Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
“And when the Lord saw her he had compassion on her”
It is a phrase that Luke especially uses. It connects the idea of seeing and then acting, yet acting in a very important way. Acting with compassion. A powerful word, it has been co-opted by the contemporary therapeutic culture in ways that overlook its more radical meaning and character. Compassion is not something that we have of ourselves or simply from ourselves in the Christian understanding. It is something given by God, something alive and at work in us through grace.
That is the lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan where the phrase is used about the “certain Samaritan”. Priest and Levite see and pass by the man wounded and half-dead lying on the roadside. So do most of us in relation to the heart-rending sorrows and sufferings of so many in our world, even in our own communities. It is not just that we are cold-hearted and mean-spirited though sadly enough that is only too often present in us. More significantly, I think, there is an implicit recognition of the limits of human charity, a recognition that we can’t solve or even begin to think we can help everybody who is in need. There are inescapably finite limits to human charity. Undeniably so.
But that doesn’t provide an excuse to do nothing. Quite the opposite. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus reminds us, “and you can do for them what you will.” Something remains for us to do. We are compelled to acts of charity by the compassion of Christ. “Go and do thou likewise”, Jesus says to the lawyer about the actions of the “certain Samaritan” who saw and had compassion on the man wounded and lying half-dead on the roadside, half-way between Jerusalem and Jericho, the heavenly and the earthly cities respectively. In the radical understanding of the Parable, Christ is the Good Samaritan, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour, meaning our humanity, is most fully and completely realized. It is not so in us except we are in Christ; he in us and we in him. In Christ, God sees us and has compassion on us, seeing Christ in us; in Christ, we see and act with compassion towards one another, albeit in limited ways, yet seeing Christ in one another.
