“Love is the fulfilling of the law”
John Drury’s masterful literary biography of the poet and priest, George Herbert (1593-1631) is entitled Music at Midnight (2013). The title is taken from an anecdote in Izaak Walton’s The Life of Mr. George Herbert, written in 1670. It has the ring of truth to it about Herbert’s character, drawn from his own account of what happened to him one evening on his way from Bemerton to an evening of music making with friends in the cathedral city of Salisbury. As he journeyed, “he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load.” Both were in distress and in need of help “which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man;” and then, in very telling phrase, “and so was like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse, and told him, that if he loved himself, he would be merciful to his beast.”
The whole event acts out the story of the Good Samaritan. But the anecdote goes on to report what happened when Herbert reached the house of his friends, dirty and in disarray, unlike his usual trim and clean self. He told them what had happened and was told by one that “he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment.” Herbert’s answer was that the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight, and that the omission of it” would have troubled “his conscience, whensoever he would pass by that place.” Walton quotes Herbert as saying, “For if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practise what I pray for … and I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy: and I praise God for the occasion. And now let’s tune our instruments.”
“To practise what I pray for.” Prayer is “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear,, Prayer (I). It illustrates the reciprocity and interplay of all things human and divine, natural and holy, domestic and exotic, concluding through a parade of images and metaphors that prayer is “something understood.” All in all, the anecdote and his poems encapsulate poignantly the radical understanding of the Parable of the Good Samaritan before us this Sunday in the midpoint of the Trinity season. It is all captured most wonderfully in the opening words of the last poem of The Temple, Love (III). “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne,” for that is our human condition. Yet “quick-ey’d Love” always draws nearer to us, “sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.”
“Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”, a certain lawyer asks Jesus but with the intent to tempt him, to test him, to try to trip him up, yet the question is right and true, a question about what is the ultimate good or end for our humanity, in other words, a recognition of a lack or need in ourselves. This theological question moves in our lives especially in our gathering together. In good Socratic fashion, Jesus answers by way of two questions which draw the truth out of the lawyer. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”, meaning ‘how do you think?’, he asks. In spite of the lawyer’s intention, he is moved by the truth itself to state what Christians have come to call the Summary of the Law and in the form which we hear it in the liturgy: loving God with the whole of our being: heart, soul, strength and mind, and our neighbour as ourself. It draws together words from Deuteronomy and Leviticus that comprise the essential biblical ethic of compassion about our life together in the pursuit of the goodness of God himself and as given to us.
“You have answered rightly,” Jesus says, “this do, and thou shalt live.” But there’s the rub. How do we love God and one another fully and completely? Do we and can we? Does this lie simply in us on the strength of ourselves? Luke points to this problem in the second question of the Lawyer, a question which he raises in “wanting to justify himself.“ “And who is my neighbour?”, he asks cynically and dismissively thus negating the very truth he had just stated. This launches the so-called Parable of the Good Samaritan which is Jesus’ answer to his question and confronts us with the radical meaning of love as the fulfilling of the law and highlights the divine love in Christ which alone fulfills the law. Without that understanding we will not hear music at midnight, the music of heavenly and earthly harmony and peace, of goodness and grace; in short, the blessedness itself which is found through Christ acting in us and us in Christ.
The parable is so familiar and well-known in one respect, yet so misunderstood in another. Why? Because the point of the parable and indeed of the Summary of the Law itself is the necessity of the love of God without which we are wounded and half-dead, if not completely dead, to God who alone can restore and heal our wounded and broken humanity. The story is not just a moralistic kind of do-goodism on our part. It is rather about the principle of divine compassion or love moving in us, a love that is nothing less than Christ. The radical meaning of the story as presented and commented upon for centuries, especially in England by way of the Venerable Bede, derives from the Fathers, particularly Augustine, who see in it the whole story of human redemption.
The “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho” is us, an image of our fallen humanity; in short, all of us, wounded and half-dead on account of our sins and short-comings, what we do to ourselves and to one another. Suffering is us, all of us. We suffer in the sufferings of others, the sufferings that belong to human sin and evil which we cannot ignore but neither can we on our own simply rectify and make right. This is the whole point of the parable. Priest and Levite see the human condition of suffering and loss but are incapable of doing anything about it; they can only pass by.
This is true for every form of human social and political construct, for every form of social justice. They are incomplete and point to something more. The law convicts us of our own follies and points us to what we seek but cannot accomplish on our own. That is why, as Paul puts it so powerfully, “love is the fulfilling of the law.” What is that love? It is the compassion of “a certain Samaritan” who “as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.” He is the image of Christ, the Good Samaritan par excellence. The whole parable is an allegory of the human condition of fallenness and of our restoration and renewal through the love of God in Jesus Christ.
The point is made much clearer by two things which our propers this morning omit. First, the classical reading of the Gospel included the two previous verses, 23 & 24, that set us up for the extraordinary blessing that the story conveys. “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” He points to what is seen and heard in him which we are meant to think upon, understand, and act upon. It has entirely to do with Jesus Christ who is uniquely our saviour and redeemer. He comes to where we are in the flesh of his humanity derived from the Virgin Mary, “like us in all things, yet without sin” (Heb. 4.15). He sees and has compassion. It is a recurring phrase especially by Luke. It has its highest expression in his Passion where we see and contemplate his sufferings for us as his love for us.
As the parable shows, “he went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.” The imagery is symbolic of the body of Christ, the Church as the body of Christ, where we see and hear the living word of God in Christ and are challenged to act out of what we hear and pray for in his body, the Church. We can only act out of what we hear and see of the divine compassion revealed in the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ, “to practise what we pray for” (Herbert).
Secondly, for centuries the traditional epistle reading was from another passage in Galatians (3. 16-22) that emphasizes how the promises of God made to Abraham and his seed are realized in the seed who, as Paul says, is Christ. The passage points out that the law is given because of transgression and is only fulfilled by a mediator which is Christ Jesus who is both God and man in whom the righteousness of the law, meaning the justicia dei, is alone fulfilled for us and in us. The seed is Christ referring to his humanity derived from Mary, “born of a woman,” “flesh of her flesh,” semen mulieris, “of the Virgin alone by the power of the Holy Ghost, without mixture of fleshly generation” (Andrewes). Jesus Christ, of course, does not have two fathers. His father is his and our heavenly Father made known to us through his being with us in the radical truth of our humanity without sin to restore us to our truth in God. The theological teaching is that he is the Word and Son of the Father made flesh through the Virgin Mary without the aid of a male, in other words, apart from sexual congress. We are only by grace the sons of God while he is what he is by nature, the Son of God.
Music at midnight is the power of God’s love remembered and embraced that bids us welcome, the love which makes our eyes though we have marr’d them, the love which bears the blame, the love whose life is given to live and move in us, the love that bids us sit and eat; in short, the love which restores our humanity to its truth in God. This is our comfort and strength in the midnight hour of our dying lives that awakens us to life.
The parable goes on to indicate the ongoing nature of that life of grace given for the good and perfection of our humanity. “Two pence” is given to the host who is charged to take care of him. They are symbolically the sacraments of baptism and communion that flow out of the crucified Christ. He suffers and dies for us not so that we do not need to suffer and die but to show us the way to life through suffering and death. Such is the radical nature of the divine compassion; the care of the Good Samaritan is Christ for us and in us. “We suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8.17).
“Blessed are they that suffer,” the philosopher Michel Henry says, in a kind of summary of the Beatitudes. For to suffer is to be alive and to know that life has been given to us; ultimately, to suffer is to rejoice in life itself. To know this is to pray for grace and to practise what we pray for in our lives with one another. It is the condition of our life together in the body of Christ. We can only “go and do likewise” by Christ in us through our reading and thinking and acting upon what we see and hear. What we see and hear is the radical meaning of the love of Christ in whom alone is the fulfilling of the law. Such is “music at midnight.”
Love is the fulfilling of the law.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 13, 2026