The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 14 July 2019
Austwick, Clapham, Keasden
You see it all, I imagine, when you’re an innkeeper. You get used to being unsurprised by whoever comes through the door next, to prop up the bar, order food or take rooms. All manner of people, you meet, up to all kinds of business. You’ll take their dollar - or in this particular innkeeper’s case, their denarii - you’ll ask no questions, you’ll listen to their stories if they volunteer them, you’ll respect their silence if that’s what surrounds them, you’ll follow up on their requests if they’re reasonable. Whoever they are - honeymooning couples, dusty traveller families, sweaty sportspeople, crumpled-suited businesspeople, the solitary regulars whose glasses are always half-empty, the people just popping in to use the facilities.
If you ask an innkeeper to answer the question, from their experience, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ they might well tell you: anyone you could imagine. And more often than not, they might say, your neighbour is likely to be someone you wouldn’t expect, going out of their way to help when they really needn’t do. Innkeepers tell plenty of stories agreeing with the one Jesus told - demonstrating how goodness so often comes from the most surprising of people, acting in unexpected ways.
It may have been an innkeeper who told me recently [1] that on a Skipton building site, when a rogue piece of scaffolding fell to the ground and impaled itself in Danny Collins’s left leg, his closest mates, his drinking pals, Dean and Billy disappeared from the scene - and it was one of the Polish lads, Alexy, who came to the rescue, made Danny comfortable, called for emergency medical help. Dean later apologised for his weak stomach - it was his fear of blood and gore which caused him to flee, he said, sheepishly. Billy said it was because the accident happened at the end of the working day and he had to go and pick up the kids from their after-school club. After the ambulance took Danny away Alexy just went back quietly to his group of Polish friends, who usually kept themselves to themselves on the building site because Danny, Dean, Billy and the other English lads treated them with suspicion.
In our world of interracial tensions perhaps the most surprising thing about this story is that a Polish builder on an English job could be portrayed as ‘good’. Just as the most surprising thing about Jesus’ story of a man left for dead by robbers was that a Samaritan could be portrayed as ‘good’.
For as you will have heard in numerous sermons on this subject before, Samaritans and Jews did not get on. So much so that a Jew making their way from Galilee to Jerusalem would prefer to take the long route, risking the ascent up the rocky mountain road from Jericho, a road notorious for robbers and brigands, rather than take the easier route through the heart of Samaria. [2]
This makes the Parable of the Good Samaritan as ironic as a cricket fan at Headingley talking about The Good Lancastrian. It’s a story as incendiary as a present-day politician talking about The Good Muslim Cleric.
Yes, it’s an incendiary story. Jesus answers the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ by saying that I shouldn’t expect my neighbour to be the one who lives next door to me, the one who comes from the same social group as me. I shouldn’t expect my neighbour to be necessarily my friend. My neighbour is likely to be someone I’d least expect it to be, someone I’d normally have nothing to do with; someone I might usually go out of my way to avoid. Anyone who has compassion on me, anyone who shows me mercy is my neighbour - and that could be anyone at all.
Some of us spend time worrying about the question, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ which we’ve been led to believe means, ‘What must I do to get to heaven?’ but in the gospels it more accurately means, ‘How can I live a good and just life here and now?’ [2]
The answer is quite simply that I’m to live like that Samaritan lived. I’m to love like that Samaritan loved.
I’m to love the person who I have nothing to do with, usually. If I want God to rescue me from myself then I’m to live ready to rescue people I just don’t belong with.
I’m to love like a Samaritan loves a Jew - sacrificially. [3]
I’m to love like a put-upon Pole loves a jack-the-lad Brit - selflessly.
I’m to love the person who I don’t know, the person I naturally shy away from; I’m to love the ‘other’ in this ‘othering' world; and as my heart goes out to them I find my peace, I find my salvation.
This is a lesson we most likely learn when our normal lives are interrupted in some way. This passage of scripture is full of interruptions: the lawyer interrupts Jesus; Jesus interrupts the lawyer’s line of thinking; the robbers interrupt the traveller’s journey; the fallen body of the traveller interrupts the Samaritan’s journey; and the Samaritan interrupts the innkeeper. [4]
Maybe only the innkeeper is ready for an interruption, innkeepers always ready to welcome whoever comes through the door next. The rest of us may find interruptions frustrating or unsettling and will avoid them if we can just like the priest and the Levite avoided any interruption to their journeys on that road that day.
But if we are to learn how to inherit eternal life, that is, how to live a good and just life here and now, then we must learn to welcome those interruptions to our customary lives which offer us the chance to practice neighbourliness.
N. T. Wright says,
God’s great purpose is not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay. [5]
And so, rejoice! - for you and me, together, are members of that rescue team.
And now, rejoice again! - for every time our hearts go out towards another, every time our hands reach out to help another, we discover we’re being rescued ourselves.
Notes
A substantial edit of The Polish builder and the rescue team: the Good Samaritan today preached in Cheshire, 2013.
[1] It may have been, but it wasn’t, as I’ve made this story up. It’s a parable…
[2] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Notes on Proper 10C, section 10, geographical notes.
[3] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Notes on Proper 10C, sections 5, 6, 7, on Luke’s astonishing use of splagchnizomai, for compassion, in regard to the Samaritan’s sacrificial act.
[4] Jione Havea, Stop, take, care: Reading Luke 10:25-37 with islanders in prison. In David J. Neville (Editor), The Bible, Justice and Public Theology. With thanks to Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley for this reference.
[5] N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, pp. 44-45, quoted in Nuechterlein, Proper 10C, section 1.
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