Christ Church

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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