Saint Michael’s Church
Serving God and Bishop’s Stortford
Sermon 11 July 2010
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St Michael's Church and All Saints, Hockerill 11th July 2010 6th Sunday After Trinity 8.00am Rev'd Toby Marchand |
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THE GOOD SAMARITAN.
Luke 10.25-37.
A few years ago I was out on my bicycle, cycling over a busy bridge over a railway track. Standing on the bridge, looking over on to the line below, was a woman. As I rode past her I distinctly heard above the noise of the traffic that she was crying.
I rode on.
“Well, it wasn’t easy to stop with all those cars and lorries. I might have caused an accident”.
“Anyhow I was late for an appointment. It probably wasn’t anything very serious. There was no report of a suicide in the papers the next day. It wasn’t my business”
“I don’t suppose there was anything I could have done”.
“Anyway I bet some of you have driven past the motorist stranded on the hard shoulder of the motorway without stopping to see if you could help!”
“.......and it so happened that a priest was going down the same road. And when he saw him he passed by on the other side”
I dislike the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It gives me an uneasy feeling every time I hear it, because of that woman. It convicts me. It disturbs me. It is part of that religion that Gerald Priestland, the great broadcaster, so aptly called Guilt-Edged religion in his series Priestland’s Progress.
The glorious thing about the parables of Jesus is that they have so many layers of interpretation. They are capable of providing many different avenues of thought.
Can I take you briefly down three of them?
The first is the interpretation of the parable as an allegory.....that is a story in which every detail represents something else. The most famous of these is probably the Parable of the Sower. In that we are given the interpretation from the lips of Jesus himself. “The seed is the word of God.. the rocky ground is the one where the seed springs up but has no root...and so on.”
The most famous allegorical interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable is that by St Augustine.
For Augustine this parable was an account of the history of mankind. And very ingenious it is, too.
“A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho” That is ADAM (or MAN) and the Jerusalem is the heavenly Jerusalem where all is peace , and from whose blessedness Adam fell away.
He fell among thieves. That is the Devil and his angels.
Who stripped him.........of his immortality. Made him mortal.
Beat him...............b y persuading him to sin.
And left him half-dead.....half dead because, in that Man can understand and know God he lives, but in that he turns away from God and sins, he dies. He is therefore half-dead.
The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by on the other side ....signify the religion and the priests of the Old Testament who could do nothing to save him.
The Samaritan is (you’ve guessed!) Jesus.
The binding of the wounds is the restraining of man’s sinful nature.
Oil is the comfort of Hope
Wine is the exhortation to work with a fervent spirit.
The donkey (the beast) is the way Jesus comes.....in other words the Incarnation. And when Man is set on his beast it means that Man believes in the incarnation of Jesus.
The Inn is the church where travellers returning to their heavenly country can be refreshed on their journey.
The two coins are the gifts of love and the spirit, given to the Innkeeper who is St Paul, and through him to the Church which he manages.
And the statement that “when I come again I will repay you fully” is, of course, a direct reference to the Second Coming and the grand reckoning at the end of time.
Clever isn’t it! And I must say |I have sneaking admiration for the way our whole history is neatly contained within this parable.
But I also have a sneaking feeling that that is not what Jesus was trying to say in it. Kit seems to me that, speaking to the illiterate crowds of his day, or even the untheological crowds of today, that story would mean very little on those lines. Unless you know the answers, so to speak, this crossword puzzle is too hard to crack.
So reluctantly, and with our thanks to St Augustine, I fear we must move on to another angle on the parable.
This also attracts me. It is the approach that looks at both the individual act of kindness, and the background situation, together. It urges Christians to involve themselves in both. First you are asked to imagine the plight of the poor man. We often think of ourselves as meant to be the Samaritan, that we sometimes forget what it must have been like for the victim.
You see individual acts of kindness, commendable though they be, are as nothing compared with the need to work to change society in which violence can happen.
In other words what the Samaritan needed to do also, apart from looking after this man, is to campaign to have the highway from Jerusalem to Jericho made safer.
A few street lights and a few street patrols would help!
If you really want to be a Good Samaritan get yourself on to the Jericho City Council and work to improve things.
You see the point I am making? What is sometimes described as “the social Gospel” is all here. This parable is the perfect hunting-ground for those Christians who want to express their faith through social concern: ...to campaign for Justice Freedom and Human Rights. It is not good enough, they say, to preach and to talk, YOU HAVE TO ACT! And act not just on the symptom (the man lying on the road) but the cause (the greed that makes robbery attractive) or (the laziness that leaves the roads unsafe.
I see the value of that. And I know that Christians need to be in the forefront of the campaign for justice, freedom, peace, and the protection of the environment. I am saddened that we do not make more impact in those fields, that Christians have sometimes been slow to take up just those issues which other caring people would expect to see them take up.
But I still feel that that is not quite what the Lord is teaching us in this parable. For me the message lies somewhere else; close by but somewhere else.
And to get to the heart of this parable, for me at any rate, I want to direct your attention for a moment to a small detail.
The Samaritan went to the man, bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and WINE> It’s the reference to wine that set me thinking. Wine in that situation is used for cleansing the wound. It is an antiseptic; much safer than using water if you live near Jericho. Oil would have been for soothing and softening, but first of all you need to cleanse the wound. The Samaritan uses wine.
Wine is a symbol of CLEANSING.
I think of the other references in the Gospels to the use of wine, and I am led to the |Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee. Do you remember how Jesus began his public ministry at a wedding reception? He was at this party and all of a sudden the wine gave out. In order that nothing should spoil the flow of happiness on that occasion he miraculously transforms water, large quantities of it, in to wine.....said by some who ought to know about these things to be the best wine of the party.
Jesus was renowned for the company he kept, the parties he attended, the joy he found in the company of tax-gatherers, prostitutes, sinners. His parables have many references to parties, to feasting, to wedding banquets. His presence at parties transformed an ordinary occasion in to a special occasion, in the same way that in his hands water was turned in to wine.
Wine is also a symbol of CELEBRATION.
And wasn’t it wine that featured so prominently in the Passover Meal?.....the Last Supper that he was to share with his disciples before he went to his death? Wasn’t it that rich, dark, red, wine that was to symbolise his rich, dark, red, blood about to be poured out for them all on the cross? And wasn’t it wine that he said that he would not drink again until he drank it new in the Kingdom of God with all of them?
The wine of the last supper became the symbol of the journey through death to life...the life of God’s kingdom, which he, Jesus, came to bring.
Wine, the symbol of eternal life, the symbol of fellowship with Jesus, establishes through the shedding of his blood and the glorious resurrection on the third day.
So Jesus seems to be telling me in this parable of the Good Samaritan, to answer my question (which is also the Lawyer’s question, and your question who is my neighbour?,) by concentrating on LOVE more than on NEIGHBOUR.
Love your neighbour was not a command that was new in the teaching of Jesus! It was there in the Old Testament. But what was new, profoundly new, was Jesus’ pointing to the need to get LOVE right first.
The Lawyer, like a good logical Jew, wanted to be able to define who his neighbour was. How far do the demands of love have to go? Who is my neighbour? My parents? My friends? My fellow Countrymen? Where do I draw the line?
Jesus is saying that you can’t do it that way round. Love doesn’t begin by defining its objects; it discovers them.
You can’t say “I’m going to show love and concern for the following types of people....now I will go out and find them and do good to them”!
The point of the parable is that if a person has love in their heart love will tell them who their neighbour is.
And that is the only possible answer to the lawyer’s question.
You have to think about the commandment to love your neighbour in terms of the word Love, not in terms of the word Neighbour. It can’t be a matter of definition.
At the Last Supper Jesus did not interview each of his disciples to test their loyalty or their knowledge of his teaching, their fitness for the future work. He gave them a symbol of himself. He literally shared himself with them. He loved them. And they became his neighbours.
Once you have grasped this cleansing, celebrating, life-giving nature of God you will begin to reflect those qualities yourself. That’s why we must love God first....become a little bit like God. And then you will automatically love your neighbour.
You can only answer the question Who is my Neighbour? When you know who God is.
And when you know who God is you don’t need to ask “Who is my neighbour? “ It is blindingly obvious!
Toby Marchand
Office Address:
Saint Michael’s Church
Windhill
Bishops Stortford
Hertfordshire
CM23 2ND