Introduction
I would guess that both of todays readings are familiar to you all this morning. In fact, the reading from Luke, the parable of the good Samaritan is listed as the most well known and well used of all the biblical stories. As such we tend to hold these stories in some special affection. But along with the comforting familiarity of these readings there also comes some danger. We can very easily be in danger of being over familiar with some of our best loved stoies. This over familiarity can lead to us having a blinkered view of the passages, our understanding is fixed with our memories at the time of hearing – beit Sunday school, a wedding or whatever. We can also be in the position where we hear the same thing about the same reading again and again over the years and we can eventually end up not listening or particularly thinking about things – that’s a fairly natural human response to things we are over familiar with – we start to switch off. I hope that looking at these familiar readings this morning can teach us a little something new, or at least remind us of things we may have forgotten.
Traditional reading of Good Samaritan
I intend to concentrate this morning on the story of the good Samaritan, with a dash of our imprisoned friends to help us navigate through the message.
I would like to start by looking at the probably very familiar traditional interpretation of Lukes passage. The story is cantered around a conversation between Jesus and a learned man. The learned man seems to be, as happened frequently, testing Jesus’s knowledge. But he was having none of it and turned the question back on the learned man, who successfully quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 back as the way to eternal life.
“Love the Lord your God, with all your Heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.” And “Love your neighbour as yourself”
But pushing further the learned man asks Jesus to clarify who exactly is his neighbour. This question leads to Jesus telling the parable of the good Samaritan. The off the page interoperation of this story leads to a pretty ethical or moral message being gleamed. We have a man of pure heritage, a Jew who has been attacked and left for dead in the street. We then get a stream of people coming past, only one of which stops to help. Firstly the Priest, a man of high position, and greatly honoured, with many temple responsibilities, in fact Jewish priests are said to be direct descendants of the Old testaments Ahron, Moses brother. Yet he simply crosses over and walks on by. Secondly the Levite, again someone with much responsibility, the keepers of the tabernacle, the dwelling palce of God. Their temple duties were many and regarded as important. Yet he too walks on by. So here we have two men of God who have taken their rules and regulations further than God intended. Helping a man who could well be dead would have hindered their duties and certainly for a time, rendered them unclean.
But all was not lost, next along the road was a Samaritan. Now Jews and Samaritans didn’t exactly see eye to eye. The Jews were a pure race, who only married other Jews. But the Samaritans were considered impure as they were the results, over the generations; of Jews inter marrying with Gentiles. Some of this happened in the outer regions of the Jewish lands, and in fact the Assyrians used to send out raiding parties to steal Jewish women purely to interbreed and ruin their heritage and family lines, an early form of ethnic cleansing. So to have a Jew and a Samaritan mix would be highly unusual, but to have one help another was unheard of! Yet that is what happened, the Samaritan tended the man and then made provision for his recovery. So the moral message we are to gleam from this reading is that everyone is our neighbour, even those we don’t particularly get on with. And we are duty bound, if we are to honour Gods law, to treat all our neighbours well.
An interesting quote I read whilst researching this reading goes like this:
To the law expert the wounded man was an object to discuss, to the robbers he was an object to exploit; the priest a problem to avoid and the Levite an object of curiosity. Only the Samaritan saw him as a person to be loved.
Allegorical reading
So a clear moral message. But there is another way to read this story, one favoured by one of the Church fathers, St Augustine, and this is by looking at it Allegorically, that is to replace the characters in the story with others to get a different message.
In the case of this particular story we are to replace the Jew with ourselves, the passers by as those in our communities and sometimes churches, and the Samaritan is Jesus. When we look at the story in this guise we learn a much more personal lesson of Grace and the loving hand of God. We get the picture that no matter how far we fall, Jesus alone can help us back up on our feet and make us right again.
When I started to look at the story in this fashion, it opened up in a way that it never had before. I started to think about what it meant in the context of the story to take that hand, to examine what was important. To the passers by what was important to them was their service to God. Yet they had somewhat missed the point. Whilst their service was undoubtedly good intentioned, they had allowed it to get in the way of what was important. To the extent they left a fellow Jew for dead. So if service wasn’t the most important thing, what was. I puzzled with this a bit until it finally struck me. The most important thing is simply being with God. We tend to put much emphasis on service these days, often to the extent of making it compulsory in our Churches. Maybe not announced in the notices, but there is certainly an undercurrent of guilt that if we are not serving the Church of the community etc in some way we are somehow not being proper Christians. Now, don’t get me wrong I am in no way down playing the importance of service, I am merely saying that firstly we are called simply to be with God, service is a result of us being with God and listening to what he may or may not be calling us to.
I recall the story of Brother Lawrence, a 17th century French monk who shunned the typical Monks lifestyle of service, silence or prayer to work in the kitchens. His reasoning was that all he did was in honour to God, so what did it matter that we wasn’t out offering healings and prayer, if he went about his Kitchen duties with love and to the best of his abilities he was honouring Gods call on him as much as those that vowed silence to enable a prayerful and contemplative life. What mattered to him was being with God and allowing his normal everyday life to express his Worship. He felt no need to enter into any other service. His story is still available today in a book called, “The practice of the presence of God”, and that is not because it is a particularly a gripping read, but because it shows God in the ordinary.
This need to serve is natural yet it needs to come from being with God first, and being happy with who we are and what we do already. The Church is great at talking about gifts and blessings and how we go about finding them, but it is not so good at saying its ok to just be, God is in the ordinary as much as he is in the extreme.
Being leads to different view of circumstances
The reading from Acts today talks of Paul and Silas’s imprisonment, and when I couple this with the parable from Luke I get another very simple, yet life changing message. Being with God, changes how we see our circumstances. Being with God, changes how we see our circumstances.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, looking at it as we have this morning, and thinking of ourselves as the one in need of help, it is easy to see how we can all be at times victims of our circumstance. One of my biggest faults is a lack of self belief, and for a long time that has held me back. It wasn’t a case of me just not recognising that trait, I was fully aware of it and allowed it to rule me. I would often come against a situation and say to myself
“If only I had a little more confidence, I could do this and do it well - maybe one day”
For all of us there are things or times in our lives when we have wished our circumstances to be different. If only I had a little more money I could do such and such. If only we had a bigger house things would be so much better. If I wasn’t so busy at the moment I could help out more. It is very easy to fall into the circumstance trap where our lives don’t move on as we contemplate what could be.
Looking at the Acts reading, it would have been easy for Paul and Silas to be feeling a little sorry for themselves – how could they be of service to God when they were stuck in prison and being treated so badly. But they don’t. As I have learnt to accept who I am and allow myself to just be with God, I have also allowed the way I view my circumstances to change. And I am sure the same was true for Paul and Silas. Rather than contemplate what could be, they were content to just be with God. So much so that when they could have escaped they didn’t, and when they got out they wanted to return. Their circumstance went from a possible frustration at being confined and unable to do Gods work, to one of contentment and peace. And in fact God worked through that to reach the guard. We go from lack of opportunity to many opportunities, and a simple differing of view is all it took.
I went through a particularly difficult time a couple of years ago which saw me having to stop youth work for a while. For a while this felt like a great injustice and I was consumed with self pity at my circumstances, but as I submitted more and more of it to God I began to see the benefits. I got a bit of a rest, and one that was well needed. I was able to make plans and spend more time with my family. As a result of that incident, my family life is now better, and the youth work I have returned to has gone from strength to strength.
Kids are the best at this aren’t they? I have five at home, and I am always amazed at how they often make the best out of their situation. If for some reason my innocent little angles do something wrong and have to be sent to their room, you can guarantee that when I go to check, expecting them to be feeling sorry for them selves, they are happily drawing or playing.
The same can be true of our Churches cant it? I certainly know at Chesterton many meetings are consumed by quotes like “If only we had another room” or “If the roof didn’t leak we could do…”. It is easy to be consumed by our circumstances and allow it to stop us effectively ministering. Plans are put in hold until such and such, money is saved because it looks like the roof may need such and such soon.”. Planning is a necessary function. But who we are in God and the way we show that to others shouldn’t be dependent upon a set of circumstances, we may need to look at a stumbling block and see the opportunity that undoubtedly lives there.

All I have talked about this morning can be summed up in three phrases.
1) We are called to be a neighbour to all, and treat them well.
2) We are broken and needy and need to constantly let God help us up again, being with God is more important that what we do for God
3) When we are with God we view our circumstances differently
All of these things though can be summed up in on single word. Grace. We need to show Grace to others, we need to accepts Gods Grace and bask in it, and we need to have the Grace to let go of those things which hold us back.
Our God is a great Big God. As we sung earlier, His love is very wonderful. So high we cant get over it, so low we cant get under it, so wide we cant get around it. Lets take the example of the Samaritan, or Jesus or Paul and Silas and learn how just being with God can lead to great things. But more importantly, being with God leads to Grace things.

Amen