Month: September 2009

“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.

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