“How readest thou?”
There are several great lines for homilies in this Gospel passage. “Who is my neighbour?” “When he saw him he had compassion on him.” “Go, and do thou likewise.” Powerful stuff and yet, in a way, they all hang upon this rather unique question, a question which Jesus asks, a question which illumines all of the great questions of the Scriptures, the great questions of religion itself. “How do you read?”
We might think that the real question is ‘what do you read?’ Certainly, that is an important question. What we read will, it goes without saying, influence how we think about things. It is not a matter of indifference about what students and children read; what the curriculum is, as it were. And there are, as well, the more disturbing issues of censorship and political correctness that attempt to circumscribe what we read, what we hear and what we say. These obscure the bigger question which is about how we read.
We are too familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A powerful story, to be sure, and one which impels us powerfully to good works, what we often overlook is the extraordinary significance of the context in which Jesus tells this story. As such, I think, we miss its deeper meaning. It ends with the precise and positive exhortation to “go and do thou likewise”, but the possibility of that actually depends not on ourselves, but on the movement of God’s grace in us accomplishing what we could not and cannot do on our own. This is the message that we do not want to hear.
We conveniently overlook the faith basis of the action that we bidden to do. The Gospel provides an amazingly radical faith statement. We know it in the Prayer Book liturgy as the Summary of the Law, proclaimed and heard at the beginning of the Communion Service. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.” Here, Jesus draws this out of “a certain lawyer” who tempted him with a question. His question, raised not for the purposes of understanding but for sophistic entrapment, was “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response was, in perfect Socratic fashion, to ask two related questions, “what is written in the law?” and “how readest thou?” Beautiful. It is in response to ‘the what and the how’ that the Lawyer speaks about the love of God and the love of neighbour, concentrating in a marvelous fashion the whole of the Torah, the Law.
Marvelous. But it doesn’t end there. He, “willing to justify himself”, asks a further question, “and who is my neighbour?” There is an interesting rhetorical shift in the lawyer’s questioning, a shift from prosecutory questioning to a question that is in a more self-defensive mode. It is as if he has already been convicted in his conscience by what has been drawn out of him by Jesus. Our relation to God is firmly rooted in our relation with one another. How we act reveals much about what we believe; conversely, what we believe must be expressed in what we do. Only so shall we “walk in the Spirit” as Paul bids us in this morning’s epistle (Gal. 5.25).
Theologically, this is simply about the credenda and the agenda, the things that are to be believed, the credenda, and the things which are to be done, the agenda. Our contemporary tendency, I think, is to focus solely on the agenda – actions become the primary measure of legitimacy and authenticity.
But there is a problem, a problem which the parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates. It is this. Left to ourselves and to our own calculus of intentions and actions, we cannot help ourselves or one another. “Ye cannot do the things that ye would”, as St. Paul says. Or to put in another way, our intentions and actions are always incomplete, our motives less than pure, less than wholly adequate. We stand in need of the Good Samaritan. Who is he?
In the parable, the “certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where [the wounded man] was”. He came where he was. Powerful. “And when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” Even more powerful. The rest is all history, we might say, the history of pastoral and priestly care. But it is based on a profound biblical insight which we have lost in our rush to the practical and in our presumption to think that we can fix all the problems of the world simply through good intentions.
The operative word here is compassion. That is the motive force in the Samaritan. But who is he and why “a certain Samaritan”? What is wrong with the Priest and the Levite? What is the relation between the parable and the Summary of the Law which is after all the notional occasion for the telling of the parable? To put it more bluntly, where do the love of God and the love of neighbour find its fullest (and finest) expression? In a way, it belongs to the wonder of the parable to point us to the answer, albeit in a symbolic form appropriate to the language of parables.
I love language and the power of words. Yet, there are times when I want to scream at the narrowness of scholars – philologists, in particular, whose business is with words. To put in St. Paul’s terms from last week, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” And here is the problem. The key word – compassion (here as a verb, esplagxnisthe) – is used a dozen times in the New Testament. A loaded word, it is often used directly about Christ. “He had compassion on the multitude.” He had “compassion” on the widow of Nain, and so forth. But, particularly in Luke’s Gospel, the same rich and loaded word is used about the figures in parables told by Jesus, parables such as “the prodigal son”, parables such as “the Good Samaritan”.
By the way, the adjective “good” appears nowhere in the text! And yet, it opens us out to precisely the concern that our pragmatic and philological wisdom often overlooks. Who is good? Ultimately, anything that is good belongs to and comes from God. There is no goodness independent of God in a religious and philosophical understanding. Any goodness that we do ultimately has its root and fruit in God.
The argument of some philologists is that insofar as compassion has to do with a figure in a parable then it cannot be related to Christ. To the contrary, I would argue. The parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates the wondrous grace of the Incarnation. Jesus comes to where we are. Jesus looks upon us with the eyes of compassion. Jesus comes to bring us healing and wholeness, redemption and salvation. To suppose that this is just a moral tale misses the real point, the point which makes our efforts at good deeds and actions possible and meaningful.
Many, many years ago, I served in a parish in the inner city of Boston. There to teach “doctrine”, I was also in charge of a weekly supper for the poor and destitute. The biggest challenge was not with those who came to be fed but with the volunteers. Why? Because of the assumptions from the left and the right wing of contemporary politics: for the one, it was a matter of more government money; for the other, it was a matter of personal initiative and drive. For both there was the greater wake-up call about compassion and redemption. The truth of the matter is that “the left” and “the right” were like Priest and Levite – seeing but not really being able to help. Something was missing in attitude and approach. What was missing is the meaning of the Good Samaritan. And who is he? For the Israel of Jesus’ day, the Samaritans were particularly despised, the outsiders of the outsiders, if you will. He is the outsider who points us to the ultimate come-from-away, namely, God, who wills in Jesus Christ to come near to us, to be our neighbour. I learned that there is something profoundly spiritual in the political and economic issues of our day.
This is the radical meaning of the parable. It is unthinkable in biblical and ancient terms, even with the prominence given to hospitality, that God should become neighbour to us. The friendship between the gods and men, Aristotle says, is impossible – the gap is too great. Similarly for us in contemporary culture; absent God, we are thrown back upon ourselves only to discover our limitations and emptiness. The point of the parable is that the outsider – the Samaritan – is the symbol of Christ, the ultimate Good Samaritan, whose operative principle, in relation to our wounded and broken humanity, is compassion. It is the compassion of God which far exceeds all human compassion to become the basis for it. Hence, “go and do thou likewise”. In Christ, God has come near to us out of his compassion for us.
We are all on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, from the heavenly city to the earthly, going in the wrong direction and we have indeed fallen among thieves, our sins, which have robbed us and left us half-dead. But by the mercy of the Good Samaritan we have been seen and not ignored; our wounds have been bound up with the healing grace of oil and wine, the humanity and divinity of Christ. We have been brought to the inn, the Church, where we are provided with spiritual care till he comes again; the two pence are the precepts of charity or the two testaments which have their fulfillment in Christ. Such are some of the views of the Fathers on this passage; in short, they saw the agenda in the light of the credenda.
Out of his compassionate grace, we can “go and do likewise”, not presuming to be able to solve all of the problems of the world, but determined not to just look and pass by, determined instead to come near and to do what we can, aware of our need for the redemptive grace of Christ, the Good Samaritan. His goodness is given that it may move in us to “go and do likewise”. Of course, it all depends on how you read.
“How readest thou?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIII, ’09,
Christ Church, Windsor