Called
Not to Be Passionately Good,
But
Compassionately Christlike
[This is a sermon preached on
I wonder just how many of us
consider ourselves to be ‘good’, and how many in our society do too. C.S. Lewis once drew a distinction that may
be helpful in explaining what is at stake.
If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive…. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.[1]
What might this distinction do to
the way we think of the ‘good’? Our
society, we may reflect, tends to imagine the ‘good’ as something focused on
oneself – my good, or the good of those like me (family, friends, even nation,
and so on), as long as it does not harm
anyone else. So this definition of
the ‘good’ is about us as individuals, and is something we define, and it has
social connotations only in negative terms.
This shows us just how thin or weak our understanding of what the ‘good’
actually is – abortion is often defended, for instance, on the basis of some
individualistic sense of what constitutes ‘good’ (I have the right to choose
not to have the baby, and that is my good that others cannot take away from
me).[2]
But
not only will we hopefully see that this is too thin an understanding of what
the ‘good’ is, as C.S. Lewis’ distinction goes some way to suggesting, but it
is also potentially dangerous and destructive of precisely what the ‘good’
is. So when we identify the good with
our concerns we can too easily, given another push, exclude others in the most
harmful of ways – often with the excuse that it is good for many: We can see something of this pragmatic utilitarian
logic operating in the torture of prisoners in Iraq – their suffering is for
our good.[3] Martin Luther King once said
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but here he stands at times of challenge and controversy.[4]
This is an insightful comment, and
resonates with my own experience of growing up. I always knew that people were not
exaggerating when they observed that N. Irish people are often very warm and
friendly, and yet I realised only too well that when we were backed into a
corner over religious or political matters that we could be reduced to the
brutish, the arrogant, and the destructive of those who are not like us. So it never really puzzled me that so many
people in 1930s Germany could have been led with so little protest and
complaint down the road to the destruction of so many by one seemingly bent on
nothing more than naked aggression and animal hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and
Slavic peoples, when the conditions were ripe for it.[5]
Many
of us tend to think that the German problem of the mid C20th was an exceptional
and relatively isolated phenomena. And yet it is disturbing just how many of the
ingredients are present in the most powerful nation and its puppet on this
earth today:
·
Militarism
·
Sense of national exceptionalism
·
Sense of mission, of expanding the reach of national
influence
·
Intensified patriotism
·
A rage against the atrocity of 9/11
·
An ignorance of the history of national development
·
Pronounced social problems at home, and even
occasionally racism surfacing
·
The worship of power, prestige, and success
·
Self-interest foreign policy, with supporting military
and financial clout
Also, quite simply, it is a mistake
to see ourselves as not causing any harm to other people. We live on a planet increasingly dominated by
global technologies, contributing to a global market and global information
sharing. In such a world, we here in
south Fife waken up to the sound of an alarm clock made by Taiwanese labourers,
drink coffee originating in Columbia, get dressed in clothes manufactured in
Indonesia, invest in banks and companies frequently involved in illegal arms
sales to ‘third world’ countries, eat sweets and ice-cream from corporations
that abuse poor women and their infants in Asia or that lend vast sums of money
to poor African countries at unrepayable interest
levels, holiday in areas that for the sake of the tourist trade evict tenants
and destroy villages, use heating energy and car fuel that contributes to
climate change and environmental problems, and so on. Everything we do seems
to have some kind of effect on someone else.
And yet we can have the cheek to glibly claim that we are good people
because we do not harm others! Perhaps
because this harm happens at a distance from us we do not have to face the
implications of our lifestyle choices – but we are contributing to these very
conditions of oppression that we are choosing to pass by. And what is more, a great number of western
Christians imagine that the Gospel is about a different world and not this
world made different. We are becoming
docile people who do not know how to think about the radical nature of the
Gospel or about the values embedded in our social, economic and political
systems.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan:
I imagine that many of you have
seen Mel Gibson’s highly controversial Easter and brutally unrelenting
meditation, The Passion of the Christ. At the risk of throwing too many more
controversial claims into the melting pot this morning, I think that it is an
interesting comment both on the value of the film itself and the state of much
of contemporary western Christianity that has lauded this cinematic piece, that had Gibson directed the Parable of the Good
Samaritan
·
it would overwhelmed our emotions with almost two
hours of brutal concentration on the beatings, humiliations and degradations
meted out to the victim in the story,
·
and focused
also on the victim’s heroic stand against his attackers.
·
Perhaps he could say that the victim was born to be
beaten and left to die, since he plays little other role in the parable.
·
The entry of the Good Samaritan would have come at the
end, and featured in the camera’s shot only for the briefest moment.
·
Moreover, the robbers could be portrayed in simplistic
fashion as ‘evil men’, with Gibson making no attempt to delve into their
psyche, into the reasons that they were driven to turn to a brutal and violent
way of life.
But this would be to seriously miss
the point of the parable’ message, just as The
Passion of the Christ in many ways distorts the Gospel of God’s grace in
Jesus Christ.
·
Yes, it shows us in the most sickening of ways
something of what Jesus must have done
·
Yes, it shows the shamefulness of the barbarism of the
authorities
·
Yes, it shows the weakness, the helplessness and the
vulnerability of those who know that the execution of Jesus is a dreadful
miscarriage of justice.
But despite doing these, it misses
the point of the life and ministry of Jesus – of Jesus’ compassion, of the fact
that the relations he had, and the conversations he entered are all integral to
the Gospels’ presentation of his significance.
Jesus came to seek out, care for and save the lost and sinners. It is theologically problematic, as such, to
claim that he simply came to die.
Something
of what I mean by this we can see in this parable, and hopefully this will
become clear as we come to look at it.
So
Jesus sets out on his journey – but he takes a route that is unusual for
Galilean Jews: he travels south through
but the people
there did not welcome him, because he was heading for
It is worth noticing the way that
Jesus responded to the lawyer. V. 25 says that the lawyer intended to “test Jesus”. Commentators are not quite sure what this
means exactly:
·
Possibly trying to check Jesus’
credentials/qualifications as a teacher to see if Jesus knew his stuff and can
draw on his knowledge of the Jewish traditions with understanding, insight and
wisdom. Maybe that is why he pushes
Jesus with a second question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ because he thinks that
Jesus is wriggling out of giving himself away.
·
Possibly the lawyer was, less charitably, trying to
catch Jesus out and play up his own credentials as a better qualified
teacher. Maybe that is why v. 29 says
that “he wanted to justify himself”, although that may also be a reference to
feeling challenged by Jesus’ response to him.
As the Gospels suggest on numerous
occasions, Jesus frequently faced unfriendly fire from opponents. But the way he responds here is telling –
instead of authoritatively answering Jesus puts the question back on to his
interrogator. In other words, Jesus did
not overwhelm the lawyer with an-end-of-debate assertion of his authority,
something churches have been all too prone to do. What does this say about the various ways
that Christians have been all too tempted to shout (metaphorically and
actually) at ‘opponents’ and not listen to others? After all, others often show us a mirror of
just what distortions are shown in our faces.
What does this say about the various manipulative techniques that
Christians have used?
·
The whipping up emotions into a frenzy and then asking
for altar calls, for instance.
·
Hell-fire and damnation message which tries, in the
worst sense to ‘scare the hell out of everyone’
Instead,
Jesus’ questioning the questioner encourages and directs the lawyer to think –
something else that churches have not been terribly good at doing – and this
encouragement to think, of course, links in to the command in v. 27 to love God
with all one’s mind.
[2] Churches of ‘MINI-MEs’
Many sermons on this passage focus
on the activity in the question ‘what must I do?’ So the sermon becomes a
diatribe against works-righteousness,
the idea that we can earn God’s favour by the things we do.
But
Jesus’ rejection of works’-righteousness is, on the one hand, much more muted –
look at v. 37 and the command to ‘go and do
likewise’. Yet, on the other hand,
Jesus’ message is much more radical – he rejects the very grounds of the
question by rejecting the I
in the ‘what must I do?’ The parable is not focused on the acts of the
Good Samaritan as such, but on the victim and the claim that the victim puts to
the three people who come across him. In
other words, we are not to think so much of what we are, what we are to do,
even in a sense what our relationship to God is like – after all, the 2
commandments are kept closely together, and the compassion of the Good
Samaritan is by one whom the Jews would not have believed capable of being able
to love God truly anyway – this is one of things that makes this parable
radical. Our being compassionate (deeds
flowing from a people made compassionate) is precisely what loving God seems to
mean. The writer of 1 John makes
something of that clear.
There
is a worrying trend, by no means only recent but is certainly made very vocal
today, that the Gospel is about me –
about individuals standing before God, in a sense without others and usually
without the whole created order (how many Christians take seriously the notion
of the healing of the ‘natural’ world as well as individuals, or at the very
most the nations?).
But
not only do Christians frequently buy into a model of being human in terms of
self-interest, but even in evangelism we often encourage others to be
self-interested too.
·
Think about how evangelism is done by way of holding
out God’s offer of heaven, and rescue from a hellish fate.
·
Too much Christian worship and preaching as well can
look as if self-interest is the thing that Christianity promotes. Just contemplate and test the words of many
of Christian songs.
·
Pre-millennialists celebrate
Christians being taken out of this world, raptured: and this then leaves the world to its
destruction. Hal Lindsey speaks with
relish of the rapture – on one occasion he says that Christian drivers on the
motorways will be raptured, thus causing a deadly
motorway pile-up. But does Lindsey
lament this, does he express sorrow over the deaths
and the eventual destruction of the world by nuclear warfare? No, he positively welcomes it – it’s God’s
will and we, if we are Christians, will be alright anyway. What a violent Gospel with little sign of the
grace of compassion this is.
This is all, of course, indicative
of a serious perversion of the Gospel – a loving of a self that has not yet
died to self to live for others.
[3] Religiously Concerned
The story records two of the
religious authorities as passing by the victim.
The fact that two do it heightens the tension, and emphasises the
point. But why did they do this? The story does not say, although preachers
and commentators have used the silence as an opportunity for speculation.
·
Religious concerns –
–
It has been commonplace to claim that they may have
felt that the victim was dead, and that they would have been defiled in
touching a dead body. If this is the
case, then Jesus’ story would be an attack on (religious) rules, orthodoxies
and traditions that forget why they are there in the first place – to serve
others. ‘Rules were made for people, and
not people for rules’, we may say. There
may well have been something of this in the story, and certainly Luke makes the
point in ch. 6 through the incident of Jesus healing
on the Sabbath. But, the two men were
heading away from
–
Others have argued that perhaps the two men were in a
hurry to perform their religious duties elsewhere. If this is so, then the Jesus’ point is to
remind that religious devotion that is heavenward without being earthward is
false. So those who worry more about
‘preaching the Gospel’ but forget the body have distorted the Gospel of God’s
compassion for the whole world that God has created and originally blessed with
the declarative word-seal that ‘it is good’.
And yet, again the men were heading away from the
·
Personal concern – perhaps they were just more
concerned about themselves being attacked.
This would emphasise how self-concern – for job security, for
popularity, just even for personal security – can make us miss the needs of the
needy.
Jesus, however, makes the point
without giving reasons – simply the point may well be that there can be many reasons but absolutely no excuses for not showing
compassion to the needy.
[4] Compassion for the Other
We need to remember just how scandalous Jesus’ next part of the story really is – the scandal of God’s all-welcoming love, which does not exclude any – God is loving toward all, despite the boundaries we tend to place – race, class, nationality, sex, denomination, religion, sexual orientation.
From what they had already heard, Jesus’ audience would have been expecting this to be an anti-clerical story, a complaint about the traditions and behaviour of the religious authorities, so as to encourage the common man and woman. After all, Jesus himself was not part of the priestly cultus, and frequently clashed in authoritative teaching with the religious leaders.[6]
But Jesus’ parable is much more radical than that too, unexpectedly shocking in fact for his Jewish listeners. Jesus breaks open the boxes that we try to put his grace in, and accuses us of gracelessness in the process. The hero is not an ordinary Jew but a Samaritan, one of the impure, the despised and rejected, an enemy of the Jewish people and who hated the Jews as much as the Jews hated them – a die-hard Celtic supporter against the die-hard Rangers supporters, an English person among the most ardent Scottish nationalists, an immigrant Iraqi among the American political and religious right.
When the lawyer responded to Jesus by asking ‘who is my neighour’ he is not being difficult or trying to escape the challenge of Jesus’ probings. There was a long-standing Jewish debate over the identity of the ‘neighbour’. The term was generally regarded as having a limited applicability, and therefore the debate tried to work out just who was excluded from its range –
–
Lev.
– v34 - extends this to the resident alien
– Israelites tended to hate the ‘foreigner’ so as to avoid becoming ensnared in the religions of the foreigners.
–
In C1st Judaea even the
resident alien had become an object of hate – they were permanent and painful
reminders of the domination of the people by the Romn
empire (cf. Lk.
Jesus simply refuses to dignify
this debate by entering into it. By
selecting the Samaritan as the hero, the impure and heretical one embodying the
divine justice as mercy to the victim, Jesus shows that to ask ‘who is my
neighbour?’ is to ask the wrong question completely. It is to imagine that the range of those to
whom one is responsible can be limited – and basically that boiled down in
practice to being limited to people like us.
Instead,
Jesus breaks open our self-concern and our tendency to self-protection which
excludes certain categories of people – just look at the far from ended history
of Christians’ abuse against Jews, women, different races, different nations,
different Christian denominations, ‘heretics’, people of other religions, and
so on. God draws God’s grace around all
peoples indiscriminately. God’s grace
cannot be identified with us as individuals, our families, any particular sex,
any particular ethnic group, our church, our denomination, our nation, and so
on. But not only is God’s grace
universal in its scope, but it may even be received and performed in various
ways by those whom we would least expect – Gandhi, the Dali Lama? We need to be careful and listen here before
we rush in to speak, thereby demonstrating our ignorances,
our prejudices, our stupidity, and our failure to understand God.
What
Christians are able to claim on the basis of the Gospel traditions is that God
loves all indiscriminately, that God’s grace was embodied for all in Jesus
Christ, and that salvation is in and through Jesus Christ alone. But how God does that, and who God may well
be in the process of actually saving, we are given no grounds to
determine.
It
is the Samaritan and not the Jewish Temple authorities who is the embodiment of
God’s grace and justice in Jesus’ parable.
It is he who demonstrates divine compassion. It is he who recognises the need and claim of
the needy victim.
And
this compassion is much much more than some emotional
attachment, or sentimental feeling of pity for the suffering man. It is an act of giving what is needed, and
lavishly so – he does not does the minimum of what is needed. No, he administers full and very costly
care. He is concerned for all the
details of the man’s healing.[7] After all, the very word ‘salvation’
etymologically has its root in the Latin salus which means ‘healing’.
[5] God’s Compassion for Us
in Christ Jesus
Some scholars have suggested that
this parable is an indirect response to the opposition shown to Jesus’ ministry
of compassion for the rejected and excluded from everyday ‘civilised’ society –
prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, foreigners, among others.
This
may well lie in the background – after all, Jesus is the One who embodied God’s
grace, justice and compassion, but was rejected as a stranger, an enemy and
destroyed by those who seemed more keen on preserving themselves in various ways. Jesus himself becomes a Samaritan of
sorts.
There
is a long tradition of associating Jesus with the Samaritan figure (there may
even be a Greek word play between the Samaritan and the Shepherd). Certainly Jesus’ order ‘Go and do likewise’
seems to preclude too simple an identification between the two figures – Jesus’
hearers would not have readily understood him as speaking of himself, something
he tends not to do in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but which does
freely in the Gospel of John.
But
looking back on this story through almost two thousand years of Christian
tradition, we can certainly make a case that Jesus himself is the compassionate
One of God, the face of God only as
he acts endlessly in creatively and lavishly caring ways for all in need. Jesus’ compassion gives new depths to what we
mean when we talk of ‘the love of God’, even as it goes to the extremity of
tortured abuse and the three-day grave.
In Christ, this it revealed that this is what God is like, and in Christ
is revealed that this is what the true human being is like – any other way of
understanding the human or promoting any form of naked self-interest becomes
blasphemy against who we really are in Christ – and that foes for all levels,
the Real-politik
national self-interest, the economics of self-interest, and so on. In the biblical traditions, these forms of
self-interest would be seen as precisely revealing what sin is. It is not the way of God in Jesus Christ, and
it cannot be ours – at any level
whatsoever. It is for compassionate
healing of the multiple and varied sins of the world that Jesus was born – we
should learn to say the same about ourselves.
Conclusion:
This is one of the most familiar
passages in the bible. And yet it is so
rich and demanding, and our lives so poor and self-absorbed in comparison that
we manifestly show by our thoughts, words, and deeds that we are ignorant of
its radical power – its power to call us to be true to who we are in Jesus
Christ, for the healing of this world.
Do we
imagine that worshipping God and loving others are two separable types of
things for Christians? Do we think that
we can offer to God our worship without challenging the values of the society,
including its churches, we live in? Does
God desire the sacrifice of our mouths and finances or the sacrifice of lives
for the sake of others? Does God desire
our evangelism alone or our care for the whole person?
There
is something deeply disturbing about Christians who, in full knowledge of what
was occurring, could be encouraged to sing louder so as to drown out the cries
coming from the next door Nazi death-camp at
In active
opposition to our society which tends to measure the worthiness of a human life
by how much it can contribute, and how much it costs, we are to live by
endlessly seeking to embody God’s extravagant compassion for a world in need,
and in the hope of seeing the creation of a world without boundaries, without
premature exclusions, without person-destroying discriminations.
This
is a massive and never ending task. In a
scene in The Fellowship of the Ring
Frodo the Hobbit balks at the size of his task – for on him rests the very
future of the human race:
I wish the ring had never had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf the Wizard wisely responds:
So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to
decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the
time that is given to you.
The harvest
of needs is great, and the workers are all too few, and Christians often seem
too bothered with quality time for themselves of with God alone. Are we going to take up the challenge put to
us by Jesus about the needy, or are we going to pass on by? Such love is, as Martin Luther King pointed
out, not that of an unrealistic Utopian dreamer, but in fact even necessary for
the humanity’s very survival. In the
movie version of Tolkein’s second part of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the wizard Sauruman asserts “there will be no dawn for men”. Without our living compassionately healing
lives that will all too easily become true.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 1f.
[2] Capital punishment is occasionally
defended on the basis of a slightly more expanded basis – it is good for the
society as a whole that this person die (as retribution, and/or for social
deterrence).
[3] Although the sheer sadistic pleasure
taken by the photographed American soldiers makes this a rather unstable
argument.
[4] Martin Luther King, Strength to Love (London: Collins Fontana, 1969), 31.
[5] The conditions were ripe – a strong
leader to take Germany out of the terrible economic depression of the late
1920s and early 1930s, the apparent failure of the Weimar Government to deal
with the rebuilding of the nation, the strong undercurrent of national love,
and the festering sense of humiliation over the treaty inflicted on them at
Versailles in 1919. Most people needed a
little push, and Hitler gave them one, playing on the might is right, what is
good for us is good motifs.
[6] Certainly this is implied, but the
fact that Jesus does not dwell on this again stands in stark contrast to Mel
Gibson’s shockingly simplistic presentation of the Jewish authorities.
[7] Contrast with this Christian
evangelism that performs the first act (out of concern for some abstract thing
called ‘justification’ or ‘salvation’) but which really demonstrates all too
little compassion/care to follow this through in a way that really actually
cares in practice (‘sanctification’).