Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 4 2019

Balthasar van Cortbemde - The Good Samaritan (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp)

Deuteronomy 30.9-14

Colossians 1.1-14

Luke 10.25-37

A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. There’s quite a lot of that in the gospels, people weighing up Jesus to see if he is “one of us”, “our sort of chap”. So he asks a question, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”. Now, this is a test. The lawyer isn’t really interested in eternal life, as he thinks he already knows the answer to that. He wants to see if Jesus agrees with him, and if so he can then approve of Jesus – or not. Is Jesus an “insider” or an “outsider”?

But the question about eternal life is profoundly important, and the rest of this gospel story explores what it means. The lawyer’s question is answered rather more fully than he either expects or wants.

Eternal life is the life that God lives. And in Jewish thought this will become fully realised in “the age to come”, when God will fill everything and all will be as it should be. To inherit eternal life is really to be the ultimate “insider”. So, the question the lawyer asks can be put another way, “how can I be an insider to the life of God?”

And Jesus turns the question round and makes the lawyer answer: obey the commandments, principally, love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s simple. As the reading from Deuteronomy puts it this morning, “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe”. It is not complicated. Do this, and you will be an insider to the life of God. It’s simple.

But our lawyer wants to make it complicated. “Who is my neighbor?” he asks. He’s still wanting to know how he can be an insider and at the same time make other people outsiders. Who are the exceptions to the law of love? But the trouble is, if you think there are exceptions to the law of love, then you are not yet an insider to the life of God.

So Jesus tells the story of the “Good Samaritan”. A man is robbed and left for dead, and a priest and a Levite pass by on the other side. Probably because they think he is dead. Priests and Levites needed to be ritually pure to serve the temple sacrifices, and touching a corpse would have made them unclean. Best not to risk it. Insiders don’t want to become outsiders.

Then comes a Samaritan. This is the real shocker in this story. There was bad feeling, racial prejudice, between Samaritans and Jews, and it went both ways. For the lawyer, the Samaritan was definitely an outsider. What might he expect the Samaritan to do in this story? Probably, to finish off the job the robbers started, loot whatever was left on the poor man’s body and kick him into a ditch.

But the Samaritan has compassion on him. He dresses the man’s wounds, takes him to the inn, pays for his care and promises more, as much as is needed. With the actions of the Samaritan, the world the lawyer expects is turned inside out.

And with his final question Jesus turns the tables on the lawyer. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”. The Lawyer had wanted to know, “who is my neighbour”. His question was centred on himself, who do I have to help if I must? But Jesus asks, who is the neighbour to the man in need? He’s turning the Lawyer’s focus away from himself to the other. And not just to any other, but to the outsider, the excluded person, the hated minority.

More than that, the neighbour is not someone we must simply be kind to, but turns out to be the person we actually need, the person from whom we must learn to receive compassion and love. The law of love teaches us that we need each other.

And all this is in answer to the Lawyer’s first question, which was, “how can I be an insider to the life of God”.

The lawyer wants to draw boundaries of insiders and outsiders. But Jesus shows him that we must look beyond the boundaries that we draw. The law of love has no exceptions. We must look to the outsider if we are to be insiders to the life of God. We must turn towards the victim if we are to live in compassion. We must stop asking questions as to who is an insider and an outsider, and just love. That is the fulfilling of the law, that is how we will inherit eternal life.

A question, asked to test Jesus, leads us by way of a parable to the heart of God’s love, which is revealed in Jesus. It shows to us our need to become insiders to the life of God, by living in love ourselves.

The parable shows us our need to love without condition, to receive love from the unexpected stranger, the mutuality of God’s kingdom, our dependency on the people we must learn not to exclude.

The parable challenges us to recognize our own prejudices, and we all have them. Who is a “Samaritan”, to me? Where do I act as though there were exceptions to the law of love? The outsider and the victim show us God. They call us out beyond the boundaries that we want to draw to justify ourselves. Because it is only by abandoning those boundaries, and going out to the outsider, that we will find ourselves insiders to the life of God.

How can I be an insider to the life of God? Love God with all your being, and love your neighbour as yourself. It’s simple. Who is my neighbour? The stranger, the outsider, the person we want to reject, is the very person we must receive! Go and do likewise.