Three levels of 'Go and do likewise'
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Introduction
Introduction
One of the best known of all Jesus’ parables, and one which has been a victim of its own success. It’s so familiar we’ve stopped really thinking about it. It’s even changed the meaning of the word ‘Samaritan’ so that we’ve lost the shock value of how it would have hit the people around Jesus who heard it for the first time.
We’re going to look at it on three levels. If you want to doze off after the first, don’t worry, you’ll still get something important and useful out of it, but if you can stay with me for the whole thing there’s stuff coming which will help you to let it go deeper into the way you live and the way you love and trust God.
Level One - Be kind
Level One - Be kind
First of all, there’s the most obvious message. Help someone who needs help.
That’s it. Help someone who needs help. Don’t wait until you you’ve asked who they are, or why they’re in a mess in the first place. There’s a place for all that, and it’s important. But when it’s urgent, when there’s someone lying injured in the road, help first, questions later.
And that help is real, practical and as generous as we can make it. It’s help which is there at the moment it’s needed. That’s where the idea for the organisation ‘Samaritans’ came from. A priest in London, Chad Varah, founded it in 1953 in response to a funeral he’d taken of a 14-year-old who’d committed suicide in distress and feeling she had no-one to talk to. Years had passed since, but Varah was determined to make sure that no-one should be so desperate that they took their own life for lack of someone to talk to, who they could know would listen without judging.
Imagine the impact on our society if everyone, whatever their background, whatever their problem, knew that they could walk into a church, or knock on the door of someone they know is a Christian, and find someone who would listen without judging, who would support them without trying to tell them what to do.
Imagine how that would impact so many of the crises of our society. And imagine, too, how people would see the church if they knew that would always be what they would find. Listening more than talking. Accepting, not judging.
Jesus’ last words in that parable still ring down the years. ‘Go and do likewise’.
Level Two - Who is my neighbour?
Level Two - Who is my neighbour?
That brings us on the second level of the parable. It ends with ‘Go and do likewise’, but it starts with a question that doesn’t lead to that answer. The lawyer didn’t ask Jesus ‘how should I love my neighbour’. That would make sense of the answer ‘Go and do likewise’. But the question he asked was very different. Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan in answer to ‘Who is my neighbour’?
This is where the success of the Samaritans has blinded us to some of the meaning of the parable. In Jesus’ day, then the last person a Jew in trouble would expect to trust, the last person she or he would turn to, would be a Samaritan. Even more than Gentiles, they were completely separate.
***Brief explanation of Samaritans***
Jesus answers that lawyer’s question by a story in which the neighbour turns out to be the last person his hearers would expect. Not the priest and the Levite, good Jews, but the enemy. The other. The outsider. The Samaritan.
To translate this into our own setting, we should think of that group of people we most instinctively distrust even before we’ve spoken to them, or with whom we’d start the conversation by assuming we’ve got nothing in common. Depending on your own views that might be Labour or Tory activists, Baptist fundamentalists or progressive liberal Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Brexiters or Remainers, migrants, the DWP - the choices are really endless, as so much of life seems now to be about dividing us up into ever smaller groups who define ourselves as much by who we’re not as by who we are.
So in the story, imagine that Jesus introduces a couple of people who are in your own group - people like you, or perhaps people who are the kind of people you’d like to be. And imagine that you’re the man lying beaten and robbed in the ditch. They’re walking down the same road. And, for whatever reason, those people walk past, leaving you there. Then someone from that other group; someone you’d instinctively cross a street to avoid, the person you hope doesn’t sit next to you on the bus. That person comes along, stops his car, cleans you up and takes you to A&E. He makes sure there’s someone there to look after you while you recover, and then gets in touch later to check you’re ok, and to pay any bills you’ve run up along the way. Asking for nothing, just helping.
The second level of the story is about how we view one another. It’s about Jesus’ utter rejection of prejudice on grounds of race and religion, but we could extend it to other areas where we discriminate too. I do not have permission to limit my care, my help, my love-in-action, to people who are ‘like me’. I don’t choose who I’m meant to love with Jesus’ love. I just have to see who turns up.
I’ve often thought there’s a reason why in the Bible we so often read of how we’re called to love our brothers and sisters and our neighbours. After all, they’re the people we have most contact with without choosing who they are. Loving your friends, that’s straightforward. Neighbours can be a bit trickier. Especially if they have loud parties or a cat that messes up the garden. That’s the point. We’re not just to love the people it’s easy to love. We’re certainly not to love - and to help - just those people we agree with, or like, or identify with. Neighbours turn up. God gives them to us. It’s down to us to love them.
Level Three - Law and gospel
Level Three - Law and gospel
There’s a third level which explains why Jesus ends up answering the question ‘who is my neighbour?’ with the answer ‘Go and do likewise’. And maybe that answer itself is a bit more subtle than we first think.
The lawyer - and when we say ‘lawyer’ we should really be thinking more of a Bible student or teacher, not what we generally mean by the word - starts by putting Jesus on the spot. There’s nothing wrong with the question in itself, or with his answer, which matches Jesus’ own summary of God’s law. 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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ (). He knew the Scriptures, and he had thought about them well and carefully. Let’s not forget that Jesus says at this point ‘You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live’
Then the bible teacher blows it. ‘He wanted to justify himself’. So he asks another question that shows Jesus that he may have got God’s word into his head, but he hasn’t let it into his heart. ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Now there are two ways he could be asking that question. One is along the lines of ‘how far can I go?’ - how many people, what kind of people, does this command inspire me to love? But he’s asking it the other way. ‘How far do I have to go?’ - when will I have loved enough people to have satisfied God? How much difference from me do I have to allow before someone isn’t really my neighbour anyway? How far down the street do I have to go before I can stop loving and say ‘sorry, not my neighbour any more’? When have I loved enough that God’s not going to be cross?
The New International Version. (2011). (). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
There are times when having a deep concern for truth, and a devotion to doing things right for God, can actually get in the way of the gospel. This is one of those. He’s more concerned to define, to pin down, what God says than he is to live by the spirit of God.
So in Jesus’ story, it’s telling that the two Jews who walk past aren’t just anybody. They’re a priest and a Levite - the Levites were the churchwardens, the choir members, the altar servers, the practical leaders of the Temple and the synagogue. Those who heard Jesus speak probably assumed that they were on the way up to Jerusalem to serve in the Temple. That was a huge honour and responsibility. For a priest in particular, there might just be one or two chances in a lifetime to lead the worship of the Temple, to offer sacrifices. Maybe the Levite worked in the Temple and was heading up there for a shift. They would both have spent the previous few days making sure that they were ritually clean, knowing that any contact with non-kosher food, working on the Sabbath, being too close to non-Jews, any of these things would have disqualified them from doing what they were on the way to the Temple to do. And touching blood - that would have knocked them off the rota straight away.
‘He wanted to justify himself’
So it’s not necessarily that they were afraid of being attacked themselves, or that they just didn’t care. Jesus’ hearers would have understood that perhaps they had a higher priority - to stay pure, to be able to play their part in the rituals at the heart of Israel’s worship. They were on the way to do something important for God. Helping an injured man would have stopped them doing that. So they carried on.
The one who stopped was the Samaritan. He wouldn’t have been allowed in the Temple anyway. He worshipped God, but not in the right way. He was already unclean ceremonially. But he cared. He stopped. He helped.
When Jesus said ‘go and do likewise’ he wasn’t just telling the lawyer to go and help people injured in the road. He was telling him he needed to do something deeper as well. He had to forget a way of religion based on lines and boundaries; of working out how much you need to do, and of who deserves your care. He had to forget trying to justify himself and instead needed to learn the freedom of relying on the forgiving love of God, which could give him the confidence to stop keeping score and start enjoying the invitation to love without limits.
So...
So...
So we’ve looked at this story we know so well. And if all you take from it is the call to practical, generous care and love for others, that’s great. And unless you’ve got that bit, then the other two levels of meaning we’ve looked at won’t help you.
But if you want to get the most out of this story, go a bit further. Ask God to help you to forget all your prejudices and stereotypes and love people because God loves them, not because they’re in some way like you - or even likeable.
And most deeply, stop keeping score with God. Don’t let a concern for truth or a particular vision of holy living get in the way of the two commandments that sum up all the others - Love God, love your neighbour.
Go and do likewise.
Amen.