Sermon, Fourth Sunday after Trinity: Making sense of stories - The Good Samaritan

I go on holiday at the end of this week and I’m looking forward to taking some novels with me (it’s always a good idea to take plenty of books, given the normal pattern of summer weather on Scottish islands!). Reading fiction helps me switch off and step sideways into someone else’s world. But the greatest joy comes when something a character says or does strikes a chord, and I find my thoughts ranging further and further from the book, as I start to make connections with my own experience. And so a fictional construct ends up resonating with some aspect of my own life, and might even bring fresh understanding, and challenge to see things differently.

The power of story is immense. A well-crafted piece of fiction has the ability to draw us in and ask ‘where I might be in relation to this story?’ Jesus understood this well. Storytelling was a key part of his largely non-literate culture. And some of the most engaging and memorable parts of the Gospels are the stories he told: fictional accounts through which timeless truths are expressed.

One of the problems, though, when we read Jesus’ stories (or hear them read) we do so within a culture very different from that of his hearers. We have become used, certainly in the post-Enlightenment West, to processing and evaluating information with the intention of understanding precisely what it means. Centuries of Biblical scholarship have pushed relentlessly in this direction; in our reading of the Bible we are encouraged to make use of scholarship to enhance our understanding and, hopefully, nourish our faith. But where is meaning to be found in the stories told by Jesus? 

Today’s Gospel includes one of the best-known: the parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s one that those of us who are cradle Christians will have known all our lives, and of course, it’s very clear what it means – or is it?

Something we perhaps need to remember is that we seldom hear only the story. We hear it framed by the context given it by the writer of Luke’s gospel. We are told:

A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘...what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ 

Jesus asks ‘what does the law say?’ and he replies ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And, wanting to justify himself, he adds, ‘And who is my neighbour?' 

And off we go with the story, which is then followed with a question:

Which of these ... was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’

The lawyer replied, ‘The one who showed him mercy.‘ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

The meaning of the story is clear: It shows us what it looks like to be a neighbour to someone in need. A universal message that transcends culture, race and religion. It’s all very straightforward, and we can go away and work out what this might mean for each of us as we try our best to love God and neighbour.

Or is it that straightforward?

First, it’s highly unlikely that this story was told on only one occasion, and only in response to a questioning lawyer. If we reflect that Jesus travelled about for 3 years, he would have had a fund of stories, repeated, varied and honed over time. What we have in the gospels are the recollections of those stories given a context by the writers and editors of the gospels. The Good Samaritan, with its theme of neighbourliness cutting across the traditional social boundaries, fits well with the inclusive and compassionate emphasis we find in Luke. 

Second, we mustn’t forget that this story is a parable. Parables aren’t supposed to be easy. They are hard work and demand that we continually ask questions without necessarily getting answers in return. Sometimes they can seem a closed book, and we have to keep coming back to them time and again before they open up. Parables challenge us: they can reveal possibilities we might not have thought about before; they can make us think afresh about the things of God—and in so doing they help us discover meaning.

We need to be careful that we don’t assume either that parables have a single meaning, or that meaning is fixed and inflexible. Meaning can be fluid: it can change depending on where we happen to be standing, who we are, and how we hear a story. 

So what might the Parable of the Good Samaritan mean, not for a 1st century Jewish lawyer, but for you and me—bearing in mind that your take on it might be quite different from that of the person sitting next to you?

In the parables we’re invited to hear a story from a range of perspectives. I wonder where you might be—where I might be—in this story?’ It might be that we are an onlooker: a disinterested observer trying to make sense of the drama unfolding before us; or it might be that we find ourselves identifying with one of the characters.

Are we the perhaps the traveller from Jerusalem to Jericho, making a dangerous journey and vulnerable. Attacked by robbers, we are left half dead. None of us is ever free from attack (physical, mental or spiritual). We encounter illness, rejection, separation, bereavement, hatred, abuse, violence and evil, as part of what it is to be human. Some of us might, at some time or other, have felt half-dead, abandoned at the roadside.

We look for help but find ourselves ignored by the very people we might have expected to help us. The priest and the Levite walk by on the other side. 

Maybe we identify with the robbers? It might seem odd to put ourselves in the place of those who attacked the traveller, but we might need to do it. Jesus did say ‘let the one without sin cast the first stone’ and we’ve all been there – we’ve injured and damaged others. Perhaps unconsciously, but sometimes intentionally. Do we perhaps need to confront the dark places in our life, realise our need of forgiveness, and of strength to overcome our faults and be true to God’s image within us. 

The priest and Levite resonate more strongly with some of us than others, but to some extent many of us are members of the religious establishment. That’s a place where respectability—doing the right thing—matters. The sight of a half-dead man makes us hope someone will come and sort him out, but it’s not for us to get our hands dirty. Anyway, we’re busy: we’ve got that Chapter meeting, that paper to write, that garden party to go to. Any of us can be so set on ‘doing the right thing’ that we are incapable of stepping outside the box and asking ‘what is the right thing?’ We’ve all been priests and Levites at some time or other. 

I know this next character is out of sequence, but what about the Innkeeper? Hard-working, trying to run a business that stays afloat: serving food and drink and giving lodging to those who turn up. When this Samaritan arrives, does it matter who he is? Not really, he’s a customer, and he’s able to pay the bill. We just get on with it: it’s not a glamorous job, looking after a wounded man, but it has to be done, and we can do it; and in doing it we’ve actually made a difference. There is resonance here for some of us, because much of the time, we simply get on with life and do what needs to be done. But in doing that we become agents of God’s work in the world – even if no one really notices. 

So what of the Samaritan? Samaritans are used to being looked down on—not really one of God’s people—and so expectations of life are not that high. Better to be realistic. But I’d thought that the point of all that religious stuff was that it was supposed to affect how we live. And I’m sure I heard somewhere that we should love our neighbour. I don’t really do the detail (all those laws) – but if God does cares for us, then we probably ought to look after one other.

And so, for the man on the road to Jericho, help came: in the unexpected shape of a foreigner. Not very promising, really. Maybe not really his sort of person, or our sort of person: a bit of an outcast, in fact. Not someone we’d want very much to do with.

But with whom does this person resonate? Who, I wonder, might the Good Samaritan stand for? Augustine thought that the Good Samaritan stood for Jesus himself. Not respectable: a friend of tax collectors and sinners, standing outside the religious establishment, and dying the death of a common criminal. Our sort of person? I wonder.

And yet it is Jesus who binds up our wounds—the ‘wounded surgeon who plies the steel’—who takes our hurts from us and carries them in his own body. 

Where are we in this story? Wherever we are, whoever we might identify with, we find that in the story we are met, challenged, and healed by our Saviour Jesus Christ. 

Lord God, 
teach us to be open to your truth,
to hear your voice.
and to trust in your redeeming love,
that we may live each day
with confidence in the salvation which is given 
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.