Only Luke gives us the story of the Good
Samaritan, and it is in answer to a lawyer’s worldly-wise question, Who is my
neighbour…? I expect the lawyer was a
little peeved because Jesus had tricked him into quoting the most basic part of
the Law, the commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbour. To recover face, as it were, the lawyer in
effect says, Ah yes, but it’s more complicated than you think. Who is my neighbour…? He implies that some are most definitely
not. Samaritans, for instance, are
heretics and beyond the pale.
Jesus’ story seems to be saying something truly
startling. If my neighbour has need of
me, then that takes priority over religious beliefs and duties, however
devout. The levite and the priest assumed
that whether they were neighbours to someone, with neighbourly obligations,
depended very much on whom the someone was.
And so it was the Samaritan, the foreigner and the heretic, who proved
to be the neighbour to the injured and bleeding man.
I think back to a parish in Scotland which was
rigidly divided into Catholic and Protestant.
I got spat on at the bus stop because I was wearing a green jacket, and
green was of course the colour of Ireland and the Catholics. These people were indeed living next door to
each other, but they were far from being neighbours. They regularly vandalized each other’s church
properties. And so we could go on to
mention all the other great divides of our times, Sunni and Shi’ite, Moslem and
Christian, and all the many possibilities in racial, sexual and gender
difference.
Looked at through contemplative eyes, this
story reminds us that God does not share our prejudices. Our contemplative disciplines of silence and
stillness steadily conform us more and more to the view of the world Jesus does
seem to have, in which the first obligation is to see past the fences, the memories,
the misunderstandings, and the wounds.
Interestingly, the lawyer’s reply to Jesus was
that, of the three candidates, it was the Samaritan who was the true neighbour,
because he showed mercy. Mercy is the
love you show and do whether it is deserved or not. Deserving has nothing to do with mercy. It is the test of our relationship with
God. The lawyer could see it. Yes, the world would fall to bits if we all
behaved like that. It’s falling to bits
anyway, as we stringently demand answers and who’s to blame, and require people
to be punished – and pour scorn on concepts such as mercy and forgiveness. Maybe even so, it is the contemplatives and
those in our world who show mercy who continue to hold things together.
No comments:
Post a Comment