No half measures

 ‘… Go and do likewise.…’ (Luke 10:37)

Luke 10:25-37 (Year C: Trinity+7)

This week’s passage from Luke comes in three complementary parts: a reaffirmation of rock solid Old Testament foundational teaching, (ii) a story to explain the point, and (iii) a clear-cut command to each of us.

Rock solid OT teaching

A ‘lawyer’ (it is a ‘pharisee’ in Matthew and a ‘scribe’ in Mark) tried to test Jesus by asking something along the lines of ‘how do I get into a heaven?’  A not unreasonable question and not unknown one among religiously inclined persons, even today.

As a good Teacher, Jesus got the learner to figure it out by posing a question in response to the Learner’s question (Let’s assume that the Learner had some interest in learning as well as in ‘testing’ Jesus). Jesus draws on a key passage from scripture – the basis of the daily Shema recited by devout Jews then and now (Deuteronomy 6:4-9):

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Jesus, however, goes further and draws on Leviticus 19:18:

you shall love your neighbour as yourself

Loving God with all our being and loving our neighbour as ourselves – are two sides of the one coin. In one way, Jesus was not saying or doing anything new. It was all there in the sacred scriptures when God spoke to his chosen people. In another way it was all new because Jesus was restating an Old Commandment and making this very emphatically and very centrally the basis of all other commandments. It was a matter of radically simplified moral theology!  It might have seemed that these two commandments entailed loving God first and then our neighbour as an afterthought. Not so. It means loving God with all our being and loving our neighbour as ourselves at one and the same time.  Loving God comes first in terms of the order of commandments but loving our neighbour comes first in terms of action because it is in loving our neighbour that we know for sure that we are loving God. God is in our neighbour – poor, excluded, lonely, oppressed and hungry as well as in the next person beside you at this moment on a bus, at a counter, in a queue, online ….

And who is my neighbour, again? Jesus as an excellent Teacher spells it out by means of a story.

A story about love

There once were four persons somewhere on the way between Jerusalem to Jericho …

One of them was lying on the side of the road critically injured and possibly close to death.  With great irony, two religiously respectable persons – one a Levite (an assistant in the Temple according to scripture scholars) and the other a priest – made for the other side of the road. Perhaps they were in a rush somewhere (a religious ceremony?).  Or, perhaps they were taking no chances because the scene might have been a trap to lure others only to be robbed and attacked? Perhaps they were heading to report the incident to someone else so that proper and timely help could be organised? (somehow I think not but I am trying to be non-judgmental towards the priest and Levite in this story!).

Moreover – and this seems to be key point in this story – touching someone who might be dead in which case they would invite ritual defilement.  Mercy took second place to a cultic religious observance (not that all cultic religious observances are unimportant and unhelpful then and now).  The fact is that it took a foreigner and someone not of our tribe and religious practice to do the decent thing and to save this victim’s life. Yes, it could have been a trap. How was the Samaritan to know? But, she/he was moved by compassion and she/he did not stop to weigh up the risks. Following emergency treatment the Samaritan took the victim to a local inn and did the modern equivalent of leaving his/her credit card details and PIN with the innkeeper. There were no questions of private health insurance, a promissory note to repay or a contract with terms and conditions. There was just compassion.

In this one gesture and story Jesus cuts through the nonsense, hypocrisy and cruelty of what passes for religion then and now.

Translated into our times and context the story urges us to put compassion first even if, sometimes, this entails some personal risk. Of course, prudence is required. However, we can often cite prudence or the call of other duties or cares to evade a duty of compassion towards the person right in front of us right now.

But, we would be missing the point if we understood this story to be about one person acting compassionately towards another. The truth is that the Samaritan displayed a measureless love for another human being and that measureless love was the love of God unleashed in a broken and divided world. God’s love moved the Samaritan but the response of this foreigner and outsider was one of love with all of heart, all of soul, all of strength and all of mind.  Four ‘Alls’ and four key actors – a Levite, a priest, a foreigner and a victim (and the story does not reveal the nationality papers or denominational status of the victim).

All, all, all, all

Oddly enough sometimes we don’t stop and ponder what the meaning of the phrase ‘all your mind’ actually means. It does not mean suspending our God-given human reason to question and deepen our understanding and commitment.  To ‘heart’, ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ could be added ‘body’.  (Mark and Luke refer, in addition, to ‘all your strength’).  In short, we are called to love with all our being – every bit of it.

The quality and test of love is the capacity to lay down one’s life for those one loves (e.g. John 15:13 – ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’).

Jesus makes something new of something very old and traditional. He is bringing two commandments together and directly linking them by means of a ‘new commandment’ which combines both. It is the hallmark of real Christianity which would follow much later as the Jesus movement within Judaism evolved into a gathering (ekklesia) of disciples a growing number of which would be gentiles.

The symbol, power and truth of the Cross is at the centre of Christian loving as revealed in Jesus Christ.  The cross has two beams:

a horizontal one that indicates love for one another (the two thieves on each side of Jesus, for example, as well as the on-looking crowd including immediate family).
a vertical one that indicates God’s love for us and our love for God.

Now the vertical beam cannot stand without the horizontal one and the horizontal one cannot hold without the support of the vertical one. So it is with one and the same love that has been given to us.

God is loved in and through our neighbour. But, we love our neighbour for himself or herself and not as an instrument to please and love God. That is the way God wants it. After all God who is in all, loves all wants us to love all with our all.

And that’s not all (Matthew 22:40):

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

In one swoop Jesus reduces the 613 commandments of the ‘Old Law’ into two commandments not so much by abolishing them as by rooting then in the essential. And his listeners were left speechless.

How we could simplify our lives and our laws and our canon laws and our rules of community if we took to hear the simple truth that underlying ‘all the law’ and the scriptures is the commandment to love God with our all and to do so sincerely by loving the person next to us now.

Very simple. Too simple in fact.

Love is the one thing you cannot overdo. If we risk everything for love we can liberate ourselves from false/dead religion together with 600 regulations and be conquered by that Love which has loved us from all eternity in the first place.

And so…

Again and again the evangelist closes a particular episode with words very similar to those used by Jesus in this story: ‘Go and do likewise.’ (v. 37). The challenge for any of us is to open our eyes to the world around us and to see need where it may not be apparent or crying out.  There is a twist to this story and it is this. The imaginary Levite or priest carried on – nobody was watching. Who would know? In any case, they may have convinced themselves that the right thing to do was to keep going and not to stop.  If, like the lawyer who posed the question to Jesus in the first place, they wanted to notch up positive credit on their passports to heaven (some might remember from decades ago the little prayer cards with a notice of so many days off purgatory). The point about pure compassion is that nobody is watching except God. But, if someone who says they don’t believe in God (usually it is a case of a 21^st century human declaring that they do not believe in a god invented by human constructs of a bygone age) they may still find God without knowing it because compassion moves them or others. Let’s say God turns up in dry, dusty, sunburnt paths and byways in the desert between some Jericho and Jerusalem in our personal journeys.