Readings:
Sermon:
We are told that a Teacher of the Law approaches Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. As he is a teacher of the law he is, perhaps, rather disingenuously trying to trip Jesus up. He has his own view of what the answer should be. Jesus replies by telling him that he must love God with all his heart and soul and his neighbour as himself. The Teacher of the Law then pushes it further by asking Jesus to define exactly who is his neighbour?
As I asked myself the same question I suddenly thought of the cheap plastic like crucifix hidden away in a drawer in my bedroom that some street seller in Jerusalem persuaded me to buy a number of years ago. It is very cheap and poorly made, but, because of what it is and represents, I have never known what to do with it! Quite frankly I have wanted to throw it away, but have never had the courage. I ask myself why I am suddenly linking the question of who my neighbour is with a crucifix hidden away in a drawer! Perhaps many more of us would prefer to be identified with a God who is truly Almighty, our protector and the one who will rescue us from all ills and remove our suffering? Perhaps the crucifix is drawing us closer to a very different understanding of where true ‘power’ really lies, in the costly loving care of a God who reaches out his arms in love for us from a position of total vulnerability.
Obviously the question of who is our neighbour is a very significant question for all of us today as we face serious and multiple questions about the way we should be living our lives in a world where people are so tragically divided on grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality and wealth or poverty and where we seek to get our own way through dominating and, if necessary, through brute force. Over the past months when we have seen so many conflicts and wars develop I have been drawn back time and time again to the ‘Almighty’ God whose true power is represented in my cheap plastic crucifix and I have now put it in the window of my bedroom!
So back to our biblical account of the man on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves, was attacked and then left injured by the side of the road. We are told that both a priest and a Levite ignored him and then a Samaritan reached out to him in love. Obviously, we might have expected the priest or the Levite to have cared for him, but it was the person of a different religious grouping, the Samaritan, who saw the injured man as his neighbour and reached out with the greatest power in the world, the power of human kindness and love. It is this power that we meet in the God who dies in absolute agony, but still able to open his arms and say ‘Father forgive them’ It is this love that truly heals and fills us with the joy and peace of the Resurrection.
Questions:
- Who is your neighbour? Spend time reflecting!