Fr. Kyle’s Trinity XIII Sermon

Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see. 

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The first thing that we have to confront in this Gospel reading for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity is what we read plainly in verse twenty-three of chapter ten: there are distinctions of spiritual knowledge. Some people are brought into a deeper understanding of the things of God. Jesus tells his disciples: you are blessed because of the things that you see.

They had just been sent out, along with dozens of other followers of Jesus—the seventy-two—to heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news of the Kingdom. Jesus has just reported that he has seen Satan fall like lightning: because of their work, the kingdom of God is advancing over all spiritual enemies. And the disciples have a close relationship with Jesus: closer than the crowds, for sure, and deeper than that of the larger group of followers. This closeness to Jesus gives them an insider’s advantage to the mysteries of Our Lord’s teaching. To the crowds, he gives a parable. To the disciples, he shares their deepest meaning.

The fact that the disciples have excelled in spiritual knowledge is not a result of their cleverness or book-learning. Just a couple of verses earlier, Jesus thanks his Father because he had “hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (10:21). One of the messages of this Gospel narrative is that Our Lord delights in elevating the lowly and in bringing them into a deeper knowledge of spiritual things. Jesus tells his disciples, “For I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.” This is the radical spiritual vision of the Magnificat, the song of St. Mary, that rejoices in the God who “hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.”

And speaking of the proud, the Evangelist, St. Luke, brings another character onto the scene: a certain lawyer. He’s the one who will prompt Jesus to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of his best stories. The scholar of the law breaks into the conversation that Jesus has been having with his disciples with a question: What shall I do to inherit eternal life? This is an important question and Jesus gives respect to the man by inviting him into a conversation. Jesus says, “What is written in the Law? How readest thou?”

And he answering said, 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 neighbour as thyself. 

We all know this is a good answer, right? Our liturgy tells us so. And what we pray is what we believe—lex orandi, lex credendi. Jesus says, “And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.” The two great commandments are what we follow when we are living the life of God. Since the Reformation, some have tried to make this section of Scripture about the question of salvation by faith vs. salvation by works. In this interpretation, the lawyer is committed to a kind of salvation by works. But because biblical religion does not pit faith against works or works against faith, this is not the question of this passage. All good works are the work of Christ. All genuine faith is the faith of Christ.

The problem with this man of the Law is made evident in the next verse:

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

What does it mean that he was “willing to justify himself”? Although it has often been read in this way, his question was not a betrayal of his heart’s desire to justify himself before God. In other words, we should not read the lawyer as trying to earn his salvation. That would be a misunderstanding of the text. Instead, he’s trying to justify himself before the crowds who are observing this bit of theological and rhetorical competition that has been unfolding between people like him and Jesus of Nazareth for quite some time. He knows he has an audience. And he’s trying to win their approval in this bit of competition that he has initiated with Our Lord. As St. Bede the Venerable explains in his reading of this text, the man is suffering from a madness of vainglory. At first he pretends a kind of ignorance: because, as the Venerable Bede points out, any educated Jew would know the answer to his question about how to obtain eternal life. And the answer is what he gave, you must observe the two great commandments of the Law.  But now, he wants to appear sly and clever before the crowd. He thinks he has the stuff: a swing-and-miss curveball in his hand. No one, not even Jesus of Nazareth, will be able to hit this. Who is my neighbor?

For the Jews, for the longest time, the fellow Jew was a brother—period. Together, the people of God formed a national and ethnic household with clear lines of separation from the rest of the nations. But in this context of the Second Temple period in which there were warring factions between different groups with varying degrees of liturgical and purity observances, the distinctions of neighborliness had grown more severe and exclusionary. The question, “Who is my neighbor?”, put to Jesus the question of which faction he belonged to: Who is the neighbor to the righteous? A Pharisee? A Sadducee? A lawyer? Or someone else?

To this challenge, Jesus tells a story.

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 

The man of the story is not explicitly identified as a Jew but the fact that he is described as a man who went down from Jerusalem means that almost certainly was a Jew. He went down the road and, as you know, roads could be dangerous during those times—and this one was. He was waylaid by thieves who not only took him for all that he had but they beat him up and left him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

The first passer-by is a priest. Many wealthy priest families lived in Jericho and would make the fifteen-mile-or-so journey between the two cities. This one sees the poor man left for dead on the side of the road, and he avoids him. We ought to understand his motivations correctly. The priest probably did not avoid him because the priest was an especially bad man. He probably avoided the poor stranger because, as the text says, he was “half dead.” If the man were dead, then coming into contact with him would make the priest unclean, and he had an obligation because of his priestly vocation to remain in a state of ritual purity if at all possible. So, he passes by.

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 

The Levite, an assistant to the priests, also had an obligation to remain ritually clean, even if it was less of obligation than was laid out for Priests in the Law of Moses. But he likewise avoids the man.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 

Now here comes the hero of our story. He looks with compassion on the man on the side of the road. He not only goes over to him, but he undertakes the burden of caring for him,  cleaning up his wounds and putting bandages on them, and he takes him and puts him on what is probably his donkey, a beast of burden, and leads him to an inn where he can be cared for.

Three things we need to notice. The first is the matter of ritual purity—a longstanding theme in the ministry of Jesus. He has consistently come into conflict with the scribes and Pharisees over cleanliness laws. And his critique is consistent: that ritual purity must not be valued over weightier matters of the law. That is the problem with the priest in this story, overvaluing purity. The second is that this man is a Samaritan, a group of people that have been enemies of the Judeans for many centuries, which means not only that he belongs to no recognizable faction of the Jewish people—such as the Pharisees or Sadducees—but also that he is worse than a Gentile. Wherever the boundaries of neighborliness should lie, surely he was outside of them.

And the third thing we need to notice is this: the Samaritan man is going to the greatest lengths of neighborliness that a person might go. As Jesus puts it, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” The answer is self-evident. The Samaritan rescues the man and then he secures him a place at an inn, guaranteeing whatever costs might be associated with his recuperation. This is a remarkable story of generosity, if nothing else. But it is more than than a story of generosity.

Notice the final words of Jesus. He tells the lawyer:

Go, and do thou likewise.

Let’s consider this command. In it, we discover an ethic—and it goes back to what we started with, which was the matter of spiritual knowledge. It is possible for us to be more learned in the ways of God than others. It is certainly the case that some people are more spiritual and holier than others. Remember that Jesus elsewhere in the Gospels says that the Pharisees are righteous. The Scriptures are clear about this principle. The stories of the saints confirm this. Some of us are further along in the spiritual life. To some people, God has revealed himself more fully. Some people have cooperated more completely with the graces of God. And, setting aside distinctions among Christians, we can go further and say that the people of God constitute a new, righteous people living the new life. This is the new humanity. We are different from the world.

But—and here is the key to the text—the fact that we form a nation, a brotherhood, a family that is set apart does not mean that we should be closed off. This was the mistake of the lawyer. As St. Cyril of Alexandria put it, his pride consisted in thinking that “he had no neighbour, as though there was no one to be compared to him.” And, as another Church Father explains Jesus’s teaching, “Think not that because thou art righteous thou hast no neighbour, for all who partake of the same nature are thy neighbours.”

Grace perfects nature. It elevates it. Grace makes human nature what it was meant to be. It does not destroy it. And therefore the grace of God, which is nothing other than the presence of God, brings us along on a path of ever greater knowledge of the things of God and as this process unfolds, our love and neighborliness does not become more and more exclusive to those within our group or our parish or our faith. Instead, grace will open us up to a degree of neighborliness that exceeds what we could have ever thought possible—a neighborliness that will one day match the love of Christ, which passes all knowledge.

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