The parable of the good Samaritan is full of twists, full of poignancies.
First of all, we read in many places in the Old Testament that the foreigner, the stranger, is to be treated well. Deuteronomy says:
God … executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and … loves the stranger, providing them with food and clothing. You also shall love the stranger … Dt 10.18f
In this parable of the good Samaritan the roles are reversed. It is the stranger, the Samaritan, who is showing love to God’s people, better than they do it to each other. God’s people are put to shame by this stranger in their midst. It was true then, and it’s true today, that believers in God don’t have a monopoly on truth. Often the church is shamed by the secular world. Sadly in being held to account over ways of dealing with abuse. The church has learnt much else from the secular world, for instance about good practice in counselling, or simply about health and safety. We should not be surprised that the thought that God is at work in people outside the church. Human beings are made in the image of God: God can be seen somehow, somewhere, in everyone. At mattins we read from Deuteronomy, “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart”. If that’s the case, is it OK then not to be a Christian, but just to do good? No it isn’t, because Christ wil take our innate divinity in us much further. I can’t help thinking that our present Prime Minister, who is a good man, would be much more focused in what he was doing if he were a practising Christian. The gospel has an uncanny power for focusing what is good, for optimising it.
The second twist in this parable is that the Samaritan was moved with pity. What if the Samaritan wasn’t moved with pity? Do you need to be moved with pity in order to love someone in need? We are glad the Samaritan was moved with pity, because that’s a sign of his humanity. But it isn’t a necessary requirement for practising love. The gospel elsewhere tells us we are to love, even if we don’t have loving feelings. Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you. In the English language the word “love” is freighted with assumptions about feelings. The gospel understanding is different. First and foremost love is practical – it is a way of behaving, not a way of feeling. One of our recent visitors was a prison chaplain working in an A category prison. There are times when she has to talk with some very unpleasant people who have done horrible things. She described the ordeal of sitting to listen to such people talk, and having an overwhelming desire to walk out. She said however that if you stay and listen to all this terrible stuff, and you stay long enough, they eventually begin to talk in a different way – the human being begins to emerge. The practical love of sitting and listening is filled with feelings of revulsion, but it is love at work. Christian love first and foremost is a way of living, and only through that can it grow into being a way of feeling.
A third twist regards the lawyer who is questioning Jesus, wanting to catch him out. Jesus is clever: he finds a way of praising the lawyer for his answer, but the lawyer wants to save face, and so he asks a sneaky question only possible from a person who thinks there are in-people and out-people: “who is my neighbour?” Is asking: who is in, and who is out? Perhaps he expects Jesus to say that our neighbour’s prostitutes and tax collectors. Now the Greek word for neighbour, and its equivalent in Hebrew, means a person who is near me. Jesus is very clever here. His example of a “near” person is someone who is about as far from the Samaritan as you can get. The wounded man is a foreign Hebrew, and Hebrews hate Samaritans. The wounded man quite likely rejects him. The victim is also really inconvenient, as he’s in absolutely dire need – there is no easy quick fix if you get involved. Our Samaritan will have to get his hands and clothes dirty, do some heavy lifting, spend money, spend time he hadn’t banked on wasting, and he would be unlikely to get any reward. That is what Jesus sees as love of neighbour. Who is the lawyer’s neighbour? Everybody. Our neighbour is everybody. We know from the Gospels that the priest and Levite, and presumably this lawyer, tend to be religion-mad. They haven’t grasped that we can’t come to God without our everybody, without our neighbour. How can we love God who we cannot see, if we don’t love our neighbour who we can see? And everybody is our neighbour
How do these things apply to life in a religious community? All of it applies I would think. We can’t come to God without our brother. but it’s not first one and then the other, first our neighbour, and then we’ll be able to love God. The two go hand-in-hand: God is in our neighbour, our brother. Progress towards God is always corporate. We have been called into community. At the most fundamental level, the love of the brethren, and indeed of God, is practical. We in CR have a tradition, for instance, that if a brother is in hospital, we endeavour to visit him every day. When our brother Benedict was in hospital in Southport, in what turned out to be his last illness, almost every day a brother made the 140-mile round trip to visit him. Brethren will know the story of when Benedict was off all liquids and nourishment, and was lying horizontal and incommunicative, and I talked for a long time about whatever I could think of, and he, ever a schoolmaster, said very quietly at a certain point “I think you are beginning to repeat yourself”.
Practical love applies to everything – not just to how we relate to each other, but also to the way in which we give ourselves to our common worship, supporting one another in it, in looking after guests, in caring for our resources; practical love in taking seriously the world’s problems and needs; and practical love of God in our application to prayer and study. We are to love the whole of the life. This is very clear in St Benedict, who tells us that even the tools and the pots and pans are to be treated the same as the vessels of the altar. I speak of course as a person who is still learning through mistakes. But it seems to me that practical love will grow – it doesn’t stand still. Giving ourselves to practical love leads to something else coming about in us, God willing. How can we describe that? Well, I suppose it’s what we see in the good Samaritan. And he is just a figure, of Christ and the mystery of the incarnation.