step across a fracture in the earth that is rapidly widening. Therefore: step forth and act; bring together these numbers that stand so far apart on the number line—1,000 steps a day and 0.001 acts a day.