SERMON 83 - SUNDAY 10 JULY 2016

 Sermon at St. John’s Parish Church, West Grimstead – Sunday 10 July 2016

Luke 10:25-37

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen

The parable of the Good Samaritan is probably the best known of all of Jesus’s parables – by both Church-going Christians and non-Christians alike. The word “Samaritan” is now synonymous with helping others in times of stress and difficulties and especially people with suicidal ideations. 

In essence the parable tells us that if you want to be a Christian, a true follower of Christ – this is how we should behave and act.  When we see somebody by the roadside broken down, then we should go to their aid and give what comfort and support we can.  Most people know this parable beginning with the words of Verse 30 – “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho” without reading or hearing the words of the preamble to this story beginning, as we did today at Verse 25. To skip the first five verses is to read the passage out of the context which prompted Jesus to tell this story in the first place.  Let’s look at those first five verses in a little more detail this morning.

First of all, it is important for us to understand that within Luke’s narrative of Jesus’s life, set out in his Gospel, this event occurs well into his ministry and, as we heard last week, he has already sent out the seventy-two disciples to spread the new good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and how to inherit eternal life.  Mission is well under way and has caught the attention of the Jewish authorities in a big way.  They feel threatened by this new ministry – that it might subvert and detract from the established way of Jewish worship and adherence to its customs and religious observance.

There was a great fear; therefore, amongst the Jewish lawyers and elders, the keepers of the Torah, that Jesus was preaching a form of religious anarchy or heresy.  They were concerned that his teachings went against the Jewish view that a very strict observance of the law was the proper way to salvation and appease God.  We read, therefore, at the very outset of this passage in Verse 25 that it was “a lawyer” or in the words of the NIV translation “an expert in the law” who stood up, not to ask a question for his further understanding, but, as it is written by Luke, “to test Jesus”.  To see, in effect, whether what Jesus had been preaching and teaching fell in line with the Jewish law of observance and belief.  ‘What must I do’ he asks ‘To inherit eternal life?’ By this question he is testing Jesus to see if he will answer in a way consistent with the observance of the law and Jewish teaching or whether he might give an answer which will contravene it and therefore condemn him.

As a qualified lawyer myself, of over 40 years’ experience, I have spent many happy, and unhappy, hours in court as an advocate.  One golden rule I was always told during my training was when cross examining a witness never to ask a question to which the advocate did not already know the answer.  The whole purpose of cross examination is to get the witness on the other side to say something which you know will aid your own client’s case. Conversely, avoid questions which might provide an unknown answer as that answer might have the unfortunate effect of condemning your own client.

Here is an example from real life.  During the course of an employment tribunal I conducted for an employee in Middlesbrough I had been given information by the employer that as you drove out of their factory compound there was a sign which read:

 “Do you have any company property in your possession? Staff taking property off site without permission will be treated as thieves and will be prosecuted”.

Our defendant (a delivery driver) had taken a hammer, several plastic bags and a ball of string off site for his own use. Please don’t ask me why.  He was duly caught and dismissed.  During my cross examination of him in court I thought that I would go for the “jugular” and just before I finally sat down I ended with one last, as I thought, crushing question – imagine the scene

“Oh, Mr. Smith, just before you sit down, just one final question I’d like you to help me with.  There is a sign as you leave the factory gates, isn’t there?” 

“Yes, that’s right, a big sign”

“How times a day on average do you think you pass it as you go to and from the factory in the van”?

“About six or seven”

“Would you like to tell the court what is written on that sign?”

“I’d love to, but unfortunately I can’t – you see, I can’t read or write”

I then compounded the situation by asking a quick supplementary one:

“So how do you read road signs when out on your deliveries?”

“With extreme difficulty”

 So you see, I have quite a bit of sympathy for our lawyer in Luke’s Gospel because I am sure he was confident that Jesus would fall foul of his cross-examination style question or be unable to answer but like me he was pole-axed.

As ever Jesus, deals with the question very carefully and cleverly by turning it back on his questioner with another question.  This was not entirely and unknown way of dealing with a question and in Jewish culture was quite a common way of answering but, in Jesus’s case, he was a master at this as we can observe many times in the gospel passages ending ultimately with his discourse with Pilate before his sentencing.

Jesus ironically asks the lawyer if he knows the law and the lawyer answers Jesus’s own question with those two Commandments which Jesus himself preached himself time and time again – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbour as yourself” and Jesus tells him that he answered correctly.  He tells him that if he does this he will live – that is – he will have eternal life – the answer to the original question.

However, just like me in that employment tribunal, the lawyer is not content to leave it at that but has to put forward a supplemental question – we are told to justify himself (or perhaps his own known failings at the latter part – to love his neighbour – something which for many of us can be difficult at times.  He has to ask the question – a typical ploy of lawyers, for a definition of the words which make up the law – “who is my neighbour?” or “what is the legal definition of a neighbour?”

Jesus answers this question will telling the story of the Good Samaritan in order, just as I did with my little story about the Middlesbrough employment tribunal, to give a clear example of how it works in practice.

I don’t intend to dissect the story in great detail because, as I said at the beginning of this sermon, we all know it so well – but it is important to pick out one or two salient points which I believe have great significance to us today.

We are not told whether the man on the journey is a Jew – he is simply referred to as a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. As he was “going down” from Jerusalem I think it is fair to assume that he was Jewish.  Therefore, after he has been mugged, the first two individuals who passed by on the other side would have been his close neighbours – a Jewish priest and a Jewish Levite (a member of that select group whose role was to look after the temple and worship – a sort of lay minister or church warden type).  Both being Jews and being heavily involved in the church or Temple, they would have been expected to know that they should love their neighbour.

At this time Samaritans were hated by the Jews.  That hatred was well steeped in history going back to the time of the return from the Exile when the Samaritans (the remnants of the former 10 Jewish tribes of north tried) to prevent to establishment of a southern Jewish province by those returning from the Babylonian captivity.  All we need to know for the moment is that this hatred was long and deep-seated. 

It was for this reason that Jesus chose to use a Samaritan as the person to come to the aid of the Jewish mugged victim. In essence, Jesus is telling the lawyer the definition of “neighbour” is anyone who isn’t you or God.  In other words, God loves us, we should love ourselves as God loves us and we should love all others as God loves us and them.  There are no boundaries to this love.  It encompasses all of God’s created beings.

Today we are seeing increasing persecution and intolerance between people of different nationalities, races and creeds. It has upset me recently that following the Brexit vote there appears to have been released an open xenophobia.  I don’t necessarily blame Brexit for this but it worries me that this has been bubbling below the surface for some time and the recent opportunity to debate the issue has highlighted this.

We as a Christian community are called upon by Jesus through the Holy Spirit to be that voice which reminds people that those two great commandments – loving God and loving our neighbour – are the true way to a better life for all on this planet as well as our own eternal life.

We seem to be in a political vacuum in this country at the moment.  Vacuums are dangerous as they can suck in dirt and evil and extremism can emerge.  As Christians we can and should show, by the way we live our lives, that we can be like the Good Samaritan, willing and able to go to the aid of those who feel mugged by our sometimes intolerant and self-centred society.  We can set an example and be true to the scriptures we profess to read and follow.  Never before has this seemed so important as it does today.

Amen

MFB/83/08.07.2016