Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Trinity – 10th July 2022: : Deut 30, 9-14; Col1, 1-14; Luke 10, 25-37

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

One of the most challenging aspects for the preacher is to preach on a text that is really well known. The problem is that with a very familiar passage of scripture, such as the Good Samaritan, people already have their own very worthwhile interpretation and understanding. So what I say today about this well- known parable of Jesus should be set alongside what opinion you have already formed. Maybe my words will supplement what you already think about this story.

Unlike most of you who know the story well, I have actually visited the Inn of the Good Samaritan. That gives me an upper hand. Well, at least it calls itself the Inn of the Good Samaritan, and it is located high up in the ragged rocks of the wilderness of Judea on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. At the Inn of the Good Samaritan your luxury air-conditioned coach can stop for a short time while people pile out to have their latte or cappuccino. To add to that, for a few dollars or shekels more, you can get on a camel and have your photograph taken with the Inn of the Good Samaritan sign in the background.

There is a sort of saying that a camel is such a strange animal it could only have been created by a committee; and its not only how it looks – try staying on the saddle when the camel stands up, or even more challenging when it sits down, lurching first backwards and then forwards.

It is one of the legal experts who asks Jesus about inheriting eternal life. Jesus first deflects the question back on the questioner. He does this often. If it is a legal expert who asks, then the best response is to pass the question back to the area of expertees of the questioner. Jesus asks the legal expert what the law says.

The lawyer turns immediately to the foundation of the relationship between the faithful Jew and God. He quotes back at Jesus the words of the ‘Shema’ – the word for ‘hear’. He is quoting Deuteronomy ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord’ and in the actual quote he continues the Shema ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself.’ had reason to use this text just a week ago. I had been asked to officiate at a Blessing of a Marriage at a location on the Athens Riviera. The couple were of mixed traditions – she an Anglican and he a Jew. They had requested that the ceremony might include some of the Jewish traditions and words as well as the basis of the Anglican Wedding Blessing ceremony. A good number of the congregation had flown over from Israel.

I had to think carefully about how to weave not only the traditions of the ceremony together, but also what to say in the sermon. I focussed on the word ‘love’, and began with the foundational sentence that we hear on the lips of the lawyer, ‘You shall love the Lord your God…..etc. I then moved towards Corinth and brought in the beautiful hymn of praise to divine love that we know so well from 1 Corinthians 13, and then I referred to the Wedding Feast at Cana, where Jesus, who is God’s love made flesh, transforms water into wine, just as he transforms our lives – he has come that we might have life, and have it with full abundance. (John 10,10).

I am told by the bride’s mother that she was looking around at the Jewish members of the congregation and she could see them nodding with assent. So I managed not to cause a new religious war!

However, the lawyer, who is accustomed to the forensic approach cannot stop there. He has a supplementary question – ‘but who is my neighbour?’

In reply Jesus doesn’t try to give a theoretical reply. Instead he tells a story. A man is traveling along that rugged and rocky road between Jericho and Jerusalem. He can maybe see the Inn in the distance. Little does he know that the Inn will one day be named after him! Probably the same camel was there to give people rides.

Plenty of robbers could hide among the rocks, so it is a dangerous route through the wilderness. He falls prey to a robbery with violence and he is left by the side of the road. He’s in a bad way. One by one three people pass by the scene of the crime. Two of them are very upright citizens – righteous men – first a priest and then a Levite.

The priest may well have been a Cohen by name – it means priest and they were descendants of the High Priest Aaron, the brother of Moses. His whole life revolves around religious purity laws. If the body lying in the road is a dead person, he can’t touch it, as to touch a dead body will render him ritually impure. So he walks on, giving the person a wide berth.

Then comes along a Levite, a descendent of the House of Levi, who constitute a second rank of the priesthood, below the level of the Cohens. He also just keeps going.

Third comes along a Samaritan. As far as the other two are concerned the Samaritan is already ritually impure, because they were heretical, with their own centre of worship and their own traditions. The Samaritans generally were despised by the Jews.

He attends to the man who has been attacked – takes him to the Inn, passing by the camel waiting for its next customer, and asks the inn-keeper to look after the man and whatever it costs he will pay on his return journey. His action is a stark contrast to the two religious conventional characters.

That’s the story Jesus tells in response to the lawyer’s question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ This story would have been quite shocking because the pagan Samaritan comes off best. Jesus knows that this would shock the lawyer and the others around him, so with sabre-like precision Jesus asks the lawyer who it was of the three that treated the injured man best.

The lawyers response is interesting. Had it been Cohen, he would probably have said ‘Cohen’ – likewise for the Levite. It is the Samaritan who is the true neighbour, but it sticks in the throat of the lawyer, and he can’t say the word; he can’t say, ‘the Samaritan’. He has to find a way round it – ‘the one who showed him mercy’.

Read again the three scripture readings set for today, and you will see that it is the fruitfulness of love that runs like a golden thread between them.

We are called to recognize the needs of our neighbours and to respond to them in love – and in this way we are showing our love for God. God’s commandment of love is not a complex theory, but is easily within our grasp – it is close to us. ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe’. (Deut. 30, 14).

The flourishing of this obedience to God’s loving commandments is the subject of the introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, ‘bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. (Col. 1, 12)

It was the one who showed mercy to the robbed and injured man who did God’s will. Jesus has the final say in this clever cross questioning by the lawyer. “Go and do likewise