“How readest thou?”
This is one of my favourite texts, I have to admit, though not simply for personal reasons, but because it speaks so strongly to the nature of the theological enterprise in itself and certainly in our times of uncertainty. The gathering of all things into the unity of God is the summary of the law and belongs to the highest dignity of our humanity; that gathering is our thinking and our doing as shaped by God’s thinking and loving at work in us. It means theology as prayer and sacrifice in service and compassion; in short, the harmony of intellect and will, of mind and heart. Our living to and for God necessitates our living to and for one another. How we read is about how we think and act. It is quite telling that the Gospel story that follows is about Martha and Mary understood in their complementary relation; contemplation and action go together.
Today marks a kind of mid-point in the pageant of sanctification. They show the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbour most fully in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is an illustration of the fruits of the Spirit manifest in our lives with one another. Yet, at first glance, the Epistle and the Gospel seem opposed. Paul says that “if we are led by the Spirit, we are not under the law,” whereas the Gospel argues for the law as summed up in the love of God and the love of neighbour and as essential to life. But Paul is not an antinominian, someone who believes they are freed by grace from the moral law. Quite the opposite. He is arguing for our being freed from the condemnation of the law by grace, our being freed for our life in the Spirit. Love is the fulfilling of the law not its negation. This is the real meaning of our being Christ’s, namely, those who: ”have crucified the flesh.” Love is sacrifice precisely in terms of the Cross. Today too marks the Feast of the Holy Cross.
The works of the flesh are not the moral law but precisely its opposite, works of immorality, rather summarily and clearly laid out in a list that comprehends the various disorders and misdirections of human desire that ultimately harm ourselves and one another. In a way, the works of the flesh counter the good that the law seeks: adultery for instance, which betrays the law and the good of marriage, or fornication which is lust for lust’s sake, idolatry which confuses God with the things of creation, witchcraft which is a misuse of power for other ends than the good, and so on. They are negative and life-destroying and stand in stark contrast to the fruits of the Spirit that are positive, life-fulfilling and life-enhancing. They are the qualities of grace that belong to the good and perfection of our humanity for ourselves and for one another and that overcome through love as forgiveness all our failings and short-comings, all of which belong to desires of the flesh.
In other words, it has more to do with our relation to the world and the flesh in terms of our relation to God. In baptism there is the renunciation of “the world and the flesh and the devil” in order to affirm the things of the Spirit. But that affirmation is really about entering into the redemption of our desires through the gathering and ordering of all things to God, the proper task of theology as prayer.
The Gospel story makes this clear. How we think about God turns on how we think about one another and vice-versa. The parable is best understood through its setting. What is written in the law? How readest thou? Jesus asks in response to the hostile question of the Lawyer who was seeking to test him. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he had asked. Jesus’ questions draw out from the lawyer what he knows in some sense but doesn’t know that he knows. What is drawn out of him is an essential spiritual and intellectual insight that belongs to education and to ethical life. From Deuteronomy and Leviticus he gives us the Summary of the Law, the love of God and the love of neighbour. “Thou hast answered right,” Jesus says, “Do this and thou shalt live.” Love is the answer. It is itself the law.
It is the summary of the ethical teaching for our humanity. Far more than a list of duties, it is a comprehensive way of life. But the lawyer replies to Jesus with the dismissive and cynical question, “and who is my neighbour?” He asks this, as Luke puts it, because he was “willing to justify himself,” as if the question relieves him from any real responsibility and agency. As if the love of neighbour is separate from the love of God.
Yet his question launches the parable of the Good Samaritan which highlights the real significance of the Summary of the Law. The parable is told to convict our consciences about our actions. How we read is really about how we think and how we think shapes how we act.
The parable is a picture of our humanity at once fallen and in disarray, imaged as “a certain man,” lying half dead on the roadside between Jerusalem and Jericho, symbolically the heavenly and earthly cities respectively, but then restored and taken care of by the compassion of God imaged in the figure of “a certain Samaritan.” Unlike the Priest and Levite, who look and pass by, the Samaritan, as he journeyed on the same road, “came where he was,” and, most crucially, “when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” The key word is compassion, the deeper meaning of which we often fail to grasp. It occurs in this way of seeing and then acting with compassion several times in the Gospels, particularly in Luke’s Gospel. Other times are about Jesus seeing us when he beholds the multitude in the wilderness or when he sees the widow of Nain accompanied by her community in shared grief. Out of compassion he feeds the multitude; out of compassion he raises the widow’s son.
In all of these passages, compassion signals the deep love of God for our humanity which seeks our good in spite of sin and evil, suffering and death; in spite of the works of the flesh. Compassion here is something divine that moves in our care and concern for one another. It is not self-serving but self-sacrificing. It is about the giving of ourselves for the good of one another. It can only happen out of an awareness in some sense or another of the absolute goodness of God and the total self-giving life of God.
This challenges all of our limited senses of what we think is good and right which so often defaults to self-interest however defined. We forget that we are ‘selves’ only in community with one another. We forget that care as grounded in compassion is not about control and manipulation of others but about our being restored to the truth of ourselves as made in the image of God. The compassion of Christ is about the restoration of that image defaced by sin and folly.
And it is about a whole way of life, a life of compassion and care towards one another. Walking in the Spirit is equally about our reading in the Spirit “Who do you think,” Jesus asks the lawyer, “was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” He is moved by the truth itself to say, “He that showed mercy on him.” Then says Jesus, “go and do thou likewise.” Reading is thinking and living, our thinking and living in the Spirit.
Our walking in the Spirit can only happen through the questions which convict our consciences and awaken us to the transforming nature of the love of God alive in us. We are freed to the truth of the law by the grace of the Spirit. Only so can we go and do likewise.
How do you read?
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XIII, 2025