Sermon of the Month - April 2010
Parables: The Good Samaritan
Introduction
The big problem with the parable of the Good Samaritan is our over-familiarity with it – and not just ours here in church; even in our society at large. It’s so familiar that Mrs Thatcher the Prime Minister chose it as her text when given the opportunity to preach a sermon. Her take on it – that ‘no one would have heard of the Good Samaritan if he were not well off enough to have the two coins in his pocket to spend on helping the man in need’ is, shall we say, a different focus than others you might hear. But this story is so familiar that several cabinet ministers in her government thought it worth their while quoting the story, and agreeing with Mrs Thatcher’s interpretation. There are not many parts of the Bible that would be taken as so familiar to the non-church-going nation at large, that they can simply be quoted with an assumption everyone will recognise the story.
To take a more recent example, an evangelical Christian leader was on BBC Question Time, and was dealing with a difficult question about homosexuality, and Claire Short, then a Labour cabinet minister, tried to take him to task by saying, ‘Surely you should just follow the Good Samaritan, and love your neighbour, whether that neighbour is gay or whatever?’
The story of the Good Samaritan is very familiar indeed, and everyone feels they know what it means.
1. Love is not ‘law and order’
Jesus told this story 2,000 years ago, and 2,000 years ago the whole of the Mediterranean world, together with Western Europe and South-Eastern Europe, was ruled by the Roman Empire.
The political leaders of Rome did not take to the message of the Good Samaritan, and the way of love as naturally as modern politicians like Margaret Thatcher or Claire Short. A slogan you may hear some politicians talk about is ‘law and order’, and the experts on both law and order were the Romans. They did of course have a strong belief in the rôle of law in the building up of an efficient and effective society. Indeed their ideas on law have proved so powerful and enduring that they form a basis for British law and for much law-making across the Western world. But it’s not just law, it’s order too. The Romans of course had the most ruthlessly efficient army in the ancient world, and nothing remotely competed with it for over a thousand years. But Roman order is just as obvious in their engineering skills. How many buildings that are more than 1,000 years old still survive? In this country, apart from a few stone circles, it’s only the Roman buildings that continue. Precious little from the Saxon age. And of course their famous roads still shape our landscape. Then there were aqueducts, rudimentary central heating systems and many other engineering feats.
Their world of ‘law and order’ was built on power. They felt it was civilisation. And far from respecting the Good Samaritan, and the Christians who followed the Messiah who told that story, they crucified them, set them on fire, fed them to the lions, had them killed by gladiators and the rest. They believed in raw power. Love, the cornerstone value of the Christians would surely be no match for that? But the more Christians were persecuted and martyred, the more people were converted into faith in Jesus, the King of Love.
The way of the Good Samaritan was a revolution in an age which assumed power was all. Love – not of course sentimental love, or family love or roamntic love – but the love demonstrated in and through Jesus himself, in his life and death for us, that love proved the answer to power. And Jesus and the followers of Jesus have been opposing the power-hungry ever since. Make love your aim – compassionate, caring love, the love of the Samaritan to a man in need. And Rome in the end was won to the King of love.
2. Love is not a ‘philosophy’
Back in 254 BC, Anaxarchus, the Greek philosopher fell in a ditch. After a bit, his favourite pupil, the philosopher Pyrrho passed by, and Anaxarchus cried out for help. Now Pyrrho followed the cynic and sceptical philosophy, and, although he was quite aware of the man in need, knew him very well, and was able to help him, he simply passed by on the other side. You might think he would be criticised. But this is ancient Greece. At the next lecture, Anaxarchus praised his pupil Pyrrho for his consistent apatheia – his utter disregard for feelings. What’s more, the Greeks generally were so impressed that they erected monuments to Pyrrho and gave him the keys of the city.
So the Good Samaritan with its philosophy of love was not what the Greeks were looking for either. The apostle Paul was very aware of this and said that the Greeks considered the way of love, shown in the cross of Christ, as foolishness to the Greeks. For if the Romans built their world on the efficient use of power, engineering power, organisational and legal power, and military power, the Greeks built theirs on philosophy, the love of wisdom, intellectual pursuits, experiential drive (which we also see in those other pursuits we trace back to the Greeks, our love of tourism, music and the arts, and of sport). To the Greeks, the best way was to stand high above the world and all its problems. Better to be blind to people’s needs, like Pyrrho, than to get down into the ditch, down to the side of the beaten man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. They were sure intellectual superiority would beat love every time. But Greece, just like Rome, was won to the Good Samaritan: the people, including the great thinkers were in due course won over to the way of love.
3. Love is not religious rules or ‘signs and wonders’
The Good Samaritan was a story told by a Jew to an audience of Jews, so surely here it should resonate most naturally? But it’s here it gets most challenging. First of all, we need to recognise that the Samaritan is not the victim here. We can easily overlook this – but this is the question the lawyer and Jesus were testing, at least on the face of it. We have the opening dialogue. Take it a bit like Prime Minister’s Questions, or like Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. The opening question is not always the the critical one, it just opens up the way. It’s the supplementary that counts. So the lawyer asks about the way to eternal life, and Jesus provides as straightforward an answer as you could imagine: what does the Law say? ‘Love God and love your neighbour,’ the lawyer summarises. He knows that is what Jesus would say, and he’s got his supplementary lined up, and is surprised perhaps to get there so quickly. And he will not allow himself to look foolish and wrong-footed. Here it comes: ‘Yes, but who is my neighbour?’ And what he expects from this is a debate as to whether the neighbour is restricted to Jews, or indeed to righteous Jews, or whether Jesus will be trapped into saying that we should also love our sinful neighbour, or even our Gentile or heretical Samaritan neighbour. But Jesus doesn’t answer the question the way he’s been set up. He doesn’t place the lawyer on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho and say, ‘Look, as he passed by, a lawyer saw a priest in need, later on he saw a sinful Jew, and finally he saw a Samaritan in need. Which ones is the lawyer duty bound to care for?’ Jesus said ‘A Jew was in a need’ – perhaps you, O lawyer, you are in desperate need on this dangerous road. And the priest and Levite pass by, ignoring you for fear you are dead, and they will become ritually unclean in touching you. But just when you have given up all hope of surviving along comes a Samaritan, a man you consider contemptible. But he is the one who saves your life. ‘So’, asks Jesus ‘who was neighbour to you?’ There’s no avoiding it: the Samaritan, the blood enemy, the heretic, he was the man who loved his neighbour. The fact is, we recognise it when we receive it. A lot of people get stuck on issues of sin and of goodness, and get wound up sometimes in all sorts of complexities. But Jesus says to them and to us: ‘Look, you know when someone loves you. You know when someone, however unexpected, cares for you, helps you, even saves your life. You know what it looks like, feels like, is like. So you do the same!’ Go and do likewise. If a Samaritan caring for you is right by God, then it’s got to be right for you as the one who wants to be true to God helps the Samaritan, or anyone else.
4. Love, actually
So what is love, actually?
Love turns the world upside down... No! Love turns the world the right way up. What a better world when people care, when they don’t let barriers like race, religion, class, income, appearance or anything else get in the way of caring.
After all, we have let God down. We are wrong in his eyes. Yet he loves us – he loves us enough for Jesus to die on the cross for us: God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
And love changes people. Love releases our potential. Love removes those barriers of distrust. Love builds up. Pride builds barriers, love removes them. Christ has removed the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Jew and Samaritan, believer and unbeliever. We not only love each other, we love those who are far away from us in all human terms. And the love of Christ bridges all those divisions. That is why it is so fantastic that we follow Jesus. For we follow the Lord who is the incarnation of love, absolutely.