“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer”. (Ps 19)
Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. September 6th 2009. Church of St. Athanasius, Glen Allen, VA.
Introduction:
The parable in today’s gospel is probably one of the most famous parables of all of the New Testament. It is a parable that is well known to many people with scant knowledge of Christianity or the New Testament scripture texts. The vividness of the imagery of this story makes it memorable.
But what is a parable? If you were to look up the meanings of the Greek word “παραβολε” you would find that one of its many meanings is “analogy”. This idea of analogy caught a very strong hold in the mind of the early church. Origen, a Father of the Church living from 185 –254 AD, wrote an interesting sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan in which everything was allegorical. St Augustine, who lived between 354AD and 430AD, went even further and his sermon on the allegorical meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan makes interesting reading. I will quote a section of it here:
“A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely, of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead.”[1]
I could go on: everything takes on a symbolic meaning: the animal (probably a donkey), the inn, the innkeeper, even the denarii – they all have symbolic significance! You can see what I mean when I talk of an allegorical approach to the parables of the New Testament.
When the Jews translated their scriptures from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek to produce the Septuagint, they translated the Hebrew word “mashal” and the Aramaic word “mathla” into the Greek word “παραβολε”. It was the emphasis that was given to the notion of allegory in the meaning of the Greek work “parable” that lead to the various allegorical interpretations of the parables of which Augustine’s example is one. But the meaning of the Hebrew and Aramaic words were not so limited and they could take on a whole variety of meanings not just allegory. Whilst at times the allegorical approach may not be incorrect in interpreting the text of the scriptures, I feel that such an approach is unnecessary in the case of today’s parable. This is one of the most straightforward of parables. I would like to take a straightforward approach in examining today’s parable.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan:
You have the Gospel text in front of you on your sheets, don’t be afraid to follow it. You will notice that the Gospel is basically in two parts: the first part is from verse 25 to verse 28, and the second part is from verse 29 to verse 37.
First part of the Gospel:
In the first part we have Jesus in a room or hall, probably a synagogue, surrounded by a crowd of people seated around Him. I say this because you will notice that the text tells us: “Just then a lawyer stood up”; notice that he stood up, so presumably he, and all the rest had been sitting, with probably only Jesus standing addressing the crowd. Notice also that the man is described as “a lawyer”. The word used in the New Testament is “νομικος” which is the name for a “doctor of the Jewish law”. So this man is a lawyer.
Imagine the scene: Jesus is standing addressing the crowd; a man stands up and challenges him – we know he is simply challenging Jesus because the text tells us “a lawyer stood up to test him”. This man is not looking for truth or seeking genuine guidance from the Lord, he is simply initiating a legal debate. Such legal debates were common among the rabbis then, just as they still are today. This learned lawyer is challenging Jesus to see how he will answer the question. The lawyer already knows the answer to his question and Jesus knows this. This is not unusual. I qualified as a barrister at the Inns of Court in London years ago. One of the rules of advocacy was that one never asked a question unless one already knew the answer. This was a fundamental rule; any advocate who broke this rule risked disaster and I have often seen advocates come to grief by ignoring this rule. What is fascinating is to see that it was operative two thousand years ago! Lawyers did not ask questions to which they did not know the answer!
The lawyer asks Jesus:
“Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus simply replies:
“What is written in the law? How readest thou”
And the lawyer answers:
“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”.
Jesus answers:
“Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live”.
Notice, that Jesus has adroitly turned the legal challenge back on his challenger: “What is written in the law?” v.26, He asks. So the lawyer is required to answer his own question, of which he knew the answer anyway!
Before I go on I would commend to your attention that wonderful answer of the lawyer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” This is a composite text taken from Deuteronomy Ch.6, v5 and Leviticus, Ch. 19, verse 18. These twenty-six words encapsulate the whole of the Gospel teaching. If only we could all live our lives by these simple directions the world would be a better place.
As an exercise during this coming week I would ask you to contrast this passage with the passage from Exodus, Chapter 20, verses 12-17. That is the passage in which Moses delivers the ten commandments to the Jewish people. If you take each of those separate commandments see whether or not it is contained within the meaning of those words taken from Luke 10, v.27. See whether or not those twenty-six words encapsulate all of the teachings of the ten commandments.
Second Part of the Gospel:
To return to our Gospel: the lawyer is slightly discomfited by having been bested in legal argument by Jesus, for the text tells us: “But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus..” v.29. Wanting to justify himself! This man was very much in an argumentative mode; he wanted to continue this legal debate. So once again he asks a question to which he knows the answer – or at least he thinks he does.
“And who is my neighbour?”
Now this term neighbour was very much in dispute among the lawyers. It was generally agreed that it connoted fellow-countrymen, including full converts to the Jewish religion, but there was disagreement about the exceptions:
· the Pharisees were inclined to exclude all non-Pharisees;
· the Essenes, a Jewish sect active at this time, required that a man should hate ‘all the sons of darkness’ that is, people who were not members of the sect of the Essenes;
· a rabbinical saying ruled that heretics, informers, and renegades should be ‘pushed down into the ditch and not pulled out’ so we know whom they considered as neighbours;
· and there was a widespread popular saying that excluded personal enemies from the category of neighbour. As an example of this last, you will remember the story of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, v 43: Jesus is saying: “You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy”.
So our friend the lawyer is not asking Jesus for a definition of the word neighbour, but for an indication of where within the community Jesus would suggest that the limits to the duty of loving were to be drawn. The lawyer is simply continuing his legal disputation.
In response, Jesus tells his story of the Good Samaritan. I don’t think we need to read anything into the story, as St. Augustine did. I would make just two points:
Firstly, this man would certainly not have been included within the lawyer’s definition of neighbour. The relations between the Jews and the Samaritans, which had undergone considerable fluctuations, had become much worse in Jesus’ time. Some time, between 6AD and 9AD, at midnight during a Passover, the Samaritans had defiled the temple court in Jerusalem by strewing around the bones of corpses. As a result there was irreconcilable hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans.
Secondly, consider the remarkable generosity of the Samaritan in the story. He leaves two denarii with the innkeeper to ensure that the injured man is cared for, and he promises to come back and pay more if necessary. Now historians tell us that one twelfth of a denarius would be about the cost of a day’s board, so the Samaritan is leaving enough to cover about twenty four days of hospital care for this injured man!
Having told the story, Jesus again gets the lawyer to answer his own question, for at the end he says: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” v.36. Again the lawyer is forced to answer his own question and in a sense lose the legal debate.
But wait a moment. Go back to verse 29 – you have got it in front of you: the lawyer’s question was: “And who is my neighbour?” Jesus has won this legal debate by forcing the lawyer to provide an answer, not to his own question, but to a different question: “Which of these three was a neighbour?” The lawyer doesn’t seem to realise that this was not his original question! He is being forced to redefine his own idea of what constitutes a neighbour. The lawyer was concerned with the idea of a neighbour as an object and his question implied a limitation; my neighbour is one who belongs to such and such a group. Jesus was interested in the neighbour as the subject : which of the three men had acted as neighbour? A man cannot determine theoretically who his neighbour is because love is not theory but practice. A man’s neighbour is any man who needs his help, says the parable; the wounded man was neighbour to the priest and the Levite just as much as he was to the Samaritan, but while they theorised in the manner of the lawyer, the Samaritan acted.
Though the final recommendation of Christ was addressed to the lawyer it contains a message and a warning, for all Christians. We must not pause to ask ourselves: “Is this man really my neighbour?” for a question like this has no place in the Christian life. Christian charity knows no bounds and oversteps all man-made limits. The pity for our society is that there are so few Samaritans among us today.
[1] Quaestiones Evangeliorum, II, 19
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