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Pentecost 9
7/8/2022

Hebrews 11:1-11
Psalm 33
Luke 12:32-40

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In a sentence:
People are never (properly) means to ends, but are an end in themselves.

This week a feature story in our newspapers was the apology of the Adelaide Crows football club to Eddie Betts and other players who were made to participate in a team training camp in early 2018. The occasion for the apology was a new autobiography by Betts, in which he describes the physical and psychological duress applied to the players in what was something like a military boot camp intended to turn the team into more effective sportsfield warriors.

Many important but mundane things about the camp could be observed, including the inappropriateness of subjecting what were, in some cases, little more than boys to such treatment, and how personal identity and confidential information were weaponised against individuals, and elements of indigenous culture were misused. The account of the camp is quite ghastly – or at least this seems to be what we are to conclude from the way in which it has been reported. “What were they thinking?” is a reasonable question to put to the club and the camp organisers, and the club’s apology reflects recognition of the problem.

Yet, if the reports do horrify us, they ought not surprise us, for there is nothing new here. By this, I don’t mean that the camp was an instance of similar things that occasionally happen. Rather, the unsurprising thing is the motivation for the camp. The methods used at the camp reflected the pervasive mindset that ends can justify means. In this case, winning was worth the risk to the hearts and minds of those who attended the camp: human beings were to be employed for ends other than those people themselves. De-humanising through abusive language and other psychological and physical methods was intended to re-cast in the players’ minds that their single purpose was winning the competition.

We trivialise what is at stake here if we judge the methods of the camp by dismissing football as “only a game” – that it was too much given what could be gained. This misses the point because the implication is that, were it not “only a game”, the methods might be justifiable. Here we can broaden what is at play in how we connect means and ends by observing that the camp was run that way because such methods actually work – or, at least, we hold that they do in certain contexts. We are familiar – as individuals, as a society and even as a church – with a justifying of means by ends, even if the means are a great human cost.

The quasi-military nature of the Crows’ training camp is significant here. In war, the hearts and bodies of soldiers are employed as a means to an end – winning the war. As a society, we celebrate the sacrifice these men and women make; that sacrifice is surely great, whether the soldiers make it willingly or unwillingly. But in this, we overlook that the nation also expects this sacrifice – that it effectively sacrifices those hearts and bodies. The human cost of war is the means to the end of winning the war. Not many months back, then Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton, warned that Australia needed to shift to a war footing, given growing tensions around the Pacific. At the same time, a recent survey reported the general unwillingness of young Australians to commit themselves to fighting a war. This prompted Prime Minister Morrison to express his disappointment in our younger generations on that issue and to write an opinion piece explaining how the nation’s defence depended upon people willing to enlist. Around all this has been a wider conversation about the reintroduction of national service – although seemingly only for young people. In a war, a nation consumes its young – apparently a justifiable means to the end of national security.

We know, of course, that the cost is horrific even if we are willing to pay it, and so annual remembrance services are sombre affairs. But it is the assumption that the cost of war must be paid which is the heart of the matter – the assumption that the end is important enough to justify means, whether the battlefield is the Adelaide Oval or the South China Sea.

We do distinguish between a footy match and geopolitical conflicts. This is principally in terms of scale: the Grand Final seems pretty trivial in contrast to national security. But we are a little confused here, because both seek to preserve a present or create a future and so both are about ends and means. And in both cases, the human means are clearly distinguishable from the end created, be it the Premiership or unassailed borders. Those human hearts and bodies matter less than the desired end. Footy is “only a game”, and so the methods of the Crows’ training camp seem excessive. Yet we still hold to the sacrificial principle in other seemingly necessary contexts.

We want then, two contradictory truths to be true at the same time: on the one hand, that human hearts and bodies are not means to anyone’s ends and, on the other hand, that sometimes we have to pile up a few bodies to divert history’s juggernauts. This is a kind of hypocrisy – a “sincere” hypocrisy, perhaps, but no less hypocritical. We don’t want to see that sometimes we agree that our hopes for history need to be lubricated by blood.

Now, we’ve not yet come to our gospel text of interest today(!), from which I’ll pull just one line: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. If the treasure is “winning” at any cost, this is where our heart will be found, and not in the well-being of the other hearts which might be crushed in achieving that end. We might lament the great cost but we will nonetheless pay it because we treasure the end more than the human coin to be paid for it.

Yet, Christian faith declares that pain, suffering and death are never means to an end with God. God does not kill or oppress for some higher cause. God can use such suffering in a world which constantly generates it – this is part of the meaning of the church’s talk of incarnation. The cross of Jesus is not God’s plan or work but our own, even if God uses it to reveal grace and hope.

The problem with the Crows’ training camp was not merely that it happened but that it could have been thought to be worth trying in the first place, brutalising human hearts towards some inhuman end: “winning”. God does not treasure the end which can be achieved by what God can do with or to us. Human beings are not means to ends – even God’s own ends. God treasures not the end but us: we are the end and the means, and so we – treasured and nurtured – are paramount in all things.

In our reading from Hebrews this morning, we heard of those whose faith was a desire for “a better country”. This is a country in which hearts don’t so much treasure things but are the treasured thing, a country in which hearts, souls and bodies are ends and means – heart begetting heart. Heart is God’s end, and so also God’s means.

If we are to treasure what God treasures, we do not climb over each other to reach up to heaven. We have no vision of the future which requires that others don’t get there but are merely the means by which we get there. Rather, we reach down and pull the other up a little higher. For we do not climb to heaven but are drawn there. When a heaven like this comes, it captures us all because, drawing each other up, we are holding hands, so that catching one of us catches us all.

Let us then, with those faithful ones in Hebrews, desire such a country as this: a world in which we seek the peace we so earnestly desire by the means of peace – the treasuring of hearts – that it might be peace not just for us but for all.

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Pentecost 8
31/7/2022

Colossians 3:1-10
Psalm 49
Luke 12:13-21

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In a sentence:
Heaven is not a place of mere rest but a life in which work and rest are properly related to each other; heaven, then, is a possibility here and now.

Why is it that a great number of us, a great deal of the time, are “ready for a holiday” – ready to leave work, whatever “work” might be for us?

It probably has something to do with the way we work. There’s the distance we might have to travel to work – maybe even moving house, interstate, or even internationally. There are the hours we might have to work. There are the people we have to deal with – whether our colleagues or our employers. Perhaps there’s the sheer difficulty of what we do, or the state of boredom it lulls us into. To acknowledge all this is to say that work can hurt, and so we much prefer to be away from it – relaxing, eating, drinking and being merry, perhaps.

I suspect that most of us have a picture in our heads of heaven being not only a place where birds are twittering incessantly and all our friends and family (or at least the ones we like) are around us, but also being a place where we’re on constant holiday! – kind of a heavenly “idle rich” way of being! This seems to have been the plan of our barn-building friend in Jesus’ parable today – we’ll call him Barney. In the story, God calls Barney a fool. Perhaps it’s part of his foolishness that he thought he’d finally found heaven on earth: the ability to withdraw from the world of work. Heaven is no longer having to work.

Those who know their Old Testament will remember that at the end of the story of Adam, Eve and the apple, God lays curses on the labours of Adam and Eve. The woman’s labour – understood here as giving birth – will become a matter of great pain, and the man’s labour – tilling the soil – would become an ongoing battle with the earth to produce what they needed. The important point is not whether we buy into this particular explanation of why labour is so difficult, or whether we have different types of work today. The important thing is that the work itself is not the punishment. In the Paradise of Eden, Adam and Eve already had work to do – working the soil and raising families – and this was so even before the apple-munching episode. Work is part of the perfect human condition, if such a condition is what life in Eden is supposed to represent. God creates Adam and puts him in the Garden to till it and keep it.

Work, then, is a part of true created human being. If that seems depressing to you, it gets worse if we imagine “getting to” heaven to be like a return to the Paradise of Eden: there’ll be work to do in heaven, too! That is perhaps not the most comforting thing the tired and weary have heard from a pulpit! We usually talk about having to work as if it were a burden rather than because it is part of what God has given us. Our man Barney didn’t “have to” work anymore. He used his possessions to protect himself from the need to work, and perhaps that was part of his problem. Perhaps Barney’s foolishness was not merely that he set himself up for a secure future without thought for others around him, but that he thereby also cut himself off from what he was created for – work. And perhaps most of us are still thinking that we’re with him!

My point here is not that work should be easy, but only that it is, in itself, good. Barney and most of the rest of us get work out of perspective. We get work out of perspective in that we work hard for futures we might not actually have. The terrifying word in Barney’s ears is that “Tonight your very life will be required of you”; essentially, he hears that, for all of his work, he will not enter into any rest. Barney doesn’t get his day off, and it scarcely helps to say that now he “rests in peace”!

What good is retirement if you drop dead the day after you stop work, or the year after? More to the point, what good was your life if your work-life was only oriented towards the “rest-life” in retirement, but all you finally do is leave a barn-sized super-payout to your estate? Our Barney has not been short-changed in death but in life. We can’t rest properly if we don’t work properly. If we work for the wrong reasons – towards the wrong end – we will rest for the wrong reasons, in the wrong way. Rest becomes escape from work, and work becomes the possibility of rest. In this way, we divide ourselves into being just one part of the whole God has made us to be; we might recall here the division we saw between work and rest in Martha and Mary a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps Barney said to himself, “I’ve earned my retirement,” with a strong emphasis on the “earned”. The problem here is that God gives us rest – as symbolized by the Sabbath – for nothing, quite unearned. God actually commands, Observe the Sabbath: stop working once in a while, for Christ’s sake (literally, for Christ’s sake! God asks us to do everything for the sake of Christ!). If we go to work with the idea of earning our break or retirement, who do we imagine is the task-master we will off, and who will owe us our rest at holiday time, or when we turn 55 or 60 or 65? It is not the God who commands that we rest. Who, then, have we been serving, if we’ve been lucky enough to have work to do?

We share Barney’s desire to relax, eat, drink and be merry! But such things are properly a part of life and not a stage in life. If they were only a stage of life, and even the best stage, then the rest of life is just a warm up to what we might not actually get to.

“Tonight your very life will be required of you” are words we’ll all hear one day, so to speak. Perhaps the difference for a Christian ought to be that such words don’t catch us by surprise or disappoint us because we haven’t actually started living yet.

By God’s grace, may we not be caught by surprise but be found to have lived a life of work and rest, labour and love, and be found to have been satisfied with that.

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Pentecost 7
24/7/2022

Psalm 85
Luke 11:1-13

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In a sentence:
Fundamental to the Lord’s Prayer is not the word but that it is prayed in and through Jesus: Jesus himself is our prayer

Do we not know the Lord’s prayer very, very well?

And yet that very familiarity itself can be a problem. Having received so comprehensively this teaching on prayer, we might miss the force of the request the disciples put to Jesus: Lord, teach us to pray. For this is a surprising – even startling – request. The disciples are people of a worshipping community. Since they were children, they were taught to pray – how to stand or to sit, what to do with their hands, what words to say, when to say them.

And yet they ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray.” And so Jesus gives them what we now have as “the Lord’s Prayer”. Does this mean that we, now having these words, know how to pray? Are the words of the Lord’s Prayer the answer to any question we might have about prayer? Most likely, all of us have had the experience of saying the Lord’s Prayer and yet getting to the end “automatically”, without having done anything other than parroting, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…”. Just saying the right words isn’t what it means to know how to pray. If this were so, prayer would be nothing different from a magic spell – the right words said with the right intonation in the right place at the right time. (“Open Sesame” gets you into the robbers’ cave regardless of how “sincerely” or “meaningfully” you say it!). Whatever prayer is, it is not this!

And so it appears that, even though we have Jesus’ response to his disciples’ request, we are ourselves not yet able to pray; the words are not enough. Having been taught to put our hands together, bow our heads and close our eyes – and even say the Lord’s Prayer – we are not necessarily able to pray. Prayer – at least Christian prayer – is not set patterns, words, or actions, although it does involve all these things.

That being said, the temptation is now strong to rush in with the solution that it’s not the words that matter but our sincerity, our intention, our earnestness, our focus. This seems necessary because we now imagine that effectiveness in holy things is always about us and what we do. “If only I believe hard enough, pray hard enough, empty myself enough, or…” … whatever. But in response to the disciples’ request, Jesus does not say – “All that matters is that you really mean it, and then you’ll be OK”. What Jesus gives the disciples looks more like a formula or a rule for prayer, as if that were a sufficient response to the request.

It seems, then, that the Lord’s Prayer is both just what we need – for Jesus gave it to us in answer to the “how to pray” request – and still not enough, for God is not impressed by our simply knowing the right words and getting our religious practice and prayer right (cf. Psalm 51.16; Isaiah 1.11).

How can this be so? How can the Lord’s Prayer be both enough, and yet not enough?

We tell ourselves – or tell our children – that prayer is “simply talking to God”? How we talk, however, depends upon which God (god) we are talking to, and it’s here that the nature of the Lord’s Prayer as Christian prayer becomes clear. Approaching prayer as if what matters is getting the words or that attitude right is to operate with just another form of what we know as “justification by works”. St Paul contrasts justification by works of the law with justification by grace through faith. Not the work we do but the work which Jesus has done, which we might receive as our own through faith – this is what sets us right before God.

The gospel presents Jesus as the means by which we stand right before God. If we seek to pray “right” before God, it is again through Jesus that this is possible. But this is not because Jesus gives us the words to pray, so that we are now “independent” pray‑ers. We’ve already seen that the words don’t do it. To pray “right” before God through Jesus is to let Jesus himself be our prayer. Prayer may well be “talking to God”, but it also has to do with God’s talking to us. And the simplest and clearest thing God has said to us is “Jesus of Nazareth” – God’s “word” made flesh. To pray is to speak back to God what he has spoken to us; and when God speaks Jesus happens.

(We might note in passing that this has importance for what we do when we come together for worship. We gather not to generate emotion or sincerity or even right doctrine, but to hear and to speak to God of the one God has already sent – Jesus himself – and to be be made that one in the process: we receive what we are, to become what we receive: the Body of Christ).

The prayer of the church, then, is not the mere words of the Lord’s prayer but Jesus himself. It is in this sense that we can say that God knows what we need before we pray – not because God “knows everything”, but because what we need is what Jesus had and is. We need to know ourselves and to know God as Jesus did. We need to be supported and to have the freedom Jesus had. We need to be loved and to love as he did. Jesus – crucified and risen – is the prayer of the church; if we utter only “Jesus is the Christ”, then we have prayed as we should.

“When you pray”, Jesus said, “say, our Father in heaven…” – and just so we should pray. Yet in that prayer we ask, Father,

your kingdom – Jesus Christ – come;

your will – lives such as Jesus’ own – be done;

give us this day what Jesus trusted you for;

give us, and make of us, the forgiveness which is Jesus-the-Christ;

rescue us in the end from evil – as you raised the Christ from the death of the crucified.

In all things – not least the decisions we might make today about our future together – we say, Lord, “Let us see, become and testify to Jesus”. To pray is as difficult – and as easy – as it is to believe ourselves to be made whole in him. If we can rest in the grace of God which is Jesus Christ, if Jesus is Lord, then we have prayer “covered”, and the only “angle” on life we need.

And so we may trust that whoever asks will be given what they ask, whoever seeks will find, whoever knocks will have the door opened, for our Father in heaven is faithful, and gives the Spirit to all who ask, that God’s people may know themselves in and as the Body of Christ. When this happens, the work of prayer, and life, has been done.

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Pentecost 6
17/7/2022

Colossians 1:15-23
Psalm 15
Luke 10:38-42

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In a sentence:
The one thing we need to “do” is trust that, in Christ, we are already “right before God”, and then to live as in the world as if this were the case.

The ancient versions of our biblical text sometimes show great variation at particular points in the text. One reason for this is that what was probably the original text was just too hard for the old copyists to believe that it was correct. The text offended the copyists, so they changed it to make it more palatable or sensible. When it looks like this might have happened, modern biblical critics ask, What is the most challenging version of these variations – the hardest to swallow. This reflects the assumption that a copyist was more likely to change a passage to make it easier than to make it harder.

Our gospel reading today is one of these disputed texts. The difficult thing is the thoroughgoing unreasonableness of Jesus’ response to Martha’s complaint. Jesus says that sister Mary has hit upon the “one thing needful”, and so seems to say that her sitting at Jesus’ feet in devoted listening to him is more important than Martha’s concern to prepare their meal. The copyists knew that we have to eat and that it’s righteous to be a good host to guests, so they wondered in what sense attending to Jesus’ teaching could be “the better part” over Martha’s attention to the necessities of nature and society. Surely, as the variant texts propose, there are a “few” things that matter and not only one.

On hearing the story, it is almost impossible not to think in either-or fashion, and we almost always do. It seems we have to choose between work and prayer. This corresponds to other dualisms in our heads – doing versus hearing, nature versus spirit, science versus faith, worship versus mission. Some modern readings wonder what Luke (and Jesus) are doing with gender roles, adding a male versus female dualism to the mix.

Faced with this perception of what is at stake, there are a couple of options before us – probably another dualism itself! We can choose between the options, or we can seek a kind of compromise. The choice is generally simply too hard: how can we properly be “only” spiritual or only worldly, only Martha or only Mary? We can’t, but still Jesus’ words jar harshly against one of these apparent options: she has chosen the better part. A compromise is a balancing act and seems to work: we know ourselves to be both matter and spirit, knowing and believing. And so we seek a balance: now a bit of body, now a bit of spirit; now I believe and trust, now I reason and know. And yet this doesn’t work, either. The problem with a balanced approach to holding opposites together is that your balance looks imbalanced to me, and my balance is an imbalance to you. This is Martha’s accusation about Mary: Lord, confirm that I have got the balance right by telling Mary that she has got it wrong.

The problem with Martha’s call for balance is that there is no reliably defendable unpacking of all our either-or moral polarities. Polarities are either-or by definition: black cannot be balanced with white if we define black simply as not-white. If worship is not-service, faith is not-reason and private is not-public, then there is no true reconciliation possible in these life options but only “balance”. We can’t agree on the balance, so we shift the problem of how to live together before God a little to the polarised left or right until our anxieties move and we shift the other way again.

Who we are and what we do – and the rightness of our identity and choices – is defined solely in terms only of the world itself. Prayer is defined not in relation to God but over against work; mission is defined not in relation to God but in relation to worship – our worship work, our mission work. We have faith here but reason there; we trust here but know there. And then we debate which is the more important, or which applies where, how the money should be spent, whose efforts better reflect the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God being somewhere outside of what we do and are.

None of this can be resolved on its own terms and so, with the ancient copyists, we have to alter the text, knowing that we’re mucking around with it and knowing also that it doesn’t make the problem go away. It just makes Jesus seem more reasonable – and so more like us as we seek to be reasonable and balanced. There is, however, nothing very balanced about Jesus, from the perspective of polarised lives like ours.

What could save us from this deathly existence? What could save us from the consignment to mere choice between options on our part, and then from the need to justify to ourselves, to each other and to God our choice for more of this and less of that?

What could save us here? The answer is scandalous. What will save us is the recognition it does not matter what we do.

This can’t be true, of course. And yet, from a Christian sense of God and the human being, it is. It does not matter whether you are working in the kitchen or sitting at Jesus’ feet. It matters that you do and be something; this is called being alive. And what you do will properly span the spectrum between the poles of our dualisms; it will be private or public, faith or reason, and so on. But no choice here is, in itself, more godly than the rest. Christain faith holds that our lives are already hidden with Christ in God, and do not become so through the things we are or do. This faith holds that it is Christ-in-us who does the praying and the working – such that holiness precedes what we do and is not applied afterwards. To say that there is no condemnation in Christ is to say that doing and being “right” has already been covered.

Jesus’ comment to Martha, then, is not that she too should be sitting at his feet, but that she should not allow herself to be distracted “by many things” from her particular responsibility at that time. Martha’s problem is not that she is in the kitchen – where for the moment she must be – but that she wants to be sitting at Jesus’ feet. Distraction is the inability to be where we are. Now is the time for rest, but we are distracted by the things we think need doing, and so neither rest nor work properly. Now is the time for faith, but we want to analyse, understand and calculate, so we finally neither trust nor know. Now is the time for worship, but we cannot get the world’s needs out of our heads; now is the time for “mission” and service, but we’re not sure we’re doing the right thing. Distraction has to do with anxiety – am I OK? Is this right, or that? Am I properly here, or there? Martha is distracted by many things – not least that Mary is not in the kitchen and that she, Martha, is not with Jesus.

And distraction has to do with judgement – first judgement of ourselves and then often of others and God. There seems to be another version of this story in John’s gospel (John 12.1-8) – familiar to many of us but not often connected to today’s version. In John, we are again at Martha and Mary’s house and hear again that “Martha served”. Mary is not “merely” sitting and listening to Jesus but takes a jar of perfume worth a year’s wages and pours it out as an anointing on his feet. In response, it is not Martha who complains to Jesus but Judas: Could this valuable thing not have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor? Is not our serving mission more important than worship? Is this not wholly (unholy) out of balance? Jesus’ response is no less appalling than in today’s (Luke’s) version: “Leave her alone… You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me”; there will always be mouths to feed but not always me to hear. Mary has done the right.

The strange word of Jesus is that it is OK for Mary to be with him, for now, without distraction. And that it is OK for Martha, for now, to be in the kitchen.

It is OK – or, in Christian-speak, it is righteous – to be where we are and to rest in that place, for now. It is OK not to be all things to all people, and even more OK not to be all things to God. It is OK not to know, or not to have done. It is OK to be a discrete, finite, mortal creature, the purpose of whose being is not to do and be all things but to do and to be according to the time and space given to us. Sometimes this will mean doing the dishes – and perhaps more often than we might think. Sometimes it will mean closing the door and our eyes and spending time with God – and perhaps more often than we might think.

The “one thing needful” – and the most difficult of all things – is to rest in the freedom and peace that God has already accepted us as we are, and will accept us as we become a different and new thing tomorrow. This is God in and for the world.

And this is what makes possible that we might be in and for God, and in and for ourselves: sometimes looking like we are working and sometimes looking like we are praying but, in all things, always thriving and alive in God.

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Pentecost 5
10/7/2022

Leviticus 19:1-4, 9-18
Psalm 82
Luke 10:25-37

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In a sentence:
God’s love is strange to us but just the love we need.

The best stories invite us into them, causing us to identify with some of the characters and enabling us to see ourselves as part of what is happening. In a good thriller, it is “me” who is about to walk into the room in which awaits the psychopathic killer with his ridiculously long, serrated-edged knife. In a good love story, it is “me” who gets the girl or the guy (depending on your preference!). The best stories enable us to be the hero, the victim, the lover, or whatever; what happens to the players in the story is what happens to us. A good story is our story.

Our gospel reading this morning presents us with stories on two different levels. First, there is the story of an encounter between Jesus and one of the religious experts of his day – a religious lawyer.  Second, as part of that first story, there is another story about a man mugged on a dangerous road. The fact that we still tell these two stories nearly 2000 years after they were first told suggests that these are good stories. And so we might wonder, Where are we in the two inter-mingled stories of our gospel reading?

Consider the first-level story of the encounter between the religious lawyer and Jesus. Most of us are humble enough not to imagine that we are Jesus in the story. These are told about Jesus because the church has long thought that he is the supreme Good Guy. Even people who don’t confess Christian faith would hesitate to imagine themselves as Jesus here. However, this leaves us with a problem. If Jesus is the good guy, and the lawyer is challenging Jesus, then the lawyer is kind of the bad guy! That is hardly acceptable either. We don’t want to be identified with Jesus’ opponents, especially if we’ve heard these stories so often that we know we should be on Jesus’ side. At worst, we can only admit to being a little like the religious lawyer. This leaves an open question about who we are at this story level. We are not Jesus but also don’t want to be the religious lawyer who gets it wrong.

Let’s look then at the second level of the story – the tale of the man mugged and left beside the road. Here we might identify with the robbers, the religious leaders who ignore the man in need, the Samaritan who helped him, the man himself robbed and beaten, the innkeeper, and perhaps even the Samaritan’s donkey!

It’s still not easy to place ourselves here but what we think this story is told for will indicate to us who we really believe ourselves to be in the story. So, what is the story told for? Typically, we read this as a moral tale. The moral, it would seem, is that “we should love one another”, or “they should love one another”, if we think someone else needs to hear the story more than we do. The final remark of Jesus is, “Go, and do as he did”. This is an important lesson. Do not do as the robbers, the priest or the Levite did; do as the Samaritan did. Who, then, does this moral reading suggest we are in the story? Probably not the Samaritan and probably not the robbers. Perhaps we are a little like those religious leaders who should have helped but did not. Still, as with the first level of the story, it’s a bit of an open question. We may believe we are only a little like those Jesus criticises here but we can’t fully identify with them. It’s too difficult to criticise ourselves in that way.

Let’s consider now one further story level: the whole gospel story of Jesus. This seems to cast us and Jesus in very clear roles. The gospel encapsulates both the story-levels of Jesus and the lawyer, and the Samaritan and the beaten man. It does this by casting God in the role of the Samaritan, and us in the role of the man robbed and beaten and left by the road to die. This is a typically “religious” reading of the parable. The moral lesson about loving those around us becomes a religious lesson about God’s love for us. For some of us this extension beyond the moral lesson is a comforting one. But, of course, if you don’t think you need comfort, it’s not so impressive. And this brings us to “the twist”.

If one element of a good story is that it invites us to find ourselves in its characters, another element is the unexpected twist – the surprising turn which catches us off guard, and also catches our breath, causing us to stop and to reconsider what we always thought must be the case. The twist here is that the Samaritan is a Samaritan. This itself has a meaning – he doesn’t just happen to come from Samaria. It is of critical importance that he is what the Jews of the time considered a heretic from the North, and someone those same Jews refused to have dealings with.

This leads to an unexpected discovery about God’s approach to us. If we are the Jewish victim lying on the road, and if God-in-Jesus is the Samaritan, then Jesus comes to us as a stranger we would actually reject, perhaps even attack, if we were not too weak to get ourselves up out of the gutter.  To put it more strongly, Jesus comes to us as one we might even think of as our enemy. And yet he is, in fact, the only source of help for us.

This has wide-reaching – and troubling – consequences for what we might expect from the world. In the stories of our lives, we develop naturally a sense that we know what is wrong, a sense that we know what we need, and a sense of who might be able to deliver it. Certainly, we also have an idea of who would not be able to deliver it. But if the story of the Good Samaritan can be read as the story of God coming to aid us in the form of the scorned Samaritan, then our thoughts about what we might expect in our lives are thrown into disarray. If we are lying on the roadside, then those individuals or things we might have expected to have assisted us are shown to be worthless – our own strength or good sense to avoid the attack in the first place, and then the priest and the Levite as those we might have relied upon for help. Instead, in the hour of need, only this stranger, this foreign heretic, comes to assist. God’s love is a strange love – precisely what we need, but not what we would have expected. It lifts and restores and yet comes from the most unexpected of sources. (As an aside: perhaps this matters for our own future accommodations thinking).

Our gospel reading today hinges on the lawyer’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” It is easy to reject that question today, if we imagine ourselves to have outgrown such religious worries. It is easy to misunderstand the question, particularly for the religious who’ve developed a certain way of understanding what “eternal life” is. And in both cases it is easy to miss the answer Jesus gives to the question, because we think we know what “love” is when we hear Jesus tell us to love our neighbour. Only when we know ourselves as loved – when we have been the poor soul beaten and left by the side of the road and been surprised to discover love from the most unexpected of sources – only then will we begin to know what it is to be called to love others… (Again, perhaps this has relevance for what we could expect in our next steps as a congregation).

The gospel is story of “love unknown.” It’s unknown because it runs deeper than any other love we have known, and so is strange to us. But though a strange love, it is love. It is the love of God for a world which considers him strange, foreign, perhaps even an enemy. And yet it is love which will not be denied. If we seek love – love for ourselves and the capacity to love others – our starting place is by the side of the road, receiving the love of the God who offers it when all other love fails.

This is love: that God loved us, in order that we might know how to love.

May the God who once loved us in his Good Samaritan, Jesus the Christ, surprise us again with his amazing love, and make of us surprising lovers.