Tag: the Good Samaritan

The Samaritan, the wounded, and the question that won’t go away

David Herbert1 Comment

We know parable of the Good Samaritan so well we can almost recite it by heart. But maybe that’s the problem. Its edges have worn smooth with repetition, and its challenge no longer cuts as sharply as Jesus intended. What happens when we let it confront us afresh? Here’s a sermon that asks us to imagine hearing it for the first time — and to wrestle with the question that won’t go away: “Who is my neighbour?”.

My customary intro – so customary these days that we could almost do it as call and response.
Here goes: I love preaching that brings scripture back to life.
Call: Do you love preaching that brings scripture back to life?
Response: We do.

But how do we bring scripture, such as this parable of the Good Samaritan back to life when we’ve worn it smooth with repetition, so familiar that its sharp edge no longer cuts?

Can we imagine the pointedness of the parable for those hearing this for the first time?
Imagine hearing this for the very first time.

Let’s do some word association.

What word do you associate with Samaritan?

What words do you think Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries associated with Samaritan?

Very different sets of word associations

Here’s a bold assertion I read this week: This parable has single-handedly shaped the reputation of the Samaritans. Samaritans stood for everything the Jews hated. In their eyes the Samaritans were despised as the last, the least and the lost. There was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan. Now a Samaritan is someone we can call when we are at the end of our tether. A Samaritan is a first responder – one who runs into trouble to help – unlike those who run away at the first sign of trouble.

But to the question posed by the lawyer, “Who is my neighbour” Jesus casts the main characters as those last, least and lost. There are two main characters.
There is the one attacked by robbers and there is the Samaritan. 

It is interesting to note who and what Jesus sees first when he preaches the good news of the kingdom. Jesus sees first not the powerful or the prominent, but the ones left behind,
the last, the least and the lost,
the stripped, beaten, and left for dead,
the wounded and the hated.

The Samaritan and the victim are the ones Jesus sees first when he responds to the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbour?”.

They are the ones Jesus “sees”.

And these last, least and lost become the leaders in this discussion about neighbourliness.
Jesus promotes them to be the first to teach the lawyer (and all Jesus’s hearers) a lesson on the question “Who is my neighbour?”


Here are the last.


And here are the first,
way off in the distance,
the priest and the levite,
the first people Jesus’s hearers would have thought should have responded to the stripped, beaten and robbed.

You would expect them to do good. 

They are prominent people.
They come first in the public eye, just as they come first in the story Jesus tells.
They are the professionals – the ones who should know the scripture the lawyer quotes: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
They would have known that as the key to eternal life, but they fail to walk the talk.
I wonder if the lawyer would have done the same – walked by on the other side, failing to walk the talk.

What happens is that the first come last in the eyes of Jesus and the kingdom of God.
They are the ones who become the outcasts by just walking by.

When Jesus preached he said to those who would listen:
Love your enemies,
do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you,
pray for those who abuse you. (Luke 6:27-28)

And here today, we hear of a Samaritan,
loving his enemy,
doing good to one, who in all likelihood, hated him
an answer to prayer for the victim, who in all likelihood,
joined in the abusive banter of the time.

The lawyer asked, “who is my neighbour?”
We might ask, “Who is my enemy?”

Enemy is a word of two parts.
There is the ene – meaning not,
and there is the emy,
like the French word ami,
behind which is the Latin word for friend – amicus.
My enemy is literally the one who is not my friend,
not only the one who hates me, curses me and abuses me,
but the one to whom I am nothing, a nobody.

The Samaritan loves his enemy.

This isn’t just about ancient hostilities.
Our world still draws lines between us and them.
Think of the debates around borders and strangers today.

We live in xenophobic times.
Perhaps these times are no different to other times.
Perhaps these times are no different to Jesus’ own times.
Perhaps we’ve always been wary of strangers.
They’re never our friends as long as they are strangers.
They’re the enemy to be kept out.

Behind the lawyer’s question was the idea that there has to be a limit to who our neighbour is.
Probably, like the lawyer, we share the basic assumption that our neighbours are people like us, and people who like us.
But in this parable Jesus not only single-handedly reshapes the reputation of the Samaritan, but he also challenges the scandal of the boundaries we build with our hatred and suspicion.

The lawyer leaves Jesus with the question “Who is my neighbour?”

The question Jesus leaves the lawyer with is, “Will you be a neighbour?”
“Will you go and do likewise?”
“Will you bear to be a neighbour to your enemy – being compassionate, attentive, practical and generous?”

We are left with the same questions.
Will we go and do likewise?
Will we follow the Samaritan’s lead?
Will we cross the road?
Will we engage with the victims of the way things are?
Will we go to the help of the wounded and hated?
Will we attend to their wounds? Will we find help?

Will we just leave them there, beaten and hated?

Will we keep them at arm’s length, as enemy, as “not our friends”?
Or, will we go and do likewise?
Will we love our enemy, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who abuse us?
Just as Jesus did.
Will we maintain the dividing lines?
Or will we simply be a neighbour, like the Samaritan,
who, unlike the lawyer, never stopped to ask,
“Who is my neighbour?” – as if there needs to be a limit.

PS. I’ve started using ChatGPT to help me prepare for preaching. This week the algorithm threw me a question that stopped me in my tracks:

What if being a neighbour means crossing every line we’ve drawn between “us” and “them”?

PPS It was Jennifer S. Wyant who claims this parable “singlehandedly reshaped the reputation of the Samaritans”.

Reading the Bible and learning from lessons – a sermon for Bible Sunday

David Herbert1 Comment

October 29th 2023

The last Sunday after Trinity – also Bible Sunday. The readings for the day are printed below: Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-end

Today is Bible Sunday. My aim in this sermon follows the words of our collect for Bible Sunday. We pray to God, who caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning. My aim is to encourage you to confidently expect to learn from the Bible and that we can confidently expect to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.

My first point is simple. The Bible isn’t one book – seeing it as one book would make it daunting and off putting. It’s a library and a boxed set. For most of our centuries most of the readers of scripture have been people who couldn’t read or who didn’t like reading. They will only have heard scripture being read. They certainly would never have had their own copy of the book version. That only became possible with the invention of the printing press – until then you could buy a house for the cost of a Bible.

The Bible and Christianity isn’t for the clever. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he reminds his brothers and sisters: “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong”. (I Cor 1:26f).

It’s not about being clever, influential or posh. In fact, the clever, influential and posh are going to be the last people to “get” scripture. Hear Mary singing in her song we call the Magnificat of the rich (presumably the rich and clever) being turned empty away while he lifts up the humble and fills the hungry with good things. (Luke 1).

It’s not about being clever. It’s not the clever writing clever things for clever people. It’s people who share the experience of being bruised and battered helping those who are poor in spirit get through the experiences of being bruised and battered – and those who go to their aid. You don’t need a degree. Jesus didn’t teach in a university. He taught in the heart. 

And he taught in the heart of a people who were bruised and battered by centuries of bitter experience of empire. They’d been enslaved, persecuted, occupied, exiled, crucified. The conflict we are witnessing in Israel and Gaza has a long and complicated history and we do well to remember that Jesus taught at the heart of this history.

Those of us who read the Bible who have never known exile, persecution, poverty or who have never been at the wrong end of identity politics do well to remember that we are reading the scriptures of those who have. We read over their shoulders – at best, as their guests.

A large part of our scriptures is focused on Jesus – even a lot of the Old Testament is about Jesus, and the books of the Old Testament were Jesus’s scriptures with Psalms being his prayer book. Jesus is always understandable. He made it so. Even his enemies understood him and that is why they were so infuriated by him.

He was always casting around for images that would speak to people about his passion – his passion for the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of things his followers would know, of seeds and weeds, of leaven in loaves, of losing things and finding them again. He aimed to be understood.

The difficulty of following Jesus isn’t that he is hard to understand. The difficulty in following Jesus is facing the challenge of his teaching and accepting the cost. The response of those who want to hear Jesus has never been that they have felt mystified and lost, but have been amazed and felt found.

Today’s gospel (at least the first half) is typically simple and straightforward. A lawyer, a Pharisee, asks Jesus what the most important commandment is. (There are 613 commandments in the Old Testament.) It wasn’t hard for Jesus to choose because the answer was well known. It was what they were told to talk about at home, when they walked along the road, when they lay down and when they got up. They impressed it on their children. It was wrapped around their heads and hands and pinned to their doors, and it’s a verse from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The lawyer gets a straightforward answer to a straightforward question, until …

Jesus adds a second which twists the meaning. Again he answers from scripture – it’s the other reading we have had, from Leviticus: “a second is like it” he says. “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

That’s not hard to understand is it? But it’s hard to put into practice isn’t it? The lawyer will have known where the reference came from and what the commandment spells out. We’ve heard it ourselves this morning (from our OT reading from Leviticus) what loving your neighbour means “you shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour.”

This is where it gets more difficult as we deal with culture and context that isn’t ours. It all needs translating for us so that each of us hears in our own language – which is God’s intention made plain at Pentecost when everyone heard the preaching of the apostles in their own language.

Scripture always raises questions and those questions are taken up by scripture itself in many cases. Jesus adds the second commandment about loving our neighbour to the first and then says everything, the whole law and the prophets, hang on these two. But then the question is raised (in Luke’s gospel) “but who is my neighbour?” How do we translate that?

Jesus translates for us by drawing a picture of a man, bruised and battered lying in a gutter. He takes three people by this helpless victim and asks which of them was the real neighbour. The answer we all know to be the one who stopped and so generously and tenderly helped. And that person turned out to be a Samaritan – who the Jews despised. Jesus gave that lawyer and all who have shared that story ever since, a new meaning, a new twist, a new challenge and new translation to the question of “who is my neighbour?” – something along the lines that you don’t really know who your neighbour is until you’re in trouble and that your neighbour can be a total stranger reaching across all sorts of barriers.

We might argue that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t have the same impact on us as it would have had on those who first heard it because they were Jewish people caught up in the prejudice against the Samaritans. 

We might also be tempted to think about who we are good neighbours to – who is going to receive our kindness and generosity. Our own national history tends to cast us as winners, generally not knowing exile, occupation or poverty, so our focus may be on the helper rather than the victim. So, we could tell the story differently – such as imagining you’re in the metaphorical gutter, bruised and battered, you don’t know where to turn. You have neighbours but they don’t know you and you don’t know them. They are no help. You have family, but they’re all busy with their own lives and they’ve mostly moved away. But there was one person who saved me – and here we full in the blanks. S/he was a ——- I’d never met them in my life. They were so brave. They never left my side. There was nothing that was too much trouble.

We never know who is going to come to our help do we? And we would turn none of them away would we? And we would be forever grateful to them wouldn’t we? And we would call them our neighbour, our good samaritan. In that one person we come to understand what it means to be a neighbour – and nothing less will do.

Jesus makes it easy for his followers to understand his teaching about the kingdom of heaven. He was hardly going to make it difficult was he? He’s a teacher who loves his followers, and his followers love him for his teaching.

For those whose heart is set on God’s kingdom the Bible is easy reading and those who are powerful, rich and clever according to the kingdoms of this world are always going to find our scriptures mystifying unless they have a change of heart.

I want to finish with a word for those who read our scriptures in our worship on Sundays.

First of all, do you realise that Jesus was also asked to read scripture in worship? You’re on the same rota. So much depends on the public reading of scripture. 

Our attitude to the Bible is shaped by the way the Bible is read in worship. Those of you who take on the role of readers are translating the text from the lectern into our hearts and minds. Every word counts and will carry its own resonance, so each word needs to be heard. 

It’s important to be as inclusive as possible for the sake of the hard of hearing and the sake of those easily distracted. It’s important that the language we use is as inclusive as possible – try not to use exclusive language. Yes, at one point, “men” and “brothers” may have been inclusive terms but they no longer are and exclusive language is offensive because we can do better if we care. Our call is to love our neighbours, not to unnecessarily offend or exclude them.

Our great translators have loved us with their efforts to bring God’s word alive. It cost some their lives. We owe a huge debt to our translators. Those who read in public worship are our translators. They need our prayer. I’ll ask them to stand while we pray for them.

Let us pray: 

Loving Lord, in Jesus you make plain your word,
we pray for our readers,
that you may give them boldness of spirit
to compensate for shyness and self-consciousness.
We pray that you will be with them in their preparations
that they may translate the word of the page to the heart of our communities
through love for our neighbours,
so that all of us come to help one another
to hear, read, mark and inwardly digest
your word of salvation.

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them; you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
You shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not go round as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour: I am the Lord.
You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.

Matthew 22:34-end
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: ‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David’. He said to them, ‘How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I put all your enemies under your feet’”?
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?’ No-one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.