Christ Church

“Thy faith hath made thee whole”

Today’s Gospel is the quintessential thanksgiving Gospel. It is appointed for Thanksgiving Day as embracing both the idea of harvest thanksgiving and national thanksgiving, the idea of giving thanks for our rational and political freedoms, however much in disarray. The Gospel story is especially powerful and complements the paradoxes of the Epistle reading from Galatians which continues the theme of our living and walking in the Spirit, bidding us, on the one hand, to “bear ye one another’s burdens,” and, on the other hand, to bear our own burdens.

In bearing one another’s burdens we are bearing our own as well. How? Because we are social, spiritual and intellectual creatures in and through our life with one another. We don’t live in isolation from one another. To be human means our connection and life with each other. But how and in what way?  These readings, like so many of the Scripture readings of the Trinity season, point us to the truth of our humanity as lived in a sacramental and social community. They speak to us about becoming and being whole.

Our text in the Prayer Book is from the King James Version which preserves Tyndale’s translation about being made whole. Wycliffe in his 14th century translation renders it as “thy faith hath made thee safe.” More modern English translations adopt the idea that “your faith hath made you well” and a few use the somewhat more literal phrase, “your faith has saved you” and one gives us “healed and saved.” In truth the Greek word which carries over into the Latin salvum conveys a range of meetings over the centuries about being rescued, being kept safe, being preserved, and getting home with the idea of being where you belong and thus who you truly are. But it is this sense of wholeness that warrants our careful attention.

The story seems at first to highlight the one who turned back. There were ten who were lepers. All ten were healed by Jesus who bids them “go and show yourselves unto the priests.” As Luke puts it, “as they went, they were cleansed.” All ten. One of them, though, in seeing “that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice, glorified God, and fell down on his face at [Jesus’] feet, giving him thanks.” Luke adds to this the observation that the one who turned back “was a Samaritan.”

It is a most moving spectacle. Jesus comments on his action in contrast with the other nine, that only one “returned to give glory to God,” and calls him “this stranger.” Is the story then about the radical individual who stands out and away from others in splendid isolation? Is being saved merely personal? Or is this stranger, this Samaritan, like the “certain Samaritan” in last Sunday’s Gospel, precisely the one who shows us the truth of our humanity in our corporate, social and spiritual lives?

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“And who is my neighbour?”

There are five questions in today’s Gospel that shape our understanding of the familiar Parable of the (so‑called) Good Samaritan which illustrates the ethic of compassion. The questions belong to a deeper consideration of the radical meaning of this parable and its place in the ethical understanding that belongs not only to the interaction and connection between Judaism and Christianity but between the major religions and philosophies of the world. In other words, there is something profoundly universal communicated to us here through the idea of the law as grace and in the insistent point about the nature of our obligations towards one another in care and compassion.

Thus this Gospel highlights the idea that we are primarily and essentially social, spiritual, and intellectual beings whose lives are bound up with one another in an ethical community. In this sense, it counters the reigning ideology of our times which assumes the self-completeness of the radically autonomous individual and which leads inescapably to the technocratic mastery of anything human or non-human that would limit the negative freedom that such autonomy assumes.

The first four questions belong to the setting of the scene for the parable; the fifth belongs to its conclusion. Two of the questions are raised by “a certain lawyer;” the other three are the questions of Jesus. The whole passage assists us in the understanding of what Paul means by “walk[ing] in the Spirit” and as not being “under the law.” This is challenging since the parable illustrates precisely the meaning of the law as primary, as a given good. The point, I think, is that the law in so far as it speaks to the reality or the nature or the form of our humanity embodies our freedom and dignity and is not simply a constraint. Such is the ethical wisdom of the teachings of the sister religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and of the Hindu teaching about ‘dharma’, of the eightfold path in Buddhism, and of the concepts of ‘ren’ and ‘li’ in Confucianism, for instance, and in accord with the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle as well, albeit in very different registers of meaning and approach. It has, in general terms, to do with a life lived in accord with reason, a reason that belongs to the order of the cosmos and the human community through which individuals find their fulfillment. That order is not simply a human construct but depends upon an abiding principle, something divine, which informs our humanity. Such is the concentrated wisdom in this Gospel.

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