A lawyer stood up and asked a pertinent question “What must
I do to inherit eternal life?”
The mutually agreed answer is the Golden rule “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”
But the lawyer wasn’t interested in intellectual theories,
he wanted to know “What must I do?”
He was interested in the practical
application of his religious tradition and the “Golden rule” for his own
life and how to live it.
And so twice in the course of Jesus’ answer he says “Do this and you will live” (v28) and “Go
and do likewise” (v37)
In the now famous parable of the Good Samaritan, it becomes
clear that in practical terms, love involves risk, trouble and expense. Moreover the action of the Samaritan wasn’t
simply a good neighbourly act, it involves pushing through his own barriers of
prejudice and inherited taboos and surpassing all basic obligations.
For both Jews and Samaritans “loving your neighbour “meant loving
a fellow Jew or a fellow Samaritan – your own group - because there was a great
hostility between the two groups. Although basically Jews, the Samaritans were
the result of Assyrian invasion and through assimilation and inter-marriage with the Assyrians, both they
and their traditions and their interpretation of their religion was deemed to
be adulterated and inferior to what was deemed the purer Judaism in Judea.
We know from just a cursory note taken of the situation in
the Middle East today to see how virulent the hatreds and taboos can become
between different cultural and religious groups. The most intense hatreds are
usually reserved for our closest neighbours. The greatest hatreds in the Middle
East today are not Muslim versus Christian or even Muslim versus Jews but
between Sunni and Shia Muslims, two branches of the same Islamic family.
Underpinning all the carnage that is happening in Syria today is that basic and
simple hatred.
In fact the similarity between Jew and Samaritan in 1st
century Palestine and Sunni and Alawite in modern Syria is striking. Just as
the Jews looked down on the impure and adulterated form of Judaism practiced by
the Samaritans so the Purist Sunni Muslim majority detest what they see as the
adulterated form of Islam practiced by the Alawite minority government, a
synchretised form of Shia Islam that has incorporated other forms into it –
apparently even celebrating the birth of Jesus and Good Friday (so I read),
interpreted in their own way of course.
In this religious and cultural war, this is why battle
hardened Shia fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon are now fighting with the Government
of Syria against their common Sunni enemies.
A direct application of this parable today in more or less
the same area where Jesus preached it would be if a wounded opposition fighter
from the Free Syrian army were to be tended and helped and found shelter and this
was paid for by a fighter from Hezbollah. The application is the same for any
protagonists, Jew and Arab, Taleban and American, Sunni and Shia, Catholic and
Protestant, Black and White. Put into that perspective we see more clearly the
risk, trouble and expense that the Samaritan was taking in a volatile social
situation, willingly to help someone in trouble.
Ethically this throws down the gauntlet to all of us. It is
a challenge to see the humanity and the need when it arises outside our own
group.
There is another little twist in Luke’s story. In verse 29,
the neighbour is the one that is helped but in verse 36 he is the one who
helps. Perhaps Luke si teaching us another lesson here.
To love one’s neighbour is not about establishing any
superiority. Carer and cared for, need each other. Just as I said last week,
for someone to give, someone has to be willing to receive. The Doctor needs the
patient as much as the patient needs the Doctor. Each does good to the other.
So if you want eternal life, which is a quality of life here
in this world, Jesus invites us to go and do likewise,
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