Month: June 2023

The end of the ending

The last of the last Chapels happened Monday and Tuesday for the Junior School and for Grade Tens. As with the conclusion of the parable of the Prodigal or Lost Sons last week, so, too, it seems fitting to conclude the Chapel programme with the reading of the story of the Good Samaritan, paying particular attention to the setting of this powerful teaching about the ethic of compassion.

It begins with a lawyer who seeks to put Jesus to the test; in short, to a situation of hostility and conflict. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”, he asks. Jesus turns the question back on him. “What is written in the law? How do you read?” I love this because it goes to an important feature of Chapel, the constant challenge about how to understand things in the face of hardships and difficulties. Ideas are set before us in the Scriptures and in relation to a host of other philosophical, theological, historical and literary considerations. At issue is how do we read? The lawyer is compelled – by truth itself it seems – to state what is sometimes known as ‘the Summary of the Law’: to love God with the whole of your being and your neighbour as yourself.

This unites passages from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus. It is an important ethical statement in itself that challenges us about ourselves in relation to one another and to God and the world. It belongs to what C.S. Lewis called “The Tao, what others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality,” the ethical way of thinking and living as found in the religions and philosophies of the world. It is, he says, “not one among a series of possible values. It is the sole source of all value judgments,” the principle upon which our ethical thinking and doing depend (The Abolition of Man).

Jesus commends the lawyer on the rightness of his answer but rightly bids him, “this do, and thou shalt live.” With knowledge comes responsibility. But then the lawyer “willing to justify himself,” asks in a cynical way, “and who is my neighbour?” This is to remove himself from any real sense of responsibility. This launches the parable of the Good Samaritan, though the term “good” is never used. We are meant to see ourselves in this parable and be convicted of our own neglect of one another, on the one hand, and be convinced of something greater, namely grace itself, on the other hand. “A certain man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho,” symbols of the heavenly and the earthly city respectively, who “fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment,” leaving him wounded and half dead, is an image of our humanity wounded and broken. But we, too, are like the Priest and Levite, religious officers in the Jewish world, who see the one who is wounded and half dead but “pass by on the other side.” We are meant to convict ourselves of how we, too, at times have looked upon the distress of others and have simply passed by and done nothing.

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The beginning of the end

There is a certain intensity and a frisson of excitement about the last weeks of the School year. In Chapel this week we have had the penultimate services for the Junior School and the Grade Tens and the last Chapels for the Grade 11s and the Grade 12s. On Monday and Tuesday, we read the last part of the parable of the Prodigal Son and on Thursday and Friday, the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Both are powerful stories that speak to an understanding of ourselves as individuals and as members of the human community but in intriguing and challenging ways.

The second half of Luke’s parable might equally be called the parable of the lost sons. It is not just the return of the younger son to the father but also the exchange between the elder son and the father. It is not just the one who goes into a far country who is lost and dead to the love of the father, it seems. We can be close at hand and yet be far removed from that same love. What remains remarkable in the parable is the father’s love which runs out to greet the returning younger son and also goes out to the elder son who is angry and hurt about the special treatment the younger son has received. Such is the destructive power of envy. The elder son can’t even acknowledge his brother as brother; he complains about “this son of yours”. It is his own brother!

This is sibling rivalry – a major theme in Genesis, for instance, that is about separation and animosity through resentment and the desire for exclusive attention. I often think about this in relation to graduation and prize day. Will you resent the accomplishments and awards of others or will you rejoice and be glad in what others have achieved? The first is destructive and harmful both to ourselves and to one another and to the community of which we are a part. Why? Because it is a refusal to see the good in others which is equally the good for us; a refusal of the good which unites us. “It was fitting,” the father says to the elder son, “to make merry and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive, was lost and is found.” There is joy not only for the younger son in returning to the truth of his being in the father’s love which he had rejected; there is the joy of the whole community. This, too, is an important feature of the three related parables that Luke tells in chapter 15: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons. It is not just rejoicing over the finding of the one lost sheep, the one lost coin, and the lost son; there is the rejoicing of the whole community which is not complete without them. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Will we be able to rejoice in that and find the good for ourselves?

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