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Everybody knows the story of the Good Samaritan. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to those in trouble. The hero of the story is a Samaritan, and as you know, Samaritans are essentially good chaps. Today there is an extremely valuable voluntary agency called the Samaritans that saves many people from suicide: to be a Samaritan is to be someone who helps his neighbour. That's what we think. But the reason we think this about Samaritans is because all we know about Samaritans is what we read in this very parable. The people who heard the parable first, however, had much more detailed and widely different views on Samaritans. What we have to grasp is that the Jews hated the Samaritans.
The Samaritans, as you may know, were descended from the ten tribes of Israel who split off from the Kingdom after the death of king Solomon. The Jews felt they had become corrupt, and, as it says in John "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans". In this day and age, when we know we're supposed not to hate anyone, we may not therefore get the full force of this parable. But think of this story: a man fell among thieves; first of all there came a solicitor, but he passed by on the other side; then came a police officer, but he too passed by on the other side; then a convicted paedophile came by and he took pity on the man and helped him.
Does that strike you as a stranger and more difficult story? Now the hero of the story is someone we distrust, loathe and detest. And that is more how a story about a Samaritan would have struck the people to whom Jesus was speaking. Jesus made the hero of the story someone his listeners hated. The parable of the Good Samaritan, then, has more in it than the moral that we should be kind to others.
Think how the man who fell among thieves would have felt. He was in trouble and glad to be rescued, sure. But it was a Samaritan - someone he hated and distrusted - who rescued him. The robbers left him "half dead". If the Samaritan had not saved him, he would have died. How would he have felt knowing that he owed his life to a member of a race he had always hated? Try thinking of yourself in that situation. Take a moment to think of the person you most hate and least respect, and then imagine what it would be like to owe your life to that person.
This would have struck the people who heard the story first quite forcibly. They were expecting the priest or the Levite to be the heroes. But the priest and the Levite ignore their co-religionist, with whom they should have had some fellow feeling. The Samaritan not only helps him practically but he starts off by feeling pity for him. It's interesting that Jesus says this in the parable. Parables are very visual: sowing the fields, harvesting in the vineyards. Most of the time they just tell us what people do. But here, unusually, Jesus starts by telling us what the Samaritan felt. So it's important that the Samaritan starts by feeling compassion. Compare his attitude with the smug fat cats Jesus preaches against later on in Luke: "Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets." Unlike them, the Samaritan is not showing off. He isn't making a point about the superior charity or wealth of Samaritans. It's not a public manifestation of piety. He actually feels pity. And remember, as much as the Jews hated the Samaritans, the Samaritans hated the Jews. Yet the Samaritan started by feeling pity on the man whose co-religionists neglected him.
There's a lot to live up to in this parable, then. If it were just a matter of being ready to give practical help to those in need, we might be alright. With luck and hard work, one could do it. But there's more: we have to feel pity for the people we help, and we have to feel pity not just for the people with a sad story that moves our heart, but for people we don't trust, people we think are mad and wicked, people we don't have dealings with. It's a tall order and when we read these challenging sayings of Jesus we may feel they ask too much.
This feeling that God is asking too much is, however, nothing new. The people of his time thought Jesus was asking too much. And the Old Testament is replete with stories of the people of Israel turning away from God's Law because it was too onerous (and falling flat on their faces as a result). This is what Moses is talking about in our passage from Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy means "Second book of the Law": it's a restatement of the Law that we read in Exodus and Leviticus. And as he gets to the end of it, Moses begins perhaps to hear his audience murmuring discontentedly. So he gets his oar in first: "what I am commanding you today is not too difficult… the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart that you may obey it." What does he mean? After all, he's come down from the top of a mountain with law written on tablets of stone: now he's saying "it's in your heart". The clue is in verse 10: "turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul". God comes first. Action comes second. You remember at the start of our Gospel, Jesus challenges the expert on the Law of Moses to summarise the Law. The lawyer replies with two verses of Scripture: "love the Lord your God with all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind" (Deuteronomy 6:4); and "Love your neighbour as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). And Jesus commends him - in fact, elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus himself also cites these two scriptures as a summary of the Law. The second is the most familiar to us, and it's this one Jesus explains in the parable. But Leviticus is just the fine print. The first of the two scriptures is the more fundamental. To this day, pious Jews start every day by praying Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad - hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One… you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. The Ten Commandments, before they start on murder or theft, before they enjoin us to honour our parents, begin "I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods before me". As it says in the Psalms "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom".
And fifteen hundred years after Moses, here is St Paul. He writes with a wider understanding of who God is. He knows God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But he says in essence the same thing as Moses: "we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work". Again: we don't start by doing good on our own account. We start by praying to the Lord. Doing right is the fruit: but you don't get fruit without a tree.
The answer to the question "how can we live up to the parable of the Good Samaritan?", then, is a simple one, which comes up again and again in the Bible, from Moses, through the Psalmist, through the teachings of Jesus himself, to the writings of St Paul. We put God first. We love the Lord your God with all our heart. Then we've done the one thing that matters. In a sense when we've done that, we're finished for the day. But of course in practical terms, love of God and accepting his power to change our lives also results in all sorts of wonderful things which we couldn't have done on our own - in loving our neighbour - even in loving a neighbour as uncongenial as a Jew to a Samaritan. As St Paul says, we will bear good fruit.
At this point it is customary to sum up with some ideas how to apply this abstract theology in daily life. Today if you'll forgive me I'd like to do that by talking about myself. Any of you who are playing sermon cricket (a wicket for every mention of God and a run for every time I say "I") may think Sachin Tendulkar has stepped up to the crease. My reason for talking about my own experience is, however, to give myself free rein to talk about human weakness in concrete terms without offending anybody.
Those who stayed awake during the sermon two weeks ago may remember that I proposed a modest spiritual exercise - and invited anyone else who cared to, to give it a try as well. The exercise was to look through Paul's list, in the letter to the Galatians, of ways that the holy spirit bears fruit in our lives, and his longer list of ways in which the absence of the holy spirit in our lives gives rise to rotten fruit; and to pick one of those that applied to me; and, not to try and rectify that fault in myself, but to pray for my relationship with God to be mended, and to go on praying until I bore fruit.
I did re-read the passage in Galatians that very day as I said I would - about 11.30 that night if I remember, but still within the rubric. After reflection I picked "fits of rage" from Paul's list. Since then I've been lifting up this area of my life in my private prayers, and asking that in whatever way I'm not loving God with all my soul, through his Spirit God would set that in order. I've also watched, out of the corner of my eye, to see if I bear any fruit.
Now you should understand this is difficult for me. Some people struggle with shame or fear; I struggle with anger. My instinctive reaction if something goes wrong is to get angry - most often with myself. I wish I didn't: but it's not something I can entirely command. If you said "just stop being angry" that would seem as tall an order as if you said "live up to the parable of the Good Samaritan". I might be able to mimic calmness - sometimes I do that - but I wouldn't be able to be not angry. Just as we might be able to do something useful for someone we hated, but we'd find it harder to love that person. It's a tall order.
But I want to report one typical incident, in concluding my interim report to you, which suggests that the system works. [n.b. in delivering this sermon I was fortunate enough to have an even better example than the following, since I had made an egregious error in conducting the sermon a few minutes earlier but, contrary to my usual inclination, felt no worse than rueful about it] Last week I baked a loaf of bread to take to a friend. It rose well, looked lovely, but I forgot to take it out of the oven so it was scorched and inedible. Yet I somewhat to my surprise I didn't rage and curse my foolishness: I just felt sad. It would have been impossible to make myself react in that calmer, more measured and much healthier way by an exercise of will. But doing what Moses says, turning again to the Lord with my heart and soul did, through a tiny but (to me at any rate) valuable miracle, eventuate in this impossible change.