Year: 2015

“And one … turned back …giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan.”

We are still on the road to Jerusalem with Jesus, it seems, at least in the logic of St. Luke’s Gospel. And, intriguingly, we have yet again a story that concerns a Samaritan, just as last Sunday’s Gospel presented us with the parable of the Good Samaritan. And once again, the Gospel is coupled with an epistle reading from Galatians. There are relatively few references to the Samaritans in the New Testament – mostly, these two Gospel stories read back-to-back on Trinity 13 and 14, and the powerful but long, long Gospel story in John’s Gospel about the woman at the well of Samaria, a story read appropriately enough as the second lesson at Morning Prayer on The First Sunday after Epiphany every other year. Why? Because it makes something known about Jesus and about human redemption.

We are made aware in that story about a tension between Jew and Samaritan best captured in the unnamed woman’s remark to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” And yet, we also see that such cultural and religious differences are transcended in a larger view of human redemption and divine compassion. “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” she says. The result of her witness is significant. “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” Jesus stays there for two days, “and many more believed because of his word.” First, her word and then, his word. “They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” The whole scene is a powerful witness to Jesus as the Redeemer and about the compassionate and yet compelling nature of human redemption. We are actively drawn into the story in order to make it our own. We see, too, how the Samaritans are brought into the pageant of redemption.

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“How readest thou?”

How do you read? Jesus asks the certain lawyer who had asked him about eternal life. Jesus responded with two questions: first, “What is written in the Law?” and then, secondly, “how do you read?” He means, I think, how do you understand or discern what is written in the Law, in the Scriptures more generally speaking.

This exchange serves as the introduction to one of the most familiar and, perhaps, most powerful of the Gospel parables, the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan (so-called because ‘good’ is not stated in the text; it belongs, and rightly so to the interpretation). The parable complements wonderfully Paul’s command in today’s Epistle (Gal. 5.16-24) to “walk in the Spirit” as against “the desire of the flesh”; it is really an illustration of “the fruit of the Spirit” alive and at work in us in our care and concern not only for one another, the neighbour whom we know, but also and importantly towards the stranger, the outsider, the neighbour whom we do not know. Somehow the stranger, too, is neighbour because the stranger, too, is human. This is quite radical and yet at the same time part and parcel of an older Jewish understanding about dealing with the sojourner, the stranger in your midst, reminding the people of Israel that they, too, were once strangers in the land. But in every way the exchange and the parable speak profoundly to what it means to be human by opening us out to a more explicit and more universal view of our humanity.

This gospel opens us out to the largest dimensions of love, the divine love which shapes and moves our human loves. Its radical message is that the love of neighbour, the possibility of our love for our fellow human beings, depends upon the love of God alive in us.

And yet that concept really all depends upon our how we read, especially how we read the Scriptures! Now there is a thought which must give us pause. Somehow our thoughts shape our actions; our thoughts are not simply afterthoughts but the very principle or living force of our actions. To put it another way, our actions are to be thoughtful actions. They arise out of our sense of humanity and of God. That is why the exchange which precedes the parable is so important. Jesus is at once countering and correcting the lawyer whose intent is actually to tempt Jesus, to put him to the test. But what about? Perhaps about this deeper understanding of the universality of our humanity which turns upon the primacy of the love of God. Somehow that love enables what otherwise seems hard and impossible, the point of view, it seems, of the lawyer who answering Jesus’ question rightly about the Law and its interpretation, then seems altogether sceptical about the possibility of doing the Law in his apparently dismissive question “and who is my neighbour?”

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