Sixth Sunday after Trinity 2007

When I was training to be a barrister one of the lessons I learned was that in court one should never ask a question to which one does not know the answer. It’s a pretty reliable guide to not getting caught out in front of the jury, but, I have to say, it’s a pretty dire prospectus for life.

I am an ex-lawyer who is married to a lawyer and so I suppose I feel qualified to cast a critical eye over members of my former profession (not that the absence of such a qualification inhibits others from doing the same). The lawyer who questions Jesus is instantly recognizable character and, I fear, an instantly dislikeable one. Legal training has plainly changed very little over the centuries. He knows the answers to both his questions. Neither is designed to elicit truth or broaden understanding. The first is a test: ‘what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The supplementary - ‘and who is my neighbour?’ - is asked out of a desire to justify himself. He brings to his questions a lethal mix of intellectual vanity and emotional insecurity. His desire to trap the teacher combines with his need of reassurance. Which of us is not familiar with at least one of those deep stirrings of the heart?

‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. The assumption of first-century Jews mirrored that of their ancestors in the days of the book of Leviticus, which is the source of the quote. Their assumption was that people do love themselves, that such love is a basic instinct of survival. Yet we, I suspect, are uncomfortable with that. Self-love is unattractive. Justifiable pride easily tips into overweening arrogance and modest self-assertion into extravagant self-aggrandisement. Yet I wonder whether this discomfort at the excesses of self-love masks a profound reality about our condition and about that of our interior selves.

Luke the Evangelist is referred to in Scripture as a physician, and although he is honoured as the patron saint of doctors we have no reason to believe that he was a psychologist. He was certainly not a writer blessed with the insights of modern psychology. These insights, which have influenced all sorts of therapies and theories, reveal that often, perhaps all too often, we do not love ourselves very much. We are not, by and large, consumed with self-loathing, it is true, a complex that some parts of the Christian tradition have done a shameful amount to encourage. But many of us, very many of us take easy refuge in the sorts of intellectual strategies and character traits that the lawyer who questions Jesus displays. These are our way of papering over the chasm that yawns at the very heart of our being, the chasm of nagging suspicion and persistent belief that, really and truly, we are not worthy of love.

This is an unspoken conviction with staggering implications. One in particular casts its long shadow over the Christian church and propels us into ceaseless, dizzying action. We ourselves are not worthy of love, of course, but so many others are. We tire ourselves in running after them and meeting their imagined and imaginary needs. But what we are actually doing is running away from our selves, and filling our diaries, minds and hearts with empty activism. I can think of at least one priest of whom it was said that he cared greatly, and for many: you could tell those for whom he cared because they had a hunted look. This is the inexorable path to exhaustion, defeat and despair.

It is not the path of the Good Samaritan, the fictional character created by Jesus in response to the lawyer’s hollow questioning. What is it that enables the Samaritan to cross the road when the priest and the Levite have passed by on the other side? He ignores the purity laws that have kept them at a safe distance. He disregards the racial codes that put enmity between his kind and the Jews. He does not consider his personal safety in what is so evidently bandit country. He dismounts, crosses to the helpless victim, and lavishes attention on him which far exceeds what is immediately necessary. Why?

It is not that he is well-intentioned, which is what makes Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment on the parable so extraordinarily crass. It is not automatic response of a do-gooder. The Samaritan crosses the road when the others do not because he loves the helpless victim as he loves himself. Cultic laws and racial segregations mean nothing to him. Personal safety and freedom from ridicule mean nothing to him. They mean nothing to him because he loves himself in the best and noblest sense of that divine command. He is not at war with himself or running away from himself: he has nothing to prove and nothing to suppress. He is at peace; and so he is set free to minister to another.

In our first reading Moses speaks to the children of Israel and explains to them that God’s word is not something that they need to chase after. It does not lie beyond the sea; it is not concealed within heaven’s vault. ‘It is very near you’ he says ‘it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The lawyer correctly identifies the greatest of God’s commandments. Their observance begins with our looking at ourselves, just as our ancestors in the faith Paul, Timothy and Epaphras must have looked at themselves. Their observance begins with our seeing there what God sees there: a person worthy of his love and therefore worthy of our love. And their observance begins with our using our confidence in that love to re-shape the world around us. Amen.



Sunday 15 July 2007
Deuteronomy 30: 9-14;
Colossians: 1: 1-14;
Luke 10: 25-37