“And one … turned back”
Metanoia, as we have suggested on occasion, literally means a thinking after, though it is usually translated simply as repentance. Repentance is a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. It signals the profound nature of our relation to God, a kind of constant circling around the principle of our being and knowing, a retire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes puts it, that marks our going to and from God in understanding and love.
Last Sunday and this Sunday present us with two Gospel stories both of which center on a Samaritan: the parable of the so-called Good Samaritan, and the one who “turned back,” “glorify[ing] God,” and “giving him thanks,” who was “a Samaritan.” In both accounts from Luke’s Gospel, it is Jesus who tells us that it was “a certain Samaritan” who “had compassion” and “showed mercy” on the one who was “wounded” and “half-dead,” and that the one who “fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks” was “a Samaritan.” In one way, Jesus is providing a critique of what we might call denominational chauvinism where one group denigrates another and asserts their own superiority. But in another way, Jesus is teaching us something more radical about ethical teaching and ethical living. It has very much to do with our encounter with the other, what Jesus calls here the “stranger.”
“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” It is, to be sure, an indictment of Israel. Ten lepers were healed; only one returned to give glory, but “he was a Samaritan”, a kind of outsider or stranger. The Samaritans were a sect within Judaism but despised by the Jews. At issue is their view of the Law and the place of the giving of the Law. But Jesus is not simply pitting Jews against Samaritans and choosing sides. He is not saying that the Samaritans are right on these questions about the Torah and the giving of the Law. In fact, quite the opposite. What then is the significance of these two back-to-back Gospels about Samaritans?
It is, I think, about something universal in our relationship to God, about the more radical nature of metanoia which these stories suggest. We confront the limits of ourselves precisely through the Summary of the Law, in the command to love God with the whole of our being and our neighbour as ourself. It is at once a necessary truth and yet utterly impossible on our own strength and power. It requires the recognition that the law is fulfilled only in Christ and only as we are in Christ. His love moving in us perfects our loves. We can only discover this through the encounter with ourselves in our imperfections and failings. It is a kind of fall upward, a fall into the radical nature of God’s love and truth, a metanoia that is about our thinking after the things of God whether known by reason or by revelation and our reasoning on it.
This counters the spectacles of self-righteousness and hypocrisy so evident in our social and political culture which Paul addresses in Galatians. Be not desirous of vain-glory, of self-conceit and narcissistic self-regard. He exhorts us: “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” the law of charity illustrated in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet we cannot bear one another’s burdens if we think we are something when we are nothing. We cannot bear one another’s burdens without bearing our own burdens and accepting responsibility for our own actions. This is metanoia because it turns us to God without which we cannot turn to one another.
The same logic of metanoia appears in this Sunday’s Gospel about giving thanks to God. Thanksgiving is a profoundly spiritual activity and in its radical meaning nothing less than God’s love moving in us. Our thanksgivings are about our participation in the divine life. In the Christian understanding, our thanksgivings are our participation in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit of their abiding and indwelling love. Our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” is to God and for what God gives – everything. God is all. Our metanoia here is our thinking after the beauty and goodness and truth of God. We can only think after God … after all!
The problem in our technocratic world and, certainly in the celebrated concept of the “internet of things,” is precisely that we turn God and ourselves and one another into things. This is a loss of meaning and understanding. It is the unmaking of ourselves. We lose our humanity, quite literally, because we reduce ourselves to a machine-like reasoning, to algorithms which work only for themselves. We create things that become ends in themselves independent of us and out of our control.
The Gospel speaks urgently and directly to our contemporary unease and discontent.. This Gospel story of the one Samaritan who “turned back,” “giving thanks,” “glorifying God” is a picture of the truth of our humanity. We are made whole in turning back and giving thanks. Such is metanoia, our learning to think after the thinking of God and to find our thinking and our being in him. This is a bit different from finding God in the world which always runs the risk of turning God into an object, a thing. To know ourselves and the world in God is the truer metanoia and the challenge for our age.
God is the ultimate other, the stranger, through whom we encounter the truth of ourselves if ever we will. What this means is negative theology: God is more truly not than he is, meaning God is ‘no thing.’ The Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions are “unabashedly anthropomorphic” (John Renard, Islam and Christianity) in using images about God that belong to human activities but they all emphatically refuse to collapse God into the world or into our humanity. Christians face the greatest danger of a kind of idolatry precisely because of the doctrine of the Incarnation. We risk the false ‘divination’ of ourselves and human activities, on the one hand, and utter nihilism, on the other hand. God’s engagement with our world does not mean its divinization nor its nothingness. We are not God. The world is not divine. It is more about learning how to ground our natural lives in the spiritual life of God. We are made in his image; not God in ours.
Thus it is the ‘stranger God’ who like the Samaritan stranger teaches us about our radical freedom and truth in turning back and giving thanks. In so doing we glorify God, the truth which is prior to us in which we participate. Such is a metanoia. Thanksgiving is our freedom to God and to his life and truth moving in us. It is in that sense that we are a eucharistic people, people of thanksgiving who seek that activity of being thankful in everything that we do, for it is all God and all in God.
“And one … turned back”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XIV, 2019