Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
“How readest thou?”
“Walk in the Spirit,” St. Paul exhorts us. “Go and do thou likewise,” Jesus says to the lawyer as the conclusion and application of the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan. There is, it seems, a kind of emphasis on acting and doing. And yet, doing is really only the active expression of our thinking. The key question here is captured in our text. It is Jesus’ question. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”
How do you read? It is really a way of asking how do you think about things. In this case the context is intriguing. The question, asked by the lawyer to tempt Jesus, that is to say, to put Jesus to the test in an attempt to catch him in a contradiction, was “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response is to ask him about the law. The answer to his question has to do with how the law is understood. In short, our doings have some kind of intimate relation to our thinking and understanding. By law here Jesus refers to the most important part of the Jewish Scriptures, known as the Law or the Torah. It has pride of place in the Jewish understanding in the same way that the Gospel has a kind of primacy in the New Testament and which is signaled in our liturgy. We are immediately thrown into the important questions about how we read and understand the Scriptures.
This is one of the pressing problems of the contemporary Church. What I find important here is that the practical urge and spirit ultimately turns upon our thinking and understanding.
There are already several levels of thinking at work in this remarkable and rich Gospel story. First, the lawyer’s initial question about eternal life is a concern far later than the Law itself. It is really a question that belongs to late Judaism, though the ideas of eternal life are found in the Psalms. In general, though, the strong Jewish emphasis on the objectivity of the Law as eternal and everlasting is in contrast to the fleeting nature of the passing world and of human life. The idea of immortality is, perhaps, implicit in the recognition of the divinely given Law but only becomes explicit, I think, through the later engagement with Greek thought. Yet, here, the lawyer is directed by Jesus to the Law and to its understanding.
