Familiar made strange: The Good Samaritan

Deuteronomy 30.10-14 ‘The word is very near you, so that you can do it’

Colossians 1.15-20 ‘All things were created through him and for him.’

Luke 10.25-37 ‘Who is my neighbour?’

 

Who proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10.37)

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The parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps Jesus’ most classic parable.

 

It’s the parable that lots of people have heard of, or refer to, even in our increasingly secularised society that doesn’t generally revert to Christian language and imagery.

 

Even if they can’t recount every detail of the parable, they will know the phrase ‘Good Samaritan’ as meaning someone who shows kindness to a person in need.

 

They may know the phrase about ‘passing by on the other side’ to mean ignoring someone in need, but not know where it comes from.

 

And almost certainly they will know the word ‘samaritan’ from the charity established by the Revd Chad Varah in 1953 after he took the funeral of a 14-year-old girl who had committed suicide.

 

The Samaritans respond so powerfully to those who need emotional support.

 

Back to the parable: we might think we know what it’s all about: snooty religious people who won’t help; the outsider who will.

 

It has the simple moral lesson help people in need, don’t “pass by on the other side”.

 

And that is a legitimate reading of the parable.

 

That reading of the parable has power when one walks the streets of Croydon, where all too often we see people lying in the doorways of shops, or around this very church.

 

It’s so difficult, isn’t it, to know quite what to do.

 

Do I go over and help; or am I just ‘passing by on the other side’?

 

Hearing this parable again should indeed make us reconsider what mercy looks like when given to another person, especially the bruised and battered, and how we go and do likewise.

 

Parables have a knack of being endlessly generative, in other words, they generate more and more meaning as you contemplate them, because they are taking you deep into the character of God.

 

The early Christian writers also remind us that the parable not only speaks to our moral sense but our spiritual sense also.

 

They give us a fresh perspective to ask what else might be said by the parable.

 

So how about this interpretation by the Biblical exegete Origen, writing in the late second and early third century?

 

One of the elders wanted to interpret the parable as follows. The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the inn, which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. And further, the two denarii mean the Father and the Son. The manager of the stable is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Saviour’s second coming. (Origen – Homilies on Luke, Homily 34)

 

I wonder if you have ever thought of the parable like that?!

 

Now, we could dismiss it as pious nonsense, or reading too much into the text.

 

It certainly is not a practical reading to draw out a moral, or even political message, but it is one that seeks to draw out of the parable things we often miss.

 

What we find with it is an entry into a symbolic world to nourish the spirit, but that also has a direct bearing on our Christian faith and redemption.

 

So, the Parable both speaks of the human condition in general, and you and me in particular, and it tells us the nature of the Church, the place in which we are received, restored and made well.

 

If the man who set off from Jerusalem is Adam, the first human, then the man on the journey is you; it’s me.

 

When we move from the presence of God, of which Jerusalem is a symbol, then we become susceptible to hostile powers that assault and harm the body and soul.

 

Where do we find comfort and healing?

 

It is no longer in the Law and prophets, and remember the lawyer who questioned Jesus knew both of them well.

 

What we learn, with that lawyer, is that the Law and the prophets point us to something more, and are incomplete until they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ: in other words, the Old Testament needs the New to make all things complete, when we can truly appreciate that, ‘the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it’. (Deuteronomy 30.14)

 

And can Jesus Christ be the Samaritan?

 

Well, in his humanity he is human, as we are; but, in his divinity, he is utterly other than us, you could say foreign to us, as were the Jews and Samaritans in his day.

 

And let’s see how he acts.

 

The wounds we bear are the wounds of the assaults of the evil one, and we bear the scarring of Original Sin.

 

Into our wounds Jesus pours the oil of unction and his divine healing: this is where we very obviously see the mercy of God in Christ being poured out, soothing the wounds we bear, easing the throb of pain in the scars of human lives.

 

And remember the man on the road had been left for dead; yet Christ comes to bring life, ‘life in all its abundance’ (John 10.10), the ‘life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19).

 

So, in this battered state we find ourselves lying in the gutter, as it were, until Christ - who promises to share and bear our burdens - comes to us and lifts us up, we who ‘are weary and heavy laden’ (Matthew 11.28) and bears us in his arms to give us rest and healing and renewal (Deuteronomy 33.27).

 

And where is the man in the parable taken? He is taken to an inn, which, in Origen’s words, is the Church, a place of hospitality into which all the bruised and battered, scarred and scared of the world may enter to receive comfort.

 

And of course, we have heard about an inn earlier in St Luke’s Gospel: Mary and Joseph found no place to stay; and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan there is an innkeeper.

 

The irony is that no innkeeper is mentioned in the Nativity account, which would ruin many a school nativity play.

 

In fact, that word used in the text, κατάλυμα (kataluma), is often translated as ‘inn’ in English, but it more accurately refers to a ‘lodging place’, ‘guest room’, or ‘upper room’.

 

So, the Church must be a place to receive those broken and battered by all that is hostile to our human flourishing, and does so knowing that Christ - the Good Samaritan, the Lord - will return.

 

I wonder if the two denarii, the two coins represent Christ’s body and blood; his body broken on the Cross by hostile powers, his blood poured out from his saving wounds.

 

After all, as our second reading said, he came ‘to reconcile all things… making peace by the blood of his cross’. (Colossians 1.20).

 

If so, then the Church is where we meet Christ who comes to us again (as the Good Samaritan promised he would) to feed us, nourish us, heal us, restore us and get us to the Jerusalem of our hope.

 

So, the Parable mirrors Christ's redemptive work in saving humanity.

 

It is a powerful illustration of God's love and mercy which we receive, and from which our duty is to love and care for others, even, or especially, those considered enemies or outsiders.

 

Jesus Christ, the Divine One who could seem remote from us, as Samaritans were from Jews, is closer to us than we can imagine: he is our true neighbour, the one who truly shows mercy.

 

In that light we cannot but reflect his compassion and mercy out in the bruising world, and we cannot shut the doors of the church, the inn of hospitality, but draw everyone in – as we ourselves have been drawn in - so that their wounds, and ours, can be tended and their sins, and ours, can be healed and forgiven by the Lover of our souls.