Homily for Sunday 10th July 2022 - St Edmund Campion & the Annunciation Catholic Churches, Charminster. (Luke 10: 25-37 from the Jerusalem Bible)
(also livestreamed on the Parish Facebook account here from 25:25)
I. Jesus and the Lawyer
It’s been fourteen years since I sat my GCSE in Religious studies, and I’ll be honest with you and say I’ve forgotten most of it, but one factoid that’s stuck with me across all those fourteen years was the number of commandments in the Jewish Law; there are six-hundred and thirteen of them. The other fact that stuck with me in that time was the number of negative commandments - three hundred and sixty five; that’s one commandment for every day of the year where God tells the Israelites “thou shalt not.” For anyone struggling with the mental arithmetic, like I absolutely would if I didn’t have it written down here, that means there are two hundred and forty-eight positive commandments, where God tells the Israelites “thou shalt”.
A lot of these we will know, and be able to summon up with ease. Any of the “Ten Commandments” for example, we would probably be able to recite without much difficulty, “thou shalt have no other Gods before me” or “thou shalt not commit adultery” are easy enough to remember. Other laws we might not be able to remember so easily.
How about Leviticus 10:6, the commandment which could have been written by anyone’s mother, especially mine. Moses commands “Do not dishevel your hair, and do not tear your vestments” the punishment for that one is a bit more severe than a mother’s disapproval, the verse goes on “Do not dishevel your hair, and do not tear your vestments, or you will die and wrath will strike all the congregation” (Leviticus 10:6 NRSVCE) – not only will you die, but the whole people of Israel will suffer because you’ve gone around in torn clothes without getting a decent haircut! If like Fr Ben, you dislike those jeans that teenagers wear which already come pre-torn, now you have a bible verse to back yourself up!
Let’s try another, Leviticus 19:9, God commands his people not to wear “garment(s) made of two different materials” (if anybody is wearing a polyester-cotton T-shirt or a polyester blend suit jacket – throw it away, it’s a violation of the Law!).
How about this one from Leviticus 19, a longer Law, the Lord commands;
“When you come into the land and plant all kinds of trees for food, then you shall regard their fruit as forbidden;[c] three years it shall be forbidden to you, it must not be eaten. In the fourth year all their fruit shall be set apart for rejoicing in the Lord. But in the fifth year you may eat of their fruit, that their yield may be increased for you”
(Leviticus 19:23-25 NRSVCE)
I’m fairly sure when my father planted the grapevines and the pear and apple trees in our back garden in Southampton we didn’t wait for five years before tasting the produce; I’m willing to bet that when Fr Ben started growing plantains on his allotment, he didn’t mark off the first four years on his calendar before bringing them home and frying them up!
The Law of Moses is long and complicated, 613 commandments spread over multiple books, and in Jesus’ time there were people called Scribes whose whole lives were spent learning, interpreting, and arguing about the Law. One of these Lawyers decides to ask Jesus a question;
“Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus knows this man is a Lawyer, so he asks Him, What is written in the Law? The man responds with the same words Jesus uses in the other Gospels to describe the greatest commandments;
You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.
(Luke 10:27 Jerusalem Bible)
Jesus congratulates him; A* - 10/10 that is the correct answer. The Old testament reading today says
the word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart for your observance,
(Deuteronomy 30:14 Jerusalem Bible)
It is not as complex as 613 commandments, but as simple as these two. But, the Lawyer isn’t satisfied. I studied Law at University, and I can tell you now; in my experience no lawyer is ever satisfied with a simple uncomplicated answer. OK then, the lawyer says, Who is my neighbour?
The parable Jesus tells, that we’ve just heard in our Gospel reading, is perhaps the best known parable Jesus ever told; the Good Samaritan. We’ve probably heard this story hundreds of times; the story of an act of extreme kindness done by someone who should have been an enemy. A man is struck down on the road by robbers, the priest and the Levite (the Lawyer) don’t stop to help him, but the foreigner, the Samaritan, stops and helps him, picks him up, and pays for his recovery. For context, in first century Israel, Jews and Samaritans hated each other, and had hated each other for several hundred years. The Jews rejected the Samaritan religion, and Samaritans rejected the Jewish prophets; yet the Samaritan stops and helps his sworn enemy when he is in dire need. Like I say, we’ve heard it hundreds of times, and taken at face value this is a moving parable about mercy and kindness. But with so many of Jesus’ parables, the face value isn’t all there is, and this one has a second meaning, which goes much deeper and actually helps us better understand the face-value interpretation.
II. The deeper meaning: a parable about salvation
Saint Ambrose, the great Bishop of Milan and teacher of the faith who taught Saint Augustine, wrote that what Jesus is doing by telling this parable is not just giving an instruction on loving our neighbour, but He is revealing something of Himself and the Salvation he is offering, He is telling us how He has loved us.
The Lawyer asked “what must I do to inherit eternal life” – the Lawyer was an expert on the word of God and wanted to unsettle Jesus, but the Lawyer in our story didn’t realise that he wasn’t talking to just any teacher of the Word, he was talking to the living breathing incarnate WORD of God. How does Jesus answer him?
A man was on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell into the hands of brigands; they took off all he had, beat him, and then made off, leaving him half for dead.
The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a symbol; Jerusalem, the Holy City, is a metaphor for heaven and Jericho is a metaphor for hell. The road the man is on is leading him away from heaven and towards hell, and on the way he is attacked by Robbers. Saint Ambrose says these are the devil and his fallen angels; they strip the man of his spiritual garments, inflict deep wounds on him, and leave him for dead because he had left the Holy City, the kingdom of heaven, and had entered their country. Saint Ambrose says the man is Adam, our first father, who represents you and me. What happens next?
A priest happened to be travelling down the same road, but when he saw the man he passed on by the other side.
The priest, who offered the sacrifices of the old law, did not help the broken man. The Levite, the teacher of the Law, did not help the broken man. Jesus is telling the priests and the Levites that it isn’t sacrifices of animals or obedience to the old law which offer salvation. The Lawyer asked Jesus, “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life” and Jesus answered him in a roundabout way; the law can’t save you. Sacrifices under the law can’t save you. What then does save the broken man? A Samaritan. The enemy of the Jews; someone with whom he has almost nothing in common.
Again, this man isn’t what He seems, in fact according to Saint Ambrose this Samaritan is Jesus, and because Jesus is also God, this Samaritan man is God. What Jesus is saying here is that human beings, after the fall from Grace, had so little in common with God that we were as un-alike as Jews and Samaritans – we had made ourselves God’s enemy. What happens then, the Samaritan our Gospel says was “moved with compassion” for the injured man.
The problem with our English translation is that it doesn’t do justice to how powerful an image Jesus was conjuring here, the original Greek word (εσπλαγχνισθη - esplanknithe) that we’ve translated here actually says something like ‘he was moved from his guts’ (σπλαγχνα – splankna) – Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth describes this expression as saying that the feeling this tries to convey is of having your insides taken out, or of a woman having a child removed by caesarean section it is gut wrenching compassion; Jesus is saying that He, that God, saw the sorry state human beings were in and were moved with compassion, despite the vast gulf and the enmity between man and God, he could do nothing other than take pity on him from the very depths of His being.
This is the metaphor we’ve been given; Jesus, the Good Samaritan, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God himself, enters into our lives, He makes the journey from the heavenly Jerusalem to the Earthly Jericho, He becomes one of us in order to save broken humanity from the pain of original sin and the wounds of actual sin.
But then He adds another layer; the Samaritan hands the man over to the care of another. To an innkeeper, and He pays him with two silver coins, before going off to go about His business, and promising to return to settle up the debt. Who is this innkeeper?
The Innkeeper, says Saint Ambrose, is the Church; He represents especially the Christian faithful. In a funny paradox, you and I are both the broken man beaten by the side of the road, and the innkeeper who has been tasked with looking after the man while Jesus is not physically present with us.
But Jesus does not leave us with nothing, He gives two coins. Saint Ambrose says these coins represent the two covenants, the Old and the New, other Church Fathers and commentators say they represent the Scriptures and the Sacred Tradition of the Church. What is sure is this; Jesus has given us what we need to take care of broken human beings. He has given us the vast treasury of the scriptures and the teachings of the Church, he has given us the seven sacraments, he has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and the promise made to the innkeeper:
“On my way back, I will make good any extra expense you have”
On the day of the resurrection, we will be repaid in kind by Jesus, rewarded for the good we have done in His name.
III. Putting this Gospel into action
What does all of this mean for you and me in our daily lives? How can we take this deeper, metaphorical, reading of the Good Samaritan and use it?
This Gospel gives us a rich lesson on loving our neighbour. At face value it tells us to take a risk, and help those who are in need as much as we are able to do so and more. But at its deeper level, Jesus is saying to us that we have been given the mission of healing broken humanity in His name and with His power.
Just as the face value reading leads us to works of mercy, to visit the sick and imprisoned, to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, the deeper reading tells us that sickness is not just physical, that someone can be a prisoner even when they seem free, that we hunger and thirst for more than just food and drink, and though fully clothed we can be spiritually naked. The Church gives us spiritual works of mercy, which are in fact as important as the corporeal works of mercy:
To instruct the ignorant.
To counsel the doubtful.
To admonish the sinners.
To bear patiently those who wrong us.
To forgive offenses.
To comfort the afflicted.
(Most important of all) To pray for the living and the dead
If you want to take home anything from today’s Gospel it is this; loving your neighbour means wanting them to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ and the sacraments of His Church, before it means anything else.
That means we each have a responsibility to pray for those around us; for the family members who stopped coming to Church, for the colleague at work who makes fun of religion, for people in our schools or colleges or universities who have never heard the Gospel preached.
We have to be willing and ready to share the great truth that today’s Gospel communicates; we were sinners, broken, left for dead, with almost nothing in common between us and God, but He loved us so much that He became one of us, He saved us, he died for us so that we could have life. Or as Saint Paul says in our second reading, that God wanted;
all things to be reconciled through Him and for Him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when He made peace by His death on the Cross (Colossians 1:20)
God wants every human being, the whole of creation, to be reconciled through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, and it is our job to pray and work for this end. So each day pray, pray for the grace of conversion for the people around you, even the ones who are hostile, and pray for them by name. And pray each day for the grace to share the truth and the joy of our Christian faith.
Laudetur Jesus Christus. Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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