Sermon at St. Mary’s Church, West
Dean and All Saints Church, Farley - Seventh Sunday after Trinity – Morning
Worship – Sunday 14 July 2013
Deuteronomy
30:9-14; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-27
May I speak in the name
of the Father, son and Holy Spirit, Amen
“Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said,
‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’”
For me, as a solicitor, it is interesting that Jesus’s
parable of the Good Samaritan, so well-known and loved by all of us, is
prompted by a question put by a lawyer. Now, I am sure that the lawyer in
Luke’s gospel was not a court lawyer; but almost certainly he was somebody
whose role it was to upkeep the sacred Jewish laws of observance, as described
in our first reading from Deuteronomy, laws designed alone to please God, and
he was probably given the task to try and trap Jesus into giving an answer
which would implicate him as either a non-observant Jew or a traitor to the
Roman occupiers. If he had been a court
lawyer he would almost certainly have known the golden rule of advocacy - that
you never ask a question to which you don’t, with any certainty, know or
suspect the answer.
Let me illustrate this with an event which occurred in my own
professional life when I was a newly qualified solicitor.
I had been given the task of cross-examining an employee of a
company accused of stealing equipment from a factory in Yorkshire – a roll of
bin liners, a ball of string and a hammer as I recall – it’s strange how you
remember these little things – and in the course of my investigations
discovered that there was an enormous sign in red letters just by the exit to
the factory site which read something along the lines of:-
“Have you any company
property on you? Any employees taking
materials off site without permission will be deemed thieves and thieves will
be dismissed and prosecuted”.
A fairly straightforward and explicit message I thought. I also ascertained that “matey” as we can
affectionately call him, had a job of driving the company van out of the
factory in the course of his duties up to ten time a day and in cross-examining
him he readily admitted that he passed the big red sign every time.
In for the kill, I looked at the judge, paused and then
launched in with my coup de grace (as I thought):-
“Would you please tell his Honour, what the sign says”? I
smiled with satisfaction at my own handiwork so far.
“No” was his stern reply
After a further nudge from the Judge to answer the question
he repeated …“No”.
“And why not?” I continued ready with the hammer blow
“Because I can’t read”!
Completely taken off my guard, I flustered, looked at my
clients who shrugged their shoulders as if to say “We didn’t know” and came out
with a quick supplementary question:
“You’ve told the court how you drive around the county
delivering and collecting products. If
you can’t read how do you find your way around (this was of course before the
days of sat. navs)?
His unblinked response to the Judge was simply - “With
difficulty!”
I tell this story, not simply because it is one of my
favourite after-dinner reminiscences from my previous professional life, but
also because I suspect that the lawyer in our bible reading felt very much like
I did in that courtroom – he got back
from Jesus far more than he bargained for when he asked that first question
about inheriting eternal life, and the supplemental one that followed – “Who, then is my neighbour?” Jesus,
as so often the case, then proceeded to give an answer by posing a question of
his own through the illustration of a parable ending with “Which one of these do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell
into the hands of the robbers? The
lawyer straight away answers with “the one who showed mercy – the Samaritan”. Jesus follows this up with a direction to
the lawyer
“Then go and do
likewise”.
The response probably left the lawyer with more questions
left unanswered than he had anticipated.
How easy is it to do likewise? We can read that parable again and again
and it will often speak to us in different ways posing questions which we have
to ask ourselves – the most important of which is probably “What would I have done in that situation? Would I have done likewise?”
A contemporary situation might be like that which faced
Philip Lawrence who paid for his good neighbourliness with his life after being
stabbed by the assailants of a 13-year old youth whose aid he went to.
Over the past few weeks the readings which we have studied
and discussed in church have centred on the call to follow Jesus and the
putting into practice of that call.
Jesus repeatedly plays a straight bat – a nice analogy to use at this
time with the Ashes Series on. He sets
conditions for those who want to follow him – leave what you are currently
doing immediately, do not dilly-dally, leave the comfort of your family and
home and come with me on the road; likewise, in sending out the seventy he
makes it clear to those he has commissioned that to go out on the mission will
be tough and rejection and danger will be with them. In today’s reading, Jesus
tells the lawyer the answer to his question – he must obey the commandant to love his neighbour as himself – something
the lawyer would have understood, but Jesus illustrates what that actually
looks like by indicating that two of the lawyer’s own kind, a priest and a
Levite (a member of that priestly clan) - people who would be expected to help,
found it too difficult and took the easy route – crossing over to the other
side of the road. People in whom there
would be an expectation of grace and mercy but which they found too hard to put
into practice.
During my years in a large commercial organisation we were
often told to “walk the talk” – in other words to put into practice those
things we had learned and which we had promised or were contracted to do. This is Jesus’s message although he knew that
in many instances this simply did not happen and we find him again and again admonishing
the Pharisees and Sadducees - on the
face of it holy men who had been trained to walk the talk but so frequently
didn’t.
Being a Christian, following Christ’s example and teachings,
as we are told to do in this and other passages of the bible, demands
sacrifices. In this morning’s Epistle,
Paul reminds the leaders in Colossae that hearing God’s word is not enough but
only by constant prayer and actions can Christians bear fruit in every good
work they do. In other words, we have
each been given the fruits of the Holy Spirit and these will ripen by their use
in actions for God. The sacrifices which we have to make and difficulties which
we encounter will become easier to bear.
In the parable, the Samaritan not only did not pass on the
other side but stopped, gave what roadside assistance he could and then took
the injured man to an inn where he ensured that he would be looked after –
providing money for that care until he returned.
Clearly, like the mugged traveller, the Samaritan was on an
important journey – no doubt with appointments to keep and tasks to fulfil –
just as the priest and the Levite would have had.
Let’s ask ourselves, how many times do we fail to give
compassionate care to others because we think we are too busy? That our own affairs are more important than
stopping to give somebody else a bit of our precious time. Perhaps we simply don’t want the unexpected
to interfere with our planned day?
Jesus was himself frequently side-tracked away from his
current mission. We see examples dotted
throughout the bible. A well-known
example would be when, on his way to attend to Jarius’s sick daughter, he was
touched by the bleeding woman. He also
spent probably a considerable amount of time with the woman at the well when he
simply wanted to stop briefly for a drink of water.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is also giving an
example of excellent pastoral care.
Christian pastoral care is not simply for those who are ordained,
licensed or commissioned/authorised by the church – it is the role and duty,
the ministry of every believer.
When we are put in the situation of being able to give
pastoral care, of helping our neighbour - who can be anyone in the world
irrespective of gender, race, creed or colour, - God will always provide us
with the time and capacity to exercise it.
There are many biblical examples from the Gospels and Acts and in my own
experience, God will never ask or expect us to do something for which we are
not ready or capable.
The writer James talks about showing faith through our
deeds. It is a strapline on my emails –
put deliberately there to remind me of the importance of this.
When the occasion arises, let’s not pass by on the other side
– let’s follow the example of the good Samaritan and “go and do likewise”.
Amen
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