4th Sunday after Trinity-The Good Samaritan
4th Sunday after Trinity
St Mary’s Barnes, 8 am
Luke 10.25-37
If you had to sum up the essence of religion in two sentences, I wonder what you would say? We know what Jesus said: love God with all that you are and love your neighbour as yourself. Both these directives appear in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18) but separately. The New Testament is the earliest evidence we have of them being linked. It may have been Jesus who first put the two together, or rabbis in his time, as reflected in today’s gospel, where Jesus affirms the answer of the religious teacher who was questioning him.
In any case there we have the essence of the matter, as we are reminded at the beginning of the 8 am service every Sunday. We are to love God with every fibre of our being, with heart and soul and strength and mind; and our neighbour as ourself.
Then the teacher asks: ‘ But who is my neighbour?’ and in reply Jesus gives one of the most famous stories in history, the parable of the good Samaritan. The crucial point to note is that Jesus does not answer the question. Instead he asks a different question. The first question was the wrong one. It implied that that you could draw a line and say this group of people, say, fellow Israelites were neighbours, and others, say gentiles were not. You had obligations to some but not others. So Jesus asked a different question: Who acted as a neighbour? Instead of being an interesting theoretical question it becomes an existential one, a summons to personal responsibility. Am I acting as a neighbour to those who have a claim on my attention?
We are to love that person as ourselves. If we were in that situation how would I want to be treated. We put ourselves in their shoes. So we have the golden rule, common to a number of religions and religious texts and also found in the teaching of Jesus: treat others as you would want them to treat you. (Mathew 7. 12 and Luke 6. 31)
The modern world likes to affirm the second directive about loving our neighbour and set aside the first about loving God. And the New Testament is indeed clear that we cannot love God if we don’t love our neighbour. But the two are closely linked in a way the world does not like to recognise. First any attempt to love God with all that we are carries with it the need to love our neighbour as a daily bench mark. Secondly, it can bring home to us how we might be failing in this regard and thirdly it can motivate and strengthen us to do better. We often fail as Christians but we know we need to fail again and fail better, to echo Samuel Beckett. And in this process God is with us all the way.