A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday after
Trinity
Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou
likewise.
—Saint
Again this morning our Gospel lesson includes one of Jesus’s parables, this time the familiar story of the “Good Samaritan.” The parable is told in the context of dramatic interaction, or dialogue.
Jesus’s interlocutor is identified as “a certain lawyer.” But “lawyer” here does not mean a courtroom advocate or a practitioner draws up wills and contracts. We might better say “legalist” than “lawyer.” The questioner is a fellow who studies the law in detail, an expert on loopholes and fine print. And he is not a student of Roman law, either, but of Torah, the Law as it was given to the Jews in the Old Testament—and so, perhaps, we might identify him not even as a legalist, but as a biblical scholar.
The first question he puts to Jesus is, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
We are told that he asks this first question to challenge Jesus, that is, to test Jesus’s knowledge of Scripture. But Jesus does not answer him; instead, he turns the table and elicits the answer from his questioner. And the answer is one that is familiar to us: it is the so-called summary of the Law, on which Jesus elsewhere says the whole of Scripture depends. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”
Now the interlocutor, the legalist, asks a second question. Again, we are told his motive. He asked the first question in order to put Jesus to the test; he asks the second because he wants to justify himself. We can read this quite literally, if we like. We may suppose that the questioner wants to make himself righteous, to put himself right with God. Because the questioner is zealous of the Law, we may suppose him to be a Pharisee, and, therefore, to believe that under the terms of the bargain God struck with his people, if the people do what is required of them, then God owes them life.
The trouble with that way of thinking is that it rapidly degenerates into a calculation of the minimum necessary inconvenience to obey the letter of the Law, and, thus, to keep God on the hook. What must one actually do in order to be reckoned as law-abiding, and, therefore, righteous? If, as he has just said, righteousness requires loving one’s neighbour, the question follows naturally: “who, then, is my neighbour?”
The answer to the second question is not as obvious as it might seem. There are many possible answers. Our neighbour might be the fellow next door, it might be any of the people in our community, it might be our kinsman, our fellow Pharisee, our fellow Jew, our fellow Israelite. If it is important to God that we love our neighbour, then it is important to us to know just who our neighbour is.
Instead
of answering the question, “Who then is my neighbour?” Jesus tells the parable of the Good
Samaritan. Three men traveling on the
The third traveler interrupted his journey to care for the robbery victim, to bind his wounds, to get him safely to an inn, to pay his way for a couple of nights. This traveler was not a Jew at all, but a Samaritan. The Samaritan showed mercy on the robbery victim, and so was a neighbour to the robbery victim.
And at this point it is clear to us, if not to Jesus’s immediate hearers, that the parable has not answered the question that was put to Jesus. The interlocutor, the legalist, the man who wanted to make himself righteous, had asked: who is my neighbour that I am supposed to love as myself. And Jesus ends the parable by asking the interlocutor a different question: “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”
As so often happens in the Gospel, Jesus turns the question around. Here the legalist wanted to know who was the neighbour that the Law required him to be nice to. But Jesus shows him that the real question is, how can one be a neighbour to anyone, friend or stranger, who needs a bit of kindness?
Who was neighbour to the robbery victim? “He who showed mercy on him,” the interlocutor replies. Then Jesus says something that is unique to the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Go and do thou likewise.” There is no other parable in which Jesus says, “Go and do thou likewise.” But it does reflect Jesus’s final answer to the original question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer, “Go, and show mercy, like the Samaritan in the parable.”
Here is the moral content of Christianity. This is how Jesus told us to live.
Again, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, a parable of judgment, Jesus told his disciples:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?' And the king will say to them in reply, 'Verily, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least these my brethren, you did it unto me.'
This is the criterion of judgment; this is what is expected of us as Christians. If we should find ourselves traveling down the Jericho road, and come upon a man who has fallen among thieves, we should ask ourselves not so much, “What would Jesus do?”, but, “What would I do if that were Jesus lying there?” And if there is some act of kindness, some act of mercy, that we would be willing to do if we saw Jesus is distress, then we should not withhold one whit of that kindness or that mercy from the least of his brethren.
On
Wednesday of this week, the Church will commemorate the tenth
anniversary of
the heavenly birthday of a twentieth century saint.
Mother Teresa of
And
those words, “You did it to me,” became the motto of the religious
order she
founded, the Missionaries of Charity.
They are painted on the walls of the convent in
Not all of us can be Mother Teresa, but all of us can venerate her for her ministry of service to the Lord by service to the least of his brethren; and all of us can ask her intercession that we may find opportunity at some point in our lives to be good Samaritans, too.
02 September 2007
See a list of the deacon's homilies.