“He had compassion on
him”
Others passed
by. We are apt to condemn their indifference, their lack of care and
concern for the wounded and poor in our midst. And yet, how easily all of
us overlook the poor. We step over them, we ignore them, and we even
communicate our contempt and unease that they should have the audacity to be
there in our midst at all. In a profound way, we are signaling our desire
that things should be other than what they are. We don’t want the poor to
be in our midst. We don’t want the poor to be at all. That can sound good
or it can sound quite sinister. Just consider. Do we want them just to be
out of our sight? Out of sight, out of mind? And if so, then out of care,
outside and without care? We are those who pass by.
Do we want the
poor not to be poor or not to be for their sake or for ours? What infects
every agency of aid to the poor is just that ambiguity. Who are we doing
what for whom? For whose real interest? Theirs or ours? And yet, as Jesus
says “the poor you have with you always”. Always, always in the
course of our lives we encounter the wounded and the broken in our midst.
And guess what? What we encounter is simply ourselves. In the poor,
really, we confront but an aspect of ourselves. After all, it could be any
one of us. There go I but for the grace of God.
But is the
parable of the Good Samaritan, so familiar, so common, simply about the
poor? No. It presents to us a wonderful and compelling picture of the
human condition which God in the richness of his grace has addressed. Here
is a picture of the poverty of our humanity, we might say. It is a parable
and so teaches something far deeper than what appears on the surface. That
is the challenge of the Scriptures after all, the challenge to think
metaphorically or, even better, analogically. It is especially a challenge
in a rather literal-minded age, a problem that is by no means restricted to
so-called fundamentalists. No. It is shared in by many who refuse, in one
way or another, the power of story and deny the teaching in the story.
This story is
told specifically as an illustration of the meaning of the exchange between
Jesus and “a certain lawyer”. Ultimately, the exchange is about
grace, the grace of Christ which is the true meaning of the law. But that
true meaning has to be drawn out of us. “What shall I do to inherit
eternal life?” the lawyer asks, only to find out that it has an
inescapable connection to the second question which Jesus elicits from him,
“who is my neighbour?”; in short, how he deals with his neighbour
invariably reflects upon his relation to God. It is a wonderful point,
really, to see the necessary and inescapable relation between morality and
doctrine, between the love of God and the love of man, between the law and
its fulfillment in Christ alone. The point is made ever so powerfully in
the parable.
There is a
quality of strange otherness about such stories that resists being
reduced to simple calls to action and moral concern. “Go and do thou
likewise” seems so simple and direct, so do-able and so obvious. And it
is, but at the same time, how we can simply ‘go and do likewise’
depends altogether on the grace of Christ in us for it is that grace
alone that enables our care for one another. The grace of Christ is the
operative principle in all works of mercy. The care signaled through
the images of the parable speaks about far more, though not less, than what
belongs to merely helping the stranger stranded on the roadside.
God is not on
the horizon but in the foreground. Augustine is the great teacher who has
grasped the larger dimensions of this story signaled precisely in its
details. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho”. Mere
place names meant to lend an element of verisimilitude to the story? Does
it matter that it is Jerusalem and Jericho? Could it just as easily have
been Baghdad and Tehran, or Halifax and Windsor? It is a parable and as
such is telling a story that has great truth in it but is not about some
actual event captured in the police reports or the Sunday newspapers. As
such we have to consider the possible significance of these elements in the
story. And, of course, there is nothing adventitious or accidental about
either Jerusalem or Jericho. In fact, those two places can be seen to
capture something of the entire pageant of the Old Testament and more
prophetically, and, perhaps, more provocatively, something of a theological
view of the human condition. The parable illustrates the grand themes of
the Fall, Redemption and the Church.
Jerusalem
symbolizes the heavenly city, the city of God, while Jericho symbolizes the
earthly city, the city of Man. The two are seen in stark opposition to one
another, a point which is further emphasized in the conflict between “the
flesh and the spirit” in the Epistle for today. In the conquest of the
Promised Land, Jericho was the great city in Israel’s way and was ultimately
toppled by a liturgy of all things, a service of prayers and praises
acknowledging the sovereignty of God against all forms of human
presumption. Such is the story of “Joshua at the battle of Jericho”
when “the walls came a tumblin’ down”. But, of course, the
Israelites also got greedy and took what they had been commanded not to take
for themselves of the spoils of war. More trouble! Is there a pattern
here?!
In the parable,
a “certain man [is going] down from Jerusalem to Jericho”. This
reminds us of the story of the Fall, of man’s falling away from God in
Paradise and turning towards the ground, to the earth, in alienation from
God, the world and his fellow-man. We are going in the wrong direction! The
consequences are immediate. He “fell among thieves, which stripped him
of his raiment, and wounded him … leaving him half dead”. “A certain
man” is every one of us.
Sin robs us of
the riches of God in creation, leaving us naked. “Who told thee that
thou wast naked?” God asks the Adam – mankind – in the Garden of
Creation after they had disobeyed God’s only commandment and found
themselves in opposition to God and to all the good things which God had
provided for them; in effect, calling not good what God had emphatically
called good. If God gives you everything that you need for life and if he
also gives you a commandment, then to reject the latter is to deny the truth
of the former. In the action of disobedience we discovered contradiction.
Paradoxically, that is also the discovery of reason. There is equally a
fall upward, we might say, for “their eyes were opened, knowing both good
and evil”. That, too, is part and parcel of the human reality but it is
discovered negatively through the hard way of experience, the
experience of alienation, hardship, suffering and death. We find ourselves,
like Adam and Eve in the ancient Genesis story, both naked,
wounded and half-dead, because we have robbed ourselves of God’s truth. It
is the human condition. What can be done about it and by whom?
Priest and
Levite pass-by. Are they going in the same direction or the other way?
Towards Jerusalem and away from Jericho? The parable is unclear about the
direction of their journeying but abundantly clear about what they represent
and what they do. They are the representatives of the Law especially in the
expression of its ritual purity. They both see the wounded man and
they both pass by. It would be easy to regard this as simply the
failure of the religion of Judaism through hypocrisy and indifference to
address the human condition. And certainly that must be there. There is an
implied criticism of the Jewish religion in Jesus’ telling this story, a
judgment on Israel, if you will. But there is something more. Priest and
Levite see the wounded man. There is an awareness of the wounded,
broken state of our humanity. But can the Law fix it or can the Law, even
in the piety of intense ritual observance, only see it, that is to
say, recognize the situation we are in but unable to fix of ourselves?
The Christian
interpretation of this parable has to recognize the limitations of the Old
Covenant, namely, that it can only point out the problem which it cannot
fix. What can be done? By whom? “A certain Samaritan as he journeyed,
came where he was”. Who is this? Well, from the standpoint of the
Jewish community, the Samaritans are the ultimate outsiders, despised
as apostate Jews because of a difference of opinion about the place
of the giving of the Law and about the centrality of Jerusalem for the true
worship of Israel. Is Jesus saying that the Samaritans are right and the
Jews are wrong about the Old Covenant and about Jerusalem?
No. He is
suggesting here and elsewhere in a number of other quite significant
passages that sometimes our differences and divisions can hide from view the
more essential things which unite us. In the case of the Samaritans, Jesus
often uses them as examples of godly action in the face of particular
religious rules that have been given a wholly human interpretation to the
detriment of the spirit of the Law. It is the openness of the Samaritans to
the spirit of the Law that Jesus most seems to celebrate and, as the
encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well of Samaria makes clear,
for example, what Jesus has to say transcends the differences between Jew
and Samaritan. “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we
know, for salvation is from the Jews, but the hour cometh and now is when
the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth”(John
4. 22-23).
The Samaritan
not only “saw him” but “had compassion on him” and acted on
that compassion “[to go] to him, [binding] up his wounds, pouring in oil
and wine, set[ting] him on his own beast, [bringing] him to an inn, [taking]
care of him” even to the point of making future provision for his care.
He is the outsider who came near to him. Who is the ultimate other
who has come near to us? Jesus, the Son of God. God has become neighbour
to us in Jesus, the Incarnate Lord, God made man, “the Word made flesh”.
We have come to
call this parable “The Good Samaritan” and the term has become
synonymous with works of care and compassion towards others, and rightly
so. But nowhere in the story is the “certain Samaritan” called the ‘good’
Samaritan. It belongs to the deeper understanding of the parable to attach
that adjective and, in so doing, to acknowledge that the action here is more
than merely descriptive; it is symbolic. The Good Samaritan is, ultimately,
Jesus and the care that he gives describes the very life of the Church, the
Church as the Body of Christ, the Church as the Inn, where we learn the
compassion of God out of which we, too, are called to act, where our wounded
and broken selves find healing and mercy in the outpouring of oil and wine
and in the giving of the two pence, suggestive of the sacraments of baptism
and eucharist, where we are taken care of until “I come again”. Only
in him, the parable so strongly suggests, can we “go and do likewise”,
because only in him are the love of God and the love of neighbour united.
“They that
are Christ’s have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts”
and only so can we “walk in the Spirit”, as St. Paul tells us in his
Letter to the Galatians, his manifesto of Christian freedom.
The action of the Good Samaritan is sacrifice, the sacrifice of ourselves
and our self-interests for the good of others out of the goodness and the
love of God, the great Other who has become neighbour to us. It means to
share in the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ in the face of our
indifference, our hatred and animosity. Only so shall we serve him
faithfully in this life that we fail not finally to attain his heavenly
promises. “He has compassion on us”. In Christ “Go and do thou
likewise”.
