GO, AND DO THOU LIKEWISE!

 A SERMON FOR THE 12TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

One of the most familiar of all the Gospel parables, the story of the Good Samaritan poses the threat of becoming a cliché.  We are so well acquainted with it that we take it for granted, and stop thinking about it.  How often do we think about the air we breathe, for example, and how important it is for us?  But this little story told by our Lord has in it one of the most fundamental and critical lessons that we all must learn.  It’s a lesson that our eternal life depends on.  Take away the air we breathe and we very quickly die.  Take away charity (for that is what this story depicts), and our death is equally fast and furious.  It may be a spiritual, as opposed to a physical death, but surely that makes it more, and not less, to be feared.

So let’s take a quick look at this “good Samaritan” chap, and remind ourselves of our responsibilities vis-à-vis this greatest of the virtues, charity.

A little background first, because it was one of the events in our Lord’s life that led him to tell the story of the Good Samaritan.  As Christ was speaking to his disciples, “a lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”  That’s the job of a lawyer, isn’t it?  To ask questions to which he already knows the answer, so that the witness may condemn himself out of his own mouth.  And this surely was the purpose of this lawyer.  He was tempting our Lord, and hoped to entrap him so that he could come in for the kill and destroy the credibility of his “witness.”  The only problem was that this particular lawyer did NOT know the answer to the question he asked.  He only thought he did. 

He knew the Jewish law forwards and backwards.  What exactly did the Jews regard as essential to salvation?  Follow the laws of Moses and the traditions of their fathers.  Our lawyer here was an expert in all that.   But guess what!  That might have been fine and dandy in the days of the Old Testament, but Christ had come to fulfill those fine and dandy, yet insufficient means of salvation.  He had come to fulfill them with the spirit of what those things represented.  It was to be the spirit of the law, and not the letter, that would save souls.  And that spirit rests utterly and completely in the law of charity.  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart , and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”  All the other laws that exist hang upon this one, supreme and all-inclusive commandment of love.

The law of Moses was given to the holy patriarch on Mount Sinai as the Hebrews left the slavery of Egypt for the new freedoms of the Promised Land.  It was a law that comprised ten separate commandments.  The first three dealt with the relationship between man and God and were inscribed on one tablet of stone.  The other seven, dealing with man’s relationship with his neighbor, were written on a second tablet.  Two stone tablets, dividing the commandments into two categories, God and neighbor.

In today’s Gospel, our blessed Lord is not throwing out this law of Moses as the lawyer wants to establish.  He tries to prove that our Lord is somehow against the laws and traditions of the patriarchs.  But we can see, how our Lord’s words refute the lawyer’s trickery utterly and completely.  Ten commandments contained on two tablets.  God and neighbor.  Two categories of law.  Our Lord merely summarizes the Ten Commandments into these two categories, and gives us the two most basic and fundamental laws of all:  Love God, and love thy neighbor.

Thwarted by our Lord, the lawyer seeks to extricate from the trap he set, and into which he himself has now fallen.  “And who is my neighbor?”  He can’t refute Christ’s reminder that we must love God, but maybe he can trick Christ into misidentifying who our neighbor is.  After all, according to the Jews, our neighbor is our fellow Jew, and only our fellow Jew.  The “others” are merely goyim—cattle.  Thus, the Jewish code of ethics permits the cheating of Gentiles in their acts of commerce, which is why we end up getting charged such high interest rates by the credit card companies.  But they weren’t allowed to cheat their fellow Jews.  That’s kind of gone out of the window by now, as the “elite” now seek only to enrich themselves, and they have totally lost all consideration for any of their fellow man.  They’ll cheat Jews and non-Jews alike these days, providing they remain rich and powerful.  Truly, the swamp needs to be drained.

Meanwhile, our Lord tells us a story, which, if the lawyer and his ilk had paid attention to it, the world would be a better place today.  He tells the story of a non-Jew, a Samaritan, not the type of neighbor the lawyer had in mind.  Some poor traveler gets beaten up by robbers, and one by one, the Jews walk past and ignore his plight as he lies half-dead in the road.  It is left to one of the goyim to take compassion on the traveler, binding his wounds and putting him up in a hotel for the night.  This is our neighbor, not the ones who hold to the letter of the law and would leave the poor man to die.

This lawyer reminds me of a certain type of traditional Catholic.  Let’s make sure we don’t behave like the holier-than-thou Jewish priest and Levite who shun the wounded man lying in the road, abiding by the letter and not the spirit of the law.  And by traditional Catholic, I mean even those before Vatican II, when many otherwise God-fearing men in the Church looked down and refused help to those outside her walls.  Today, let’s make sure we don’t look upon ourselves as the “elite”, ready to take care of ourselves but not the poor, the orphans, the homeless.  Let’s make sure we don’t look upon those who hold a different faith with any less charity than we view each other who have kept the faith in these bad times.  Let’s not “tut-tut” at the faults of our neighbor, but rather do what we can to bind their wounds of ignorance, gently pouring the oil and wine of truth on their false beliefs and showing them the error of their ways.  Finally, let’s lead them with all charity towards the inn of eternal happiness, where they may abide forever.  This is the true love of our neighbor.   It’s called mercy.  So let’s obey the words of our Lord to the lawyer: “Go, and do thou likewise.”