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LENT II, Year C: February 28 2010

This sermon is the second in our series in Lent in which we reflect upon parts of the prayer of confession that we have been using in the Mass during Lent (see the Mass book). Last week Bishop Jack preached on the opening words of the prayer 'Most merciful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that we have sinned, in thought word and deed' and this week I am preaching on the next part of the prayer : 'we have not loved thee with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves'.

We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. Well you will remember what Bishop Jack said about that last week: the problem is that we do love our neighbours as ourselves; the problem is that we do not love ourselves very much, and we treat our neighbour in the same way. If we have no sense of being loved of being worthy of love, then how can we begin to love our neighbour as ourselves?

True of course: and perhaps a way of re-discovering oneself as worthy of being loved, of recovering a sense of being beloved of God, is the tentative step taken towards our neighbour, the self doubt — or worse — for a moment put to one side, as we slowly reach out in friendship to someone on the journey with us: and perhaps in that gesture, that act of friendliness or courtesy or encouragement or affirmation or compassion, we begin to re-discover something within ourselves that is capable of being loved, and wishes to respond to that love.

We have not loved our neighbour as ourselves. Who is our neighbour? This was the question from the lawyer trying to test Jesus you will remember: how do I inherit eternal life, asks the lawyer? And Jesus asks him what does he read in the scriptures; and he replies that they say 'love God and love your neighbour as yourself': a synthesis of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. And those texts of course understood the neighbour to be primarily your fellow Israelites, but also importantly it extended beyond the people of Israel, to include the resident alien living alongside the Israelites: 'the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt'.

Jesus tells the lawyer that he is correct in what he says about the scriptures — do this and you will live. But who is my neighbour, the lawyer presses? Just who counts as my neighbour to whom I owe this great duty to love? Define who my neighbour is; and Jesus then tells the parable of the Good Samaritan which we know so well. It was the foreigner, the despised outcast from Israel who nonetheless was the neighbour to the Israelite fallen among thieves. And what did the Samaritan do in the parable? Firstly he was 'moved with pity' for the injured man; secondly, he went to him and bandaged his wounds and cared for him. It was the fact that he was first of all moved with pity for the condition of the man, that then caused him to act on that pity, that meant that the Samaritan was a neighbour to the man.

And when asked by Jesus who was the neighbour to the injured man, the lawyer, perhaps unable to bring himself to say it was a Samaritan, identifies instead the essential quality of the act of the Samaritan: the neighbour was the 'one who showed him mercy'.

I think this parable helps us to understand the essential quality of neighbourliness that we need to find withinin ourselves in our response to our fellow men and women. 'We must be moved by pity'.

Our use of the word 'pity' today does not have the resonance that it does in this passage. The NSPCC some decades ago stopped calling its children's branch 'the League of Pity' because the word 'pity' had picked up somewhere along the way some unspoken notion of condescension. The word 'pity' now had a very diminished meaning when we say rather lamely 'what a pity' when we see that it has started to rain. I think that the quality that the Samaritan was demonstrating towards the injured man, and in which we are invited to join, was much more than just feeling sorry for someone. I think being moved by pity for our neighbour means this: it means to live a life not as isolated units, not within the narrow confines of our own self interest, or our small group of similar-thinking friends, but instead we live lives of emotional imagination, broadened out beyond these boundaries so that we live within the lives of other people, we live within the speech or perceptions or regard of others, and they live within our lives.

The good Samaritan was 'moved' by the plight of the man who had been robbed. You cannot be moved unless you live a life in which you look beyond the boundaries of your tightly drawn comfortable world: if all that we do is look at ourselves, or beyond that to our immediate family or friends with whom we feel comfortable, if we never go beyond those boundaries, we will not be moved in the way that the Good Samaritan was moved when he suddenly, unexpectedly, inconveniently came upon the man who had fallen amongst thieves: he was moved by the condition of the man and his situation and he acted upon it. There was an emotional solidarity between him and the injured man. The others who passed on the other side — the priest, the Levite — must have had had a narrow imagination, tightly drawn boundaries beyond whose limits they never allowed their eyes to stray: no doubt they regretted what had happened to the man who had been robbed, no doubt they wished that it had not happened, no doubt they wished the man a speedy recovery, no doubt they condemned the robbers and hoped they were caught and brought to justice — but they were not moved as the Good Samaritan was moved, and, not being moved, they did not act.

So even though we see TV news of the terrible events around the world and even though we deeply regret what has happened in those countries, and wish them well in their recovery, the question that we are asked this morning is: are we like the Good Samaritan who was so moved for the injured man, that he brought him within the scope of his life, brought within his life the needs, the loss, the pain of the stranger who was nothing to do with him, but who nonetheless was the person to whom he was a good neighbour.

Well, this is all very well: but we cannot be a one person Red Cross flying in to every war torn country or earthquake zone dispensing our bandages and pouring our oil like the Good Samaritan. Of course we can't. But we cannot begin to even comprehend why anyone would feel it appropriate to do that, unless we live lives in which we are prepared to draw into the emotional imaginative scope of our lives all people in need, whoever or whatever they are are wherever they may be. If we are prepared to live lives of such emotional imagination and breadth in which we are open to the differences between us and other people, and yet — notwithstanding those differences — we live lives 'moved by pity' for them, then we live a life of a good neighbour, I think.

The Chief Rabbi Johnathan Sacks writes movingly about this in The Dignity of Difference:

"The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognise God's image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different to mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image, instead of allowing Him to remake me in His."

Sacks speaks to us of the breadth of imagination that we are called upon to exercise in our understanding of our neighbour. That within the person who is so apparently different to me, so difficult to understand, can I not see the image of God? And does that not move me to respond to him as my neighbour? And if I do not see that image, Sacks writes, then I have made my God into my own image, and not allowed God to change me into His.

Elsewhere he writes: "can we find in the human thou a fragment of the divine thou? Can we recognise God's image in someone who is not in my image?"

"Can I a Jew, recognise God's image in one who is not in my image: in a Hindu, a Sikh, a Christian, or a Muslim? [...] What then becomes of my faith which until then had bound me to those who are like me, and must now make space for those who are different, and have another way of interpreting the world?"

The scope of our emotional imagination that is required in this lifting of our eyes, and including all those who are not like us within the scope of our neighbourly care, is hinted at in the OT lesson in those ancient verses, where the elderly and still childless Abraham speaks to God: having received the promise so many years ago that God would one day make him into a great nation, Abraham asks, how can this be when I am still childless? God asks him to raise his eyes to the heavens:

"Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. Then He said to him: 'So shall your descendants be'." And Abraham believed the Lord.

Those to whom we are neighbour are as numerous as the stars in heaven: we should lift our eyes beyond that which we know and take in all that is around us and see the breadth and scope of those to whom we are neighbour and, like Abraham, place our trust in God.

Because we do need to trust God. If we do not there is a danger that, in the face of all this, we may collapse in a heap in the corner, under a feeling of helplessness faced with all the problems of the world which we cannot possibly solve on our own. But for the Christian, the person on the roadside who needs our help is not just calling from us a great effort of will, a great feat of works: we believe that in the person on the roadside is the injured Christ to whom we are called to go; in the poor in the favellas of Peru which Bishop Bill Godfrey spoke of a few weeks ago, is the suffering Christ whom he was called to serve. For the Christian, this reaching out to our neighbour is not just a reaching out to a fellow human being, it is a reaching out to nothing less than God Himself, reaching out to the presence of God within all human beings and particularly in their suffering and their need: and in this reaching out so are we transformed.

Just as in a moment, by our hands we reach out to receive the bread which is the Body of Christ, and, in this reaching out and receiving, we are transformed into the thing that we receive.