Sunday 11 July 2010, Sixth after Trinity

‘A lawyer stood up to test Jesus’.



My career as a lawyer spanned a brief seven years. Those seven years did include, though, one case in which the threat of the death penalty hung over the head of the party I represented. His name was Bandit, and his crime was that he was alleged to be a pit-bull terrier. The allegation, I must admit, was hardly helped by the name which his thoughtful owner had bestowed upon him. The prosecution was brought under the infamous Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, a knee-jerk response from the then Government to serial reports of supposedly domesticated pets visiting terror upon our fellow citizens.

The Act was widely reviled as one of the most spectacularly ineffective pieces of legislation in history. It outlawed the ownership of various types of dog instead of addressing those dogs’ vicious conduct. So long as I could establish that Bandit was not a pit-bull he would in theory be free to go and maul whoever he chose. It was a bonanza for dog-breeding experts, who found themselves in demand up and down the land, giving their opinion on whether the dog under investigation was or was not a Japanese Tosa. Type, or category, was everything; conduct, or behaviour, was not.

Successive Governments have since 1991 repented of the haste with which the Act was passed, but they have not repented of the legal principle which underpinned it. This is that it is within the competence of the law to define almost anything, and that such definition is inevitably for the common good. The last Government created more new crimes than any of its predecessors has ever done. To take an obvious example, there are now no fewer than seventy sexual offences on the statute book. This rush to law, this urge to codify is not confined to the civil authorities. The General Synod of our Church is spending this weekend debating not whether women should in principle be ordained as bishops, but what consideration should be afforded those who cannot in conscience accept their ordination. The particular focus is whether such consideration should be enshrined in law, whether those who object should be a legally-entrenched constituency.

It is in response to a lawyer’s question that Jesus tells one of the most famous of his parables. ‘Wanting to justify himself’ writes Saint Luke, the lawyer asks Jesus ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Lawyers are trained never to ask a question to which they don’t know the answer, and this was doubtless forming on his lips even as the question left them. My neighbours are the people with whom the Lord has made his eternal covenant. My neighbours strive to love him as I strive to love him. My neighbours worship him in Jerusalem, the sanctuary of his choosing. My neighbours can be easily identified.

It is to such a mindset that Jesus speaks of the man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and message that he speaks is scandalous. It is not the priest or the Levite who is moved with pity at the plight of their fellow Jew. No: they are holy men, mindful that contact with his corpse will destroy their ritual cleanliness. It is a Samaritan who is moved. A Samaritan: one of the schismatics who challenged the authority of Jerusalem, one of the heretics who turned their backs on its temple, one of the slanderers who held that the orthodox faith of the Jews was a corruption of God’s truth. The lawyer would certainly have had a category for Samaritans, and it would equally certainly not have been labelled ‘neighbour’.

Yet in his parable Jesus insists that neighbourliness is not like dog type. It cannot be defined in the terms beloved of lawyers. It is not dependent on ties of blood or ancestry; it is not regulated by ethnicity or class; it is not restricted by faith or tradition. The action of the Samaritan reveals that neighbourliness has no bounds.

The action of the Samaritan also reveals that neighbourliness means not complacent, stultifying obligation, but unprompted loving action. The traveller’s neighbour turns out to be the one who had shown him mercy. To be a neighbour is to respond to need. To be a neighbour is to demonstrate purposeful, practical care.

To act as the Samaritan acts is to tear up every category and to re-draw both the bounds of neighbourliness and the duties of neighbourliness. Under the Dangerous Dogs Act, remember, type is everything; for the lawyer in the story, type is everything; but for Jesus type is nothing and action is everything. It is for this reason that I will be unhappy with any legislation for women bishops which resorts to legal categorization and creates the sort of apartheid that has bedevilled the preaching of the Gospel for two thousand years. The parable of the Samaritan calls us to act generously to those who are not like us. The parable of the Samaritan challenges us not to take refuge in unbridgeable enclaves of purity. The parable of the Samaritan asks us to cross the road and kneel alongside the one whom we fear. Neighbourliness means unprompted, loving action.

My part in Bandit’s story had a happy ending. The Court allowed him to live (although I hope not to fight) another day. Today we celebrate a happy occasion - a baptism. The Samaritan has the courage and the clear-sightedness to see past the wounded traveller’s race and religion. He refuses the easy categories - strange foreigner, hated enemy, worthless victim. He sees the need and responds. In baptism God sees past our humanity’s frailty and sin. He refuses the easy categories – faithless weakling, distracted wretch, biddable miscreant. He sees the need and responds.

Today God crosses the road, reaching out to this child and holding him up as surely as the Samaritan did the robbers’ prey. In God’s response to the promise of this child’s life we see enacted the limitless bounds of neighbourliness and the work that it demands. So let’s go to it. Amen.