Biography
Dr. Edwina Hunter is the Joe R. Engle Professor of Preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Dr. Hunter has had a long and distinguished career as a university professor in the field of communications and preaching. She is a past president of the Academy of Homiletics, serves on the Advisory Board of "The Living Pulpit" — a journal about preaching -- and is a frequent guest lecturer and preacher in seminaries around the world. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Touch The Untouchable — Speak the Unspeakable" 
Jesus turned the worlds of his hearers upside down and inside out. Those who really heard him could never again be the same. It was as though they had lived a certain way, thought a certain way, and talked a certain way all their lives to that point when they heard Jesus. From then on, they lived a different way, thought a different way, and talked a different way. They were changed in unbelievable ways.

How willing are you, how willing am I at my age, in my circumstances to have my world turned upside down? How willing are we to be disturbed and challenged? Do you, do I, want so badly to hear what Jesus has to say for this day that I am willing to be changed drastically and radically? Does the very word "radical" frighten us? It frightens me because I know that if I take an overtly radical position on any number of things, I could lose friends and perhaps alienate some people I love very much. Yet, I want to hear, really hear, Jesus. You really want to hear Jesus, too. I believe you do because, no matter whether we see Him as God's Son or as a wise prophet and teacher, we know we have something to learn from Him.

Long ago when I was in my young adult years, I studied the parables of Jesus in a formal academic setting. I was told that if I could find the one small seed or core of meaning in each parable, then I would have the full meaning of the parable. I came to feel the parables were exhaustible, that they were simplistic, and had nothing much to say. In fact, I had heard so many sermons from the most well-known parables, sermons preached with the same "core" of meaning, that I had come to find both the sermons and the parables boring.

Then, after many years, I studied the parables again. This time under a professor who was excited by the complexity of the parables and awed by their relevance to today. I could hardly believe all I was hearing. Why, there are levels and levels of meanings in the parables! They are inexhaustible!

I learned that if we go back and look at the original context in which Jesus told the parable, the original audience who heard it, we can begin to understand what happened to them. We can begin to understand how shocked, disconcerted, radicalized they became -- if they truly heard what Jesus said. And we come to realize that it is only as we experience what the original audience experienced that we have truly heard what he said.

Let's take the parable we call "The Good Samaritan" as an example of this. Now, I don't know about you, but I have always heard this parable interpreted as the Good Samaritan is one of "us" who does a good deed or something good for another one of us. It is sort of kept in the family. Even newspapers label a person a good Samaritan if he or she risks something to rescue or help someone of his/her own race, color, belief, class, sexual orientation, or nationality. Television and radio news broadcasters use the term in the same way. We understand what is meant. We have a common meaning for "Good Samaritan." We are in no way upset by stories we hear of present day good Samaritans. On the contrary, we are inspired, awed by such selfless giving.

However, that is not the way the story Jesus told was accepted by his first audience. That first audience, you can believe, was very much upset. Shocked is not too strong a word. Repulsed may not be too strong a word. Let's briefly review the story and its setting. Jesus was talking to a group of people. He had told them that the first great commandment was to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and their neighbor as themselves. One of his listeners, in challenge of Jesus, asked Him the question, "Who is my neighbor?"

That original audience was composed of people of like mind, like religion, like background, like race, like prejudices and biases. They could not have been more shocked at the manner in which Jesus answered that question. He told of a man traveling from Jerusalem who was overtaken by robbers, beaten, robbed, and left for dead by the side of the road. A Priest and a Levite came by, saw him, and walked way around him and passed by on the other side. Then, then, a Samaritan .... A Samaritan, his listeners must have thought, one of those worst of our enemies, outcasts, violators of our religion? A Samaritan stopped to help this man? What on earth is Jesus saying?

Jesus knew what he was saying and he wanted to be sure they had heard him. So he asked, "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan notes that his original questioner could not even say the word "Samaritan" so bitter were his thoughts. It was a word he could not, would not speak. So He simply answered, "The one who showed him kindness."

Okay. Jesus' original audience was shocked because they and the Samaritans hated and despised each other. So? So, what does this parable have to say to us? We can hear that only if we translate it very personally. Whom do I, whom do you despise, fear, hate so much that you hate even to speak the name? Or take it further. Jesus said that the Samaritan actually touched the man who had been left for dead. Touched? He touched one who, for him and his, was untouchable.

What is Jesus saying? He is saying that we will never understand who our neighbor is -- who the one is that we are to love as ourselves -- until we are able to touch the untouchable one and speak the unspeakable name. Biblical scholar, Robert Funk, says that we have to ask, "Whom would I least like to be touched by?" By whom would I least like to be helped, indebted to? Only then can we understand, hear what Jesus was saying.

Jesus not only told this story, He acted on His own words. Do you remember when, in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1, a leper came to Jesus and asked him to make him clean. Mark said, according to our translation, "Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him ...." That touch was so much more than a light, casual touch. Jesus embraced the leper!

Do you remember, in John 4, when Jesus, left by himself beside a well, asked for a drink of water from a Samaritan woman who came to draw water? No Jewish man was to address any woman, not even his wife, outside the confines of the home. But Jesus spoke to a Samaritan who was also a woman. He engaged her in a lengthy theological discussion. He may not have touched her with His hand; however, he touched her very soul and inner self with His knowledge of her and His compassion for her. How very intimate! How very touching is a conversation, eye-to-eye and soul-to-soul! Jesus touched and allowed himself to be touched by those who were considered by his culture to be the most despised and outcast and unclean. The woman, having bled for 12 years, desperately unclean, reached out and touched just the hem of His garment, enough to make Him also unclean. He did not reproach her. He healed her and blessed her. On and on, we could go! Jesus touched the untouchable! Jesus spoke the unspeakable!

And what about us? What about you and me? Whom do we hate and despise because our culture and society have said we should? Whom are we afraid to be touched by? What name do we not even want to speak?

Do you recall as vividly as I the consternation, the shock in so many areas when PLO leader Yasser Arafat reached out his hand and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, however tentatively, however reluctantly, reached out his hand and the two historically bitter enemies actually touched, shook hands, for the whole world to see. That picture was printed over and over. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of words were written about it. People from both Arafat's and Rabin's cultures condemned the touch -- were shocked by it! Whatever has happened, whatever will happen since that handshake occurred, I will always see it as a moment when each man touched the untouchable one.

Please, Holy One, Universal Force, Creator, and Lover of us All, please let us so hear that our personal world is turned upside down. Help us to reach across chasms and history and tradition to touch others. Let us be willing to be touched by, helped by persons we have once despised. For some of us, that may be persons of another color or race, for others it may mean persons of a different political persuasion. For yet others, it may mean being willing to be touched by, helped by someone we have written off as almost non-human. Break us, melt us, mold us, use us so that, for us, there will no longer be even one person who is untouchable, one name that is unspeakable.

Amen.

Interview with Edwina Hunter
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Edwina, you talked about this terrible issue of exclusivity and untouchability. It stays with us, doesn't it?

Edwina Hunter: It really does.

Hardin: We see it all the time in terms of groups forming that have a very narrow perception of what is an acceptable person.

Hunter: This is something, Dave, that frightens me, I think, almost more than anything else. All over this country that is happening but not just here. We look at Germany and we look at what has happened there with the rise of neo-nazism. All we can do is call them hate groups that have formed in so many parts of the world and here. It seems that we are going to be hating and despising someone forever.

Hardin: I tend to simplify it too much probably, but I tend to think of it as something that people who have no self-regard and very little self-respect latch onto as way of creating a special being in themselves, a way of separating themselves from others because they feel so inadequate.

Hunter: I think you are right.

Hardin: How do we get these hate groups out? We believe in freedom of speech. I have seen the ACLU defend the right of the nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. What do we do about hate groups?

Hunter: Almost, I think, at times they need to be infiltrated. Something needs to happen that someone can move into them. I think we have seen over and over in our own lives that when we have come to know someone personally and care for an individual, then somehow we care more for that individual's group and for the people around.

Hardin: You mentioned this marvelous moment when Rabin and Arafat shook hands and the world shook with them.

Hunter: Yes.

Hardin: I remember a survey I saw when I was in the Holy Land, done by the U.S. State Department, that showed that if an Israeli knew a Palestinian personally, he was three times less likely to want the Palestinians to be restrained. If a Palestinian knew an Israeli personally, he was three times less likely to want Israel destroyed or damaged. It was a matter of knowing people. I was struck by that as I watched these two men shake hands and all of a sudden it seemed like the world kind of burst forth in a mood of peace. At least it struck me that way.

Hunter: Many people talked of weeping, of shedding tears at the moment in which that occurred.

Hardin:I know Mahatma Gandhi hated, and spent his life fighting, the issue of the untouchables, that person who contaminates you merely if you touch them. I guess I lead a sheltered life and you probably do too, Edwina. When the Yugoslavian country fell apart and these terribly destructive actions began, I didn't know there was such hatred in that country.

Hunter: I didn't either. I had no idea of the divisions and what would happen as far as ethnic cleansing is concerned.

Hardin: I am hopeful that we can get past it but it seems to be a very slow process. Let me ask you about another change. You moved all the way across the country. You had been teaching at the Pacific School of Religion for how long?

Hunter: In one capacity or another, for about fourteen years.

Hardin: And you moved to New York City, to Manhattan. What about the change? What was the biggest change for you doing that?

Hunter: It wasn't as big a change as it might have been for some people because Pacific School of Religion is an interdenominational seminary and we had as many as 30 or 40 different denominations and faiths on campus at once. Union has been known traditionally as nondenominational and there are even more there -- the diversity theologically, the diversity in race, culture, background.

Hardin: I sense in both places -- and you wouldn't be there without it --

Hunter: I wouldn't be there without it! That is the truth.

Hardin: I sense there is an inclusivity that is very important to you.

Hunter: There is a way in which I have said that probably Pacific School of Religion and Union are the only two schools where I could teach in this country.

Hardin: ...that really accepts so broadly all of us as people and I think that is very exciting. Now you start teaching again in January.

Hunter: In January.

Hardin: If we can just have more people saying what you are saying, maybe this hate stuff will end.

Hunter: We're hoping our students will go out and live it and say it.

Hardin: I think it's been great hearing you. I agree wholly with you and thank you for being with us.

Hunter: It's been great being with you, Dave.