Day: September 11, 2022

“Go, and do thou likewise”

It is not too much to suggest that the remarkable seventy year reign of Queen Elizabeth II bears eloquent testimony to the ethic of compassion set before us in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. She was a uniting figure in the face of the culture of antagonism in the divisions and conflicts of our postmodern world. A Queen who was deeply devoted to her people who in turn were devoted to her, and “knowing whose minister she [was],” as the Collect puts it, Elizabeth sought in her own gracious way the honour and glory of God through her devotion to duty and her compassionate commitment to sacrificial service. We mark her passing with profound gratitude for her witness and life of service and commend her soul to God’s gracious keeping.

In the two hundred and fifty one years of the life of this Parish, first as the Parish of Windsor, and then, and now, as Christ Church, there have been nine monarchs, two of whom were Queens whose combined reigns, the reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II, were the longest, totalling one hundred and thirty four years. The passing of Elizabeth marks the end of an era and the beginning of another under the reign now of her son, Charles III, the tenth monarch in the history of our Parish. Long live the King.

The passing of a monarch gives us reason to reflect upon the significance and nature of sovereignty whether in its republican or monarchical forms, whether diffused among the citizenry or concentrated in the person of the sovereign. As Queen Elizabeth’s long reign reminds us, all sovereign power derives from God, from what is greater than ourselves. When that is forgotten there is only tyranny and abuse. What is forgotten is the relation of mercy and truth and the necessary interplay of wisdom and power, of thought and action, we might say. This is what is set before us today in the Gospel story and its setting.

How do we face the troubling and difficult things of our world and day? Through the renewing of our minds upon the wisdom of the ethical. What is the Good and how does it live in us? It can only be through the opening of our souls and minds to “the fear” or wonder “of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom,” and which, even more, as Job says, “is wisdom” (Job. 28.28). This is equally about our being open to the epekeina of Plato, the Beyond, the Good which is beyond the being and the knowing of things as their ground in which the soul participates even in its suffering; this, too, is the insight of Job and Jesus. It is ancient wisdom. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the death of Enkidu moves Gilgamesh to embark upon the greater journey, the quest for wisdom. These reminders counter the spectre of “endism” which hangs over us and paralyzes us in our contemporary fears and anxieties about our world and one another.

The story of Mary and Martha, the images of contemplation and action respectively, bookends the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Christian ethic of compassion par excellence. We easily overlook how the parable is framed by the quest for wisdom; first, by the lawyer’s question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is a question about ‘what is the good as something to be done’, and by Jesus’ response. “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?” and, then, at the end by the story of Mary and Martha which immediately follows it in Luke’s Gospel. In between is the parable given as illustration and answer to the cynical and dismissive second question of the Lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?”

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