Sermon preached on July 14, 2013
Saint Clements by the Sea, San
Clemente
By Shireen Baker
Text:
Luke 10: 25-37 (The Good Samaritan)
Today’s Gospel starts
in the same way as many other Gospel lessons, a leader in the community, stands
up and ‘tests’ Jesus in some way. This
time it is a lawyer and he asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal
life?" Lawyers were teachers of Jewish law and were concerned with
maintaining the law in its minutia. In this story he is testing to see how well
Jesus knew and preached the laws of Moses.
Despite the antagonism
of the questioner, Jesus takes the question seriously, and turning it around on
the lawyer asks, “What is in the law?” Amazingly
the lawyer answers Jesus by reciting the two great commandments, “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as
yourself."
You see, the importance
of loving God and your neighbor was by no means a new concept. There is a story about an honored Jewish
leader, a Pharisee and lawyer known as Hillel the Elder, who died when Jesus
was about 10 years old. In this story a
Gentile approaches him and asks him to explain the Torah to him while he stands
on one foot, Hillel’s answers the Gentile
saying, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole
Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn.”
So the Lawyer already
knows what he is meant to do, but he persists because he wants to ‘Justify
himself.’ He wants to know the exact
boundaries of the law, who exactly is he supposed to love, who can he leave
out, how little can he do to be made righteous?
It is in answer to this
question that Jesus tells the story that we now know as “The Good
Samaritan”. These days the word
Samaritan has come to mean ‘compassionate helper.’ And generally we think we understand the
point of the tale – ‘Don’t be like those
bad compassionless priests and Levites, be nice like the Good Samaritan.” But is that what the story is really telling
us, or is Jesus challenging the lawyer, and us, to something much more
difficult?
In the story that Jesus
tells, the priest and the Levite, were respectable, good Jews. They were the ordinary temple workers, not so
high up in the temple hierarchy that they would have been unrelatable, but were
still holy, clean and law abiding. And
their reaction to the man lying on the side of the road, was not done out of
callousness, or cruelty. Their jobs
required that they maintain a high standard of purity. They would no longer be able to work in the
temple if they came in contact with a dead body and the very act of going over
to check would have put their jobs at risk.
What’s more, the body could easily have been a trap, set there by
robbers, they very easily could have become victims of a crime on that isolated
stretch of highway, all in all the risks seemed to outweigh the rewards. So they did not get involved, before they
could even think about helping or not, they crossed over to the other side of
the street, avoiding the problem entirely.
Jesus’ listeners would
probably have been saddened by the actions of the priest and Levite, but those
actions would still have seemed understandable.
The actions of the
Samaritan, on the other hand, would have been alarming, nonsensical even.
Now, of course, we know
that a Samaritan is not necessarily someone who helps people in need, a
Samaritan is part of a schismatic sect of Judaism that lived a very separate
life from the rest of the Jewish population.
Instead of worshiping at the temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritans
worshiped on mount Garizen, and they did not interact with those outside of their
sect. Samaritans were seen as unclean
heretics, but what is equally important is that Samaritans saw the Jews as
unclean heretics as well. Generally
Samaritans would have avoided contact with Jews at all cost. So for this particular Samaritan to delay his
own journey, risk his own well-being, spend a large sum of money and promise to
return to check up on the injured man, was absolutely astonishing. He went far above anything that would have
been expected of anyone, much less a Samaritan.
And after all this, the
Lawyer’s question “who is my neighbor?” is actually the wrong question
entirely, so Jesus doesn’t even answer it, instead he rephrases it, asking the
lawyer “who was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
The lawyer wants to
know what his rights and responsibilities are under the law; he wants to know
“who do we have to be neighbors to?” But
Jesus wants to know “how much of a neighbor are we capable of being?” How far can we push the limits of our love
for one another? How much are we willing
to risk, how much are we willing to sacrifice?
Without question the
man on the street, a fellow Jew, would have been considered neighbor to the
priest and the Levite, but they had other laws to worry about, other
responsibilities to hide behind. Without
question the man on the street would NOT have been considered a neighbor to the
Samaritan, but he acted, not out of responsibility but out of love.
Every day we are faced
with similar challenges, and I know that I for one am constantly falling into
the mindset of the Lawyer, asking myself questions, “how much do I have to give
to the homeless man asking for change?” “How
much time do I have to spend helping this person find their lost dog?” “How
long do I have to spend talking to this lonely person on the subway before I
can go back to reading my book?”How far do I have to go? How much do I have to sacrifice? But most of the time I have stopped asking
entirely, I have set the limits to what I can do and that is that. Love does not really come into it at all.
But Jesus makes it
pretty clear that there really is no limit to the love we should be showing to
one another, and we know this, every Sunday we are faced with Christ’s
teachings, over and over again we are told to ‘put on Christ,’ to take up the
cross and follow, we know the challenge that is before us - we know what it
really means to be a ‘Good Samaritan.’ But
knowing is simply not good enough and Christ says in the end “Go and do
likewise.”
But how can we,
really? The task seems so daunting, so
beyond reason even. Real loving compassion,
the kind the Samaritan felt, that kind of compassion is so difficult to
sustain. It requires entering into other
people’s suffering, into other people’s weakness and pain, It requires becoming
vulnerable when what we really want to do is find a quick and easy cure or run
away from the suffering entirely.
It is most certainly
not easy, but there are ways -
Thomas Merton once
wrote “"Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to
thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new
things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new."
I think it is in this
way that we can slowly but surely be formed as Christians, abandoning the
question “what are my Christian responsibilities?” and asking instead “how much
love can I show today?”
