Trinity 7 Year C
14th July 2013
Proper 10: Deuteronomy 30.9-14; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: graft in our hearts the love of your name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of your great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
+ May I speak in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN
An engineer, a physicist, and a lawyer were being interviewed for a position as chief executive officer of a large corporation. The engineer was interviewed first, and was asked a long list of questions, ending with "How much is two plus two?" The engineer excused himself, and made a series of measurements and calculations before returning to theboardroom and announcing, "Four." The physicist was next interviewed, and was asked the same questions. Before answering the last question, he excused himself, made for the library, and did a great deal of research. After a consultation with the greatest mathematical thinkers of the day, and after many calculations, he also announced "Four." The lawyer was interviewed last, and was asked the same questions. At the end of his interview, before answering the last question, he drew all the blinds in the room, looked outside the door to see if anyone was there, and asked "How much do you want it to be?"
A Lawyer stood up to test Jesus.‘Teacher’, he said, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’
Now it is obvious that the person talking to Jesus in the Gospel is a lawyer, because I understand the first thing you learn is not to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.
In this case, the lawyer answered perfectly, and was told to ‘Go and do likewise’, not like the rich young man, who asked the same question and was sent on his way with quite a shock.
The challenge to the Rich young man was to see his money in a different way, and the challenge to the lawyer is to see justice in a different way from the norms of the day.
Jesus met them both on their own ground and challenged them. This wasn’t some mystical hidden knowledge,
Deuteronomy “Surely this commandment I am commanding you today, is not too hard for you, nor too far away”.
That accessibility is extraordinarily comforting, and yet also challenging, because it removes any excuses, for him and for us, about not knowing how to express our love for God.
That brings us rather neatly to the second half of our Gospel reading, which in a few short verses seems to give us a story that jumps off the page, and is well known by all Christians.
This is probably because it speaks to us all wherever we are in the life, at all ages. It represents the times when we should have done something, and didn’t, even though in the eyes of the world we had good reason, in the eyes of God, there was no such reason. We have the ability to be the Good Samaritan, if only we learn to love properly.
I can imagine throughout the world people imagine who the characters in the story are, and they feel the anxiety, the joy the relief and the warm feeling of humanity redeemed from the strangest of places.
A few years ago I started doing an annual Sunday service for children who, in one way or another, were victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Each year a group of a dozen or so would come over for a month to the parish with their leaders and stay with parishioners. They visit everything worth seeing in South Wales, and attend church on the Sundays. It was sad that each year we would hear that several of the children or leaders would have died, and we remembered them in our prayers.
The day before my very first sermon for the children, I was told that the interpreter was a lovely person, but couldn’t really speak English very well. She was excellent at Russian and the language of the Belarusian children however!
I learned the Russian for ‘Hello’, ‘Bible’ and ‘Story’, dressed the children in shepherds robes from the nativity play and got one to pretend to assault the other. When the other three saw this they smiled, and as I told the story in English the children knew how to act…two ignoring the child lying in the aisle (with Belarusian hand signals that made the interpreter blush, but made the congregation laugh), finally, with no prompting the last child picked up the other one, moved him to the choir stalls and acted out feeding and bandaging the injured traveler.
Such is the power of this story that hides at the end of a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer, recorded for us by a gentile physician.
When the lawyer asks the question “well, who is my neighbour”, we can see that theLOVE OF GOD cannot be separated fromLOVE OF NEIGHBOUR. We cannot love GOD, if we do not love our NEIGHBOUR. And we will never grow up into the full stature of Christ unless we can properly grasp this.
The Colossians grasped this: their "faith in Christ Jesus and love . . . for all the saints" fell naturally into one sentence.
Commenting on the readings for today, a commentator in The Church Times notes;
Love takes shape in action. Once the Christians at Colossae "truly comprehended the grace of God", the gospel began to bear fruit among them.
Intelligent first century lawyers understood it, children from Chernobyl understood it, and the early Christian church in Colosae understood it, people all over the world know. May we all, in our time, bear fruit that will last through our love for God and others.
Shall we finish with a prayer.
Let us pray
May you be strong with the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, whilst joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the Saints in Light. AMEN
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