The Good Samaritan

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 1^st 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, 

Giving and receiving

Paul uses the dichotomy flesh and Spirit as a kind of shorthand. In Paul’s language he uses the word flesh here to mean anything that just satisfies yourself and no-one else and builds up your own ego, and Spirit to mean any impulse that has its source in God and is for the common good.

He starts this extract by giving some pastoral advice on how to heal wounds that inevitably occur in any community – to do it gently and listen to the other.....easier said than done. He says that bearing each other’s burdens is actually fulfilling the law of Christ because it respects the other and gives then time and worth and therefore is the outworking of Love. Personally I think the most valuable thing you can give anyone is your time and attention, as this conveys respect and worth to the other.

This time given to the other is much more needful in a church than people who are puffed up in pride about their own spiritual gifts - people that he gently chides in verses 3 and 4.

An interesting line for us nowadays I think is that he writes “Work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.”

Showing partiality towards your own group could be interpreted as self serving but I think Paul uncovers an uncomfortable truth.

And that is that many of us are far more comfortable supporting others in far away countries, whether financially or with our prayers than we are showing any compassion or support for the person we are sitting next to in church.

Aid, whether material or financial to people far away is at arms length. It is impersonal  and takes very little effort and can often satisfy our own spiritual pride as much as anything. It is paradoxically much harder to show support, physical, emotional, financial or spiritual to those much closer to home.

There was a spiritual discussion last week of which I was a part, concerning giving and receiving. The concensus was that it is much easier to give than to receive. I think that the reason that we so often don’t give to our closest neighbours is that we are afraid of the response.

We are frightened that our offer will be misinterpreted, or our offer rejected or that we may have ulterior motives, that in the giving and receiving there is a power imbalance and the receiver may feel disempowered. Our sense of pride and autonomy may be threatened.

But for someone to give, someone must be open to receive.

This requires an openness to each other that may be hard work. But one other thing came out of that spiritual discussion. Giving and receiving is one thing, but what almost all of us without exception find it most difficult to do is ask for help when we need it..

We see it as a sign of weakness. Admitting weakness is not something to be encouraged in society at large because we know as sure as eggs are eggs we will be taken advantage of, trampled underfott and probably ridiculed as well just for good measure.

Perhaps the most important function an open and accepting church can offer its members is this safe accepting and open space where we can admit when we are weak and in need and actually ask for help.

But when people do ask for your help it is such a lovely thing. That they have approached you and asked you is such a lovely thing – it is a blessing.

We deny that blessing to people when we don’t ask for help when we need it. I am as big a culprit as anyone here. It is something we all need to foster and help each other out with.

It starts with us feeling comfortable and relaxed in each other’s company and is an acknowledgement that we are all in need all of the time. At root we are are all looking for love and we just want to be happy.

It sounds so lightweight that doesn’t it? No mention of sacrifice, or redemption or salvation or any other heavy religious terms, but it’s true.

That is the human condition. We are all looking for love and we want to be happy.  Happiness comes from within – a content and accepting and peaceful relationship with ourselves, life, the universe, with God and also from without – with each other our families, friends and for us our fellow travellers and seekers in the church. If we can’t offer love, acceptance and happiness in any of our practices then we are not fulfilling the law of Christ which is Love.  

Let the dead bury their own dead.

This part of Luke’s gospel is where Jesus resolutely sets his face towards Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where the great confrontation with the earthly powers is going to take place.

It was going to be the Passover, the greatest religious feast for the Jews, and everything that Luke considers important about Jesus’ life will happen there in a grand climax, the last supper, the betrayal, trial, crucifixion and the rising again on the third day.

It was a grand clash of kingdoms, in Jesus’ mind and worldview. The kingdoms of this world set in stark opposition to the Kingdom of God. They were going eyeball to eyeball, toe to toe.

There must be no distraction, no loss of nerve, no prevarication. The phrase “No-one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” is a direct reference to the great prophet Elisha (1 Kings 19:20) who when he was called was allowed a little respite to get his house in order before he followed Elijah, but Jesus says we can’t even allow that, the situation is so urgent.

Into this situation is uttered one of the most radical statements Jesus ever uttered. It is “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

Just as Jesus spoke of sighted people who were blind, so he spoke of living people who were dead.

Now in Judaism, the duty to bury one’s own father was one of the most sacred obligations, overruling even the Sabbath rules. For Jesus tp say something like that was really radical stuff.

But the symbolic meaning is clear. There is a way of living that amounts to living in the land of the dead. The saying also affirms that it is possible to leave the land of the dead. It is both an indictment and an invitation.

It is an indictment and an invitation that transcends time and space and is spoken to each one of us today.

Death as a metaphor for a way of living appears twice in the parable of the prodigal son. The Father says both “This son of mine is dead” and “This brother of yours is dead” to his angry elder son.

To state the obvious, the prodigal son was very much physically alive, yet his life in a foreign land is spoken of as equivalent to being dead. He came alive again when he returned to his family and was welcomed back into the loving arms of his family.

In fact if you remember that story, the prodigal son was very nervous about approaching his Father, it was his Father on seeing him in the distance ran towards his son and embraced him and proclaimed a feast to celebrate.

God running towards a person and embracing them is a lovely picture of what happens in baptism. No matter how tentative and nervous or unaware anyone might be, however young or old you might be, how deep or shallow our understanding may be, the embrace, the love is the same.

The Metanoia, the change of heart and mind is the beginning and the content of the way of Jesus. In the gospel reading Jesus also says “Follow me”. That is what he wanted.

So many Christian waste so much time grovelling at Jesus’ feet. He never never asked for any of that you know. He would rather you got up from your knees, and he’ll help you up, put you on your feet and help us to walk the path that he walked. To live as he lived.

If you want pointers to how to live as he lived, all the parables in the gospels are the direct teaching as to how to live as a child of God. It is a walk marked by compassion, forgiveness, but also of sacrifice and determination, courage and strength.     

Amazing Grace?

The question Paul is wrestling with is this.

He has had a revelation that faith is the only thing that matters, and this revelation came through his Damascus road experience.

But if faith is all that matters how come God revealed himself through the law?

What satisfies him intellectually is the notion that although faith is all that matters, the world needed to be nannied and led towards this revelation – the the experience of the Israelites and the ten commandments and the reams of prohibitions that came after was a necessary precursor to this final and best revelation that faith is what really matters.

Actually when you read Paul some more he rationalises that much more to his satisfaction by noting that Abraham, who operated by faith, pre-dates Moses. So in fact, faith did come first, but the law was a necessary part of the plan.

All very well, but what difference does it make? Well in Paul’s case, as I noted last week, this discovery means Freedom.

He feels set free. If knowing Christ through faith means freedom, then his lifetime as a Pharisee, his religious life was lived as if in a prison, bounded by rules, regulations, rituals, creeds.

In his experience, God circumvented all of those conventional religious means of making contact and contacted Paul direct. If you remember his conversion story, he was struck blind, and through the intervention of another Christian “the scales fell from his eyes.” This is a metaphor forthe profound change that had occurred in his life – he had gone from darkness to light – from a prison to freedom.

But freedom can be a dangerous thing. In fact Paul has to spend some time in his letters trying to tell people that Christian Freedom doesn’t mean you can do just whatever you like whenever you like, disregarding all around you. This freedom exists within the law of love. As he writes,  “All things are possible for me but not everything is profitable, not everything edifies”.

This difference between licence and freedom, and the difficulty is discerning which is which is the reason that for most of its history the church has disregarded Freedom and preferred to fall back into being a religion of rules and laws. Grace, the fundamental gift of Christianity to the world - unmerited love – is not most Christian’s experience of the church and its ways. The word Grace  is spoken of, but the message most often received is that you need to be good to get into heaven.

Something to think about for yourself. What is Christianity for me? A source of freedom, or a written moral code? If it is essentially freedom – can I handle that freedom, or do I prefer the safety of the guilded cage?   

Come to the well.

In this modern parable – the divine, the universal principle of wholeness and unity, the source of beauty and creativity is available to everyone equally, entirely free of charge. 

God is here and with us now. He is around you and within you. In fact nothing can separate you from the love of God.

If you want to find God you can find Him in the beauty and creativity that is all around us and you can also find him by looking inside yourself – for as Jesus pointed out  - you won’t find the kingdom of God anywhere else, for the Kingdom of God is within you.

And this God within you – his essential character is LOVE.

In John’s letter in the New Testament, if fact he says that GOD iS LOVE .

I’m sure that many will say here today that I might believe in God if I could only feel or experience God.

Well the Christian revelation is that every time you give or receive love,  in thought words or deeds, you have experienced Love because God IS Love and Love is GOD.

Every time you forgive someone or are yourselves forgiven, every time you feel compassion or someone feels compassion for you, every time someone helps someone else, you are experiencing God in your life.

You have direct access to this divine through your own heart, soul and mind. You have free access to the well that is fullness of life.

Jesus, when he spoke to the woman at the well, told her of a spring that would well up from deep inside her.  He called that well of God’s love – Living water.  We all have free access to that water.

In the parable people came and told us that you can really only come to the water if you have to fill in lots of forms and wait your turn or do a dance in the right way and wait to see if you are judged worthy to gain access.

And that is how many people see God today – as a distant phantom unconnected with their real lives and hidden behind  loads of barriers and obstacles that we have to fight through to eventually get to him.

Don’t believe it. You are, we are, God’s children. When we come together on a Sunday morning in church – it is not to fight our way through an obstacle course to try and qualify for an audience with the divine – we come out of gratitude to celebrate what we already have. The gift of our own lives and the presence of God within them.  

That is why we celebrate. Though we all have troubles – life is a gift. Make the most of it and celebrate. God is here. His Spirit is with us.

It is not I who live.....

When we read dense theology like Paul’s letter to the Galatians we become acutely aware that we are reading someone else’s mail and have no idea who he was responding to and why they were at odds with Paul.

But from reading Paul’s arguments we have normally understood, in crude terms, that Paul believed that he was made right with God through his faith in Christ. And this was in a natural opposition to the Jews (by which we understand the term to refer to the Pharisees or a pharisaic frame of mind) who  thought that they were made right with God by observing the law. So Paul champions Grace and the Jews champion works.

But actually that simplistic view is rather undermined by the 1^st century Jewish historian Josephus who wrote this interesting phrase in his book “The antiquities of the Jews”;

“It is not possible for men to return thanks to God by means of works, for the Deity stands in need of nothing and is above any such recompense”

If we take Josephus’ statement as the standard mainstream Jewish viewpoint, it means that they didn’t observe the law because they thought they would gain anything from it – they observed the law out of gratitude to a God who loved them. Following the law was something that indicated grateful acceptance of what God had done for them.

If that is so then the sharp dichotomy between a Jewish and Christian understanding of law versus grace becomes very blurred indeed.

You could in fact say that what Jesus did is simply clarify what that law really meant and took the written word and its’ laws and myriad constraints and duties and made them an affair of the heart.  Jesus in fact clarifies and simplifies the law by cutting straight to the heart of the matter.  Jesus sums up the law in the Golden rule “Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. He takes an external set of codes and internalises them. In the last days the law will be written on their hearts said the Old Testament prophets.

I think it serves us well to remember this when we read parables where the fall guys are always the scribes and the Pharisees, and sometimes the Sadducees.

Rather than an example of a split between Judaism and Christianity, the differing attitudes employed by Jesus and the Pharisees, might better be seen as examples of different dispositions that we all possess.

Heart and mind don’t always work in tandem and often the Pharisee in all of us gets the upper hand over the Jesus  way within us.

These two dispositions are on display in the parable in Luke. The central character is a woman who we are told up front is a “sinner” but who hears that Jesus is in the house of Simon the Pharisee as his lunch guest and goes to see him herself.  Her gratitude at being forgiven is evident in her lavish treatment of Jesus, anointing his feet with oil and drying them with her hair.

All the Pharisee sees is a sinner, but Jesus sees a person who is wholeheartedly sorry for whatever she has done and the gratitude in her for knowing that she is forgiven is enormous. The line attributed to Jesus is those who are forgiven little love little. At first sight a bit harsh, because it implies that only people who go seriously off the rails can love God a lot, and those of us who never do anything very seriously wrong, well our love is always going to be a bit tepid.

But on reflection perhaps he is right. I don’t think he is making a judgement – he is simply being straightforwardly honest.

Taking St. Paul as an example. In Romans 8 Paul makes a huge thing of no longer being condemned by God for all his transgressions because he has discovered Grace and forgiveness.

But what if like me, it never entered your head for a minute that I was ever condemned by God in the first place? What was a blessed relief to Paul and a cornerstone of his theology to me is just incomprehensible words.

I think it is apt here to discuss this word “Sin” as well. Our normal understanding of the word is that it is tantamount to evil, or wrongdoing. But in the Christian scheme of things “sins” i.e. wrongdoing  is simply a consequence of “Sin” capital “s” which is more properly means “separation from God”.

The answer to separation is being together which we call atonement. Our sins, our transgressions or trespasses if you prefer, are a natural consequence of being separate from God. Our sins are products of our self centredness, our egos run riot. Only “I” matter. I am the centre of all things.

The antidote to that is God-centredness. When we realise that it is not just “me”, it is “us”. When what is separate is brought back together and made whole. We are all a part of a deeper and all encompassing reality. It is what Paul meant when he wrote, in that Galatians piece “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me”

It is then that we learn to love more and be more compassionate. Then that we learn to be a bit less judgemental, a bit more expansive. But we have to keep at it. Metanoia, repentance is not a once for all thing, it is a daily decision.

The Pharisee is still there within us, and will assert himself at any and every opportunity. To welcome or not to welcome, to love or not to love, to include or not to include. Daily decisions made easier if you know you are already an intrinsic part of the whole and have gratitiude for that greatest gift of all – your own life.. 

Be the change you are looking for.

Let me start by drawing out some important points from the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Nain.

Widow’s were amongst the most vulnerable people in Jewish society in the first century. Along with orphans they were a shorthand way of describing someone in absolute dire need.  In her society, without a husband her son would be her provider and protector, and with him dead her state was parlous, and faced probable destitution.

This parable then sees Jesus as the embodiment of God answering or meeting a great need. Note also that nobody asks Jesus to act, and no one declares any faith.  But God, and the transformative nature of God’s presence is “in” the situation and makes a difference.

Jesus wasn’t the first person in the Bible said to have raised people from the dead of course. In fact in the old testament the prophets Elijah and Elijah both raise the dead children of widows (1 & 2 Kings) parables saying exactly the same thing – that God’s presence meets dire need and can have a transformative effect.

The very nature of God is to bring life out of death both symbolically and literally, both within our mortal lives and beyond our mortal existence.

As a premium example of someone being brought from spiritual death to spiritual life within his mortal life, St. Paul recounts his own experience in his letter to the Galatians.

He writes of his own experience of being an active opponent of the church and having a profound spiritual experience on the road to Damascus that transformed his life.  We can easily forget that St. Paul never knew Jesus and has no knowledge or very little direct knowledge of Jesus’ life and ministry which is why you find no references to Jesus’ life or sayings in any of Paul’s letters.

All he would have had to go on was his meeting with Peter and James in Jerusalem after disappearing to Arabia for three years after his conversion experience. In our translation, after his sojourn in the desert it said that he “visited” Peter, but apparently the English word doesn’t do Justice to the Greek. It was more of a private consultation where there would have been an exchange of views and Peter would doubtless have also furnished Paul with some basic information on what Jesus was actually like in life.

Paul’s  “knowing” of the Spirit of God in Jesus wasn’t based on a personal flesh and blood encounter, it was based on a spiritual encounter – a spiritual encounter that Paul himself puts on the same level as the post resurrection encounters of the twelve apostles by the way. That encounter resulted in a re-orientation of Paul’s mind and Spirit that we call metanoia  - but a more common word would be a transformation.

So for us, the template for transformation is Paul rather than the disciples. We, like St. Paul, never knew Jesus, but the possibility of God taking our lives and making them more productive and fruitful based on a spiritual encounter, or a series of spiritual encounters - a deeper knowing of God -  is exactly the same for us as for Paul.  (And actually exactly the same as it was for Jesus!)

I noted in my mid week letter that both Paul and Jesus took time to discern what their encounters meant. Both took a long time in the desert or wilderness, which you can take metaphorically or literally to think and contemplate and work out what this encounter really meant for them.

We are the same. Whatever inner compulsion you have for going to church, whatever experience of the nebulous you have ever had, whatever nagging questions you have ever had about your life and place in the cosmos – we need to honestly lay those questions out in front of us to allow us to think about them in the context of a Spiritual reality we call God and trust that in following that light however dim it might sometimes feel, we might discern his presence with us and trust that we are heading in the right direction and are heading towards our goal – which is also God.

A little further on you may also discern that this journey is actually one of self realisation. In coming to know God you come to know yourself and likewise, in getting to know who you really are in the core of your being, you come to know God. I am reminded of the old lliturgical greeting..

Come near to God and he will come near to you.

This comes from the letter of James and seems to encapsulate what I am trying to say. Of course James, Jesus’ brother, was the other person Paul names as meeting in Jerusalem. James is yet another example of Spiritual life out of death. Jesus’ family were against him in his life but came to a new understanding of his brother’s life and message after he had died. And so, because of his provenance as Jesus’ brother it was James rather than any of the disciples that came to pre-eminence in the early church in Jerusalem. James writes of an internal Spiritual transaction;

Come near to God and he will come near to you.