NewCreation

Homily for 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year С

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And this week, following on almost directly from last Sunday's Gospel, we have the Gospel of the Good Samaritan. And this is one of two parables unique to Luke which are told in the most brilliant and vivid storytelling detail, and which both of them — this one and the parable of the Prodigal Son — are almost definitive of what we know of and love as Christianity. They've come to be absolutely key texts for our understanding what our faith is about, and for very good reasons in both cases. It's curious, though, that the parable of the Good Samaritan is only told in Luke's Gospel. And there may be good reasons for that. The similar incident which occurs in Mark's Gospel comes towards the end of Mark's Gospel, while Jesus is being questioned in the Temple. And there it's a scribe who comes up to Jesus and asks Jesus what is the most important of all the laws, and Jesus answers with very much the same answer as the lawyer gives here. And it's the scribe who's happy with the answer, and then goes on to fill that out and say, "Yes, that is true; this is more important than all the laws and all sacrifices." In other words, it's where Mark does something which Matthew does in other places, which is indicate how key Jesus' teaching is about God wanting mercy, not sacrifice. And that's what loving God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength looks like. It looks like loving mercy and not sacrifice. So what I think St. Luke has done is probably — and this may have come from Jesus himself, who knows — but it's certainly the way of filling out Jesus's understanding of "I want mercy and not sacrifice," and how that's lived out. So let's just see how Luke does this. So a lawyer stands up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" I always think that line is more important than it seems. Because he's not just saying what must I do to be a good boy, or to grow up and be a fine adult, or whatever it is. No, he's asking him a legal question to do with inheriting eternal life. That means joining in the life to come, the life of God. Of course, if you believe in God who is greater than anything that is, who's the source of all that is, in whose eyes we are small objects — if you like, before whom we are all small — then of course the life of God is something that's categorically different from what we know. It's something vastly bigger, and we're required to be stretched into it. So inheriting the life of God is a pretty dynamic It's not just a "you've behaved well, good brownie points." He's actually asking a serious question in a monotheistic world: what must I do to inherit the future life, the coming-upon-us life? Which would have been a good Jewish question. Jesus said to him, "What's written in the law? How do you read it?" — understanding that, as a lawyer, you're in the business of interpreting texts, putting texts together, seeing where they make sense together, how they interpret each other, and so forth. In other words, he's asking him a standard question in response to a legal opinion. You put together different opinions, putting together different elements of law and showing how they interpret each other. So far, so good. So the lawyer, who's clearly done his homework, says, "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 neighbour as yourself." So the lawyer has put together two bits of law: a bit of law from Deuteronomy, or maybe from the Joshua version, which is about loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind; and then he's added a little bit from Leviticus: "And you shall love your neighbour as yourself." These two don't come together in the Hebrew Scriptures. It was a deliberate act, putting them together — putting together the love of God and the love of neighbour as the same thing. And that's a very good answer. From Jesus: "One who hears" — no, exactly the right thing. "So you have given the right answer. Do this and you will live." You understand that love of God and love of neighbour are essentially the same thing. But wanting to justify himself, the lawyer asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbour?" So I don't exactly know what it means by wanting to justify himself. Was he underwhelmed, that he'd received basically "yes, what a splendid answer, that's that"? Or was he trying to push for something a little bit more from Jesus? Because after all there is an open question. Because in the book of Leviticus, where we have the passage about loving the neighbour as yourself, this is what Leviticus 19 verse 17 takes — says, "you shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin, you shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord." Okay, now all that's about your people. So might the lawyer be saying, well, okay, so is my neighbor just amongst my people? Well, also in the book of Leviticus, but a few verses later, it says, "when an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. You shall love the alien as yourself. For you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God." So you shall love the alien as yourself. In other words, the tendency of the book of Leviticus is to universalizing the notion of neighbor. It's not only your people, but even foreigners who are amongst you. You are to love them as yourself. You are to treat them the same. A very, very stern commandment, and one which, of course, most of our countries have forgotten, is the very strictest law of the Lord. But that's what it seems the lawyer wanted interpretation with. Should this be read in a universalizing way? How am I to detect my neighbor? How do I know what limits to put on anything if my neighbor is potentially anybody? Because if you're a lawyer, naturally you want to be able to distinguish between when you've got something right and when you've got something wrong. And it's here that Jesus turns the whole thing around. "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead." Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho means going away from the Temple. So it's not specifically going towards somewhere where they would need to be preparing directly for the cult. Jerusalem to Jericho is a steep downhill road. I mean, Jericho is close to the Dead Sea. You go way down below sea level to get to Jericho. So they stripped him and beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. And the Greek word there, hēmithanē, means quite literally "half dead." It's a very exact term. Now, it's quite important that this person is half dead. It can't be determined, obviously, whether he's alive or dead, probably without touching him. Now, by chance, a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. By chance. Everything in this Gospel is accidental: "it happened that," "by chance, this and that." Nothing is preordained, there's no, if you like, grand scheme of things being fulfilled in some way. No, it's just things happening, damn things happening one after another. Someone's got beaten up, a priest is going down the road, when he sees him he passes by on the other side. If I were a priest at the time, I would probably have done exactly the same thing, because the risk of my touching a corpse — which would have left me impure and thus unable to function as a priest for weeks, and thus unable to earn money to feed my family — was very high. So we easily despise the priest. I think it's quite important that for the first listeners of this story, it would have probably made sense why the priest passed by. We're used to saying, "Oh, the priest is obviously the bad guy" — yeah, okay, priests are bad guys, we'd better get used to it. But the point here is that the priest was supposed not to touch a corpse, and they wouldn't know whether this was a corpse or not without touching him. So likewise a Levite is in pretty much the same position as regards the need for ritual purity, and the ability to earn his keep dependent on that, looking after his family. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. "But a Samaritan, while traveling, came near him, and when he saw him, he was moved with pity." Well, the Samaritan was the then-equivalent of the detested other, the unbearable other, the person who in your narrative could not possibly be a good person. You think of whatever your world is divided into, who the good is and bad is — it's the sort of person who most irritates you, the person you find it most difficult to attribute good motives to. You can imagine that whichever side of whatever racial or national divide you are, or gender, whatever — think of any disability — it's the one about whom good things could not possibly be imagined. It's the narcissism of small differences: those who are most like you and therefore most utterly repulsive to you. This is the one who is coming along at this point. That's what the Samaritans were for Jews and vice versa: the people who had strong views about each other and tried to make each other's lives as difficult as possible under given circumstances. So the Samaritan comes along. When he saw him, he was moved with pity. And this is obviously the key verse in the Gospel, the key word in the Gospel: he was moved with pity. His viscera came out — esplanchnísthē — the viscera were moved, he was gut-wrenched, literally. And of course, what was he gut-wrenched at? He was gut-wrenched at seeing a neighbour as himself. He didn't see an object to be avoided so that I can look after my family. He saw, "That could be me there, my neighbour as myself." He saw himself in the rejected, the thrown-out one. And of course the irony is that that's how God saw God's self: in the sacrificed one. That's why did the Levite and the priest have to keep themselves pure? Well, so that they could offer the sacrifice. And what was the sacrifice? Which was usually indicated by God's entrails — that was God's portion of the sacrifice. That was God showing God's compassion with human beings by adopting the form of a human sacrificial victim. So the irony is that the Samaritan has seen the neighbour as himself, which of course is how God sees the human sacrificial victim: with deep, deep pity. So he goes to him, bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them — oil to smooth down the beaten bits, the bruises, and wine, which was the best disinfectant they had at the time. It killed the germs, killed any infections that were growing. Then he put him on his own animal — so again, no consideration of whether that would cause some sort of impurity to his animal or not — brought him to an inn and took care of him. So he himself takes him to the inn and looks after him in the inn. The next day he takes out two denarii, which is several days' wages, and gives them to the innkeeper and says, "Take care of him. And when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend." In other words, "I am now making a pledge here to you that I will be good for the care of this person. This person — I'm going to take responsibility for them until they get better. I will repay you whatever more you spend." "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" So notice that the question which Jesus answers is not actually the question which the lawyer asked him. The lawyer asked him, "Who is my neighbor?" And Jesus puts the question at the end: who turned out to be neighborly towards someone? In other words, the definition of neighbor is not best thought of as to whom am I limited, or to whom am I obligated as a minimum in order to be a decent person. It is better seen as: what is it like actually to create neighborliness in an ongoing and sustained way for someone? That's what being a neighbor is. The neighbor starts from the other, not from you wondering how that other fits into your life. It's the other who alters your life — that is the key thing. Now, Jesus has answered the question about inheriting eternal life here. And the really interesting thing is that the Samaritan, who is obviously the model for this, has been taken by surprise. He's come across somebody lying on the road. He has been moved by him. He has given of himself in caring for him, and he's prepared to give himself even more. He's so excited to be found doing these things — he's actually found something real in life. After this person, actually being prepared to run the risk of picking up the hospital bill at the end, which could be very considerable, he's prepared to give himself away to that, because he's discovered what it's like to share the life of God. It's better to give yourself away even if you don't really know where that will take you. That's what it looks like to inherit the life of God: creating neighborliness, giving yourself away, even in ways that you can't control, being prepared as it were to put yourself at risk in order to do that. He has discovered what it is like to inherit eternal life, to be on the inside of the life of God. So Jesus asks this question to the lawyer, who says — and it's difficult to tell whether he's just being loyally exact, or whether he doesn't want to say the word "the Samaritan" — because the lawyer answers, when he's asked, "Which do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?", the lawyer says, "The one who showed him mercy." Mercy, not sacrifice. The one who showed him mercy — that was the one who created neighborliness. So yes, obviously the lawyer doesn't want to admit that it was One of them bastards who's the good guy in this story. But the whole point of this story is that we have been able to retell it and retell it and retell it in every conceivable different generation according to who our annoying, irritating other – to whom we cannot attribute good – is. And we can imagine them learning to rescue us, creating neighbourliness for us, and saying, "Ah, that's eternal life," which then may prepare us to be able to recognise others in situations of extremity and so enter into eternal life. It's the surprise and the excitement and the joy of discovering the life of God in mercy and not in sacrifice. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.