The wonderful thing about a good story is the almost infinite variety of ways in which it can be interpreted. This is why Jesus, like all great teachers, speaks in parables. Parables are mirrors into which we are invited to gaze until we begin to see a reflection of ourselves. What we see in them will vary from person to person and there is no single interpretation which is the right one over and above all others. There are one or two cases in the Gospel where Jesus apparently explains a parable, but scholars tell us that these explanations were added later by the early church. Jesus himself never explained his parables. Parables are like jokes in this respect. If you need to explain them they are not worth telling. A good parable, like a good joke, speaks for itself.
So what could the parable of the Good Samaritan, be saying to us today? Well, given that we are slap bang in the middle of July and half-way the Kilmarnock Fair, I would like to offer you one particular interpretation of the Good Samaritan. For years now, it has been my habit to offer you around this time a reflection on the place of rest in the christian life and, on the basis of this parable, I would like to do the same now. Its meaning, to paraphrase the first reading, is not beyond our reach. It’s not beyond the heavens or beyond the sea so that someone has to go and bring it back. It’s very near to us. So near, in fact, that each one of us here is every person in that story. It’s not about someone else. You are the man who who fell into the hands of brigands. You are the brigands who beat him up and left him for dead. You are the priest and the Levite who walked by on the other side and, you have the potential, at least, to be the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story. But how can we be all of these people at the same time? Well, let’s look at it again.
Few of us, I would suggest, can avoid forever being mugged by modern living. Life has always had the habit of jumping up and punching us in the face when we least expect it. Sickness and ill-health comes to us all eventually and there is ultimately no way of avoiding them. But the modern world has developed some very sophisticated forms of sickness. The speed of technological change in our lifetime has been truly astonishing, the problem being that we ourselves, locked into the much slower process called evolution, have not been able to keep pace with it. The result is that we are living at a speed we were never designed for and the result is that modern version of the plague we call stress. Its everywhere and no-one is safe from it. It comes in a thousand shapes and forms and, if we are to believe what the medical people tell us, can be a cause of most of the other diseases we suffer from and sooner or later die from. Even the apparently young, fit and healthy can be struck down by it and the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would be littered today with its victims, often left for dead by an economic system which swallows people whole, chews them up and spits them out again without a thought for the ell being of the individual involved. Basically, we are all trying to do do too many things too quickly all at the same time and, not surprisingly, something has to give. And eventually, no matter who we are, it does.
But if we are to change this situation we must recognize that, as well as being the man who was mugged, we are also the brigands who did the mugging. In other words, there is no point in blaming someone else for putting us under all this stress. We do it ourselves. When I was ill two years ago, the most important advice I got was, ‘listen to your body.’ Our bodies are very wise and are constantly telling us what their needs are. So often, however, we just don’t pay any attention. Time and time again we go through red lights, ignoring the body’s requests for rest, for time off, for sleep, for medical attention and so on. Why we do this is very complicated. Partly its that most fundamental of all sins reflected in the book of Genesis; the desire to be like God, a deep rooted tendency in us which deludes us into thinking we can do whatever we want regardless of the limitations which go with being human. And so, in all kinds of ways, we abuse and harm our bodies, demanding of them more than they are able to deliver, until one day we find ourselves lying on that road from Jerusalem to Jericho, bruised and battered in all kinds of ways by our own foolishness. Which brings us to the Good Samaritan.
The Good Samaritan, in this sense, is our capacity to care for ourselves or love ourselves, something which, for a whole series of reasons, most of us are not very good at. And yet, if it is so important today to care for and look after the planet we live on, how much more important must it be to care for our our own bodies, created as we are in the image and likeness of God. And so, as men and women of faith, we are called to resist all those modern pressures which lead to stress. Our consumer-driven society tells us that happiness lies in acquiring more material things. This drive for more and more things fuels an economic system which sucks the very life blood out of human beings today to the detriment of not just our health, but family life and relationships, the things that really matter, and only the Good Samaritan in ourselves, can ultimately save us from this, something that became very real for me yesterday.
As I was writing this homily, the phone rang. It was someone inviting me for lunch. My first reaction was that I couldn’t possibly go. I had all kinds of holy things to do: this homily to prepare, the bulletin and bidding prayers to do and everything to get ready for Mass. I could’t possibly go for lunch. But after putting the phone down I saw very clearly that it was the priest and the Levite in me that had said no to the invitation. And so I let the Good Samaritan decide instead and went. And it was really good.
So my final thought today is: Thank God for innkeepers. I hope to see a lot of them over the next few weeks.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer this week by holding up before God all those people in our society today who are the victims of the stress caused by the rapid pace of modern living. Over and over again we hear people complain of exhaustion. Many simply cannot cope. And so we ask God for the wisdom we need to discern the movement of his Spirit in the midst of all this so that, together, we can learn to live more healthy and balanced lives……………………………Lord hear us
We pray in a particular way for all those people who suffer from mental health problems in our society today. Often they are misunderstood and treated as modern-day lepers, forced to live on the margins of society and shunned by those of us who have no appreciation of the nature and seriousness of their illness. And so we pray for a deeper understanding of what is happening to them and a profound awareness that such illness could strike any of us at any time…………………………....Lord hear us
While we are young and healthy we tend to think that illness is something that happens to others and will never happen to ourselves. When it finally comes and we discover that we are as human as everybody else it can be difficult to cope with. And so we pray for all around us whose health is breaking down or is causing worry and concern, that they will have the inner strength they need to deal with this and all that the passing of the years inevitably brings………………………………...Lord hear us
The parable of the Good Samaritan takes us to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It is about loving our neighbour as ourselves. These two things go together because, unless we learn to love ourselves, we will not know how to love others. A person who has no sense of his or her own worth will have no sense of the worth of others. And so we pray for a deep sense of what it means to be created in God’s image and likenss, both for ourselves and for every person we meet in the course of our lives…...Lord hear us
The priest and the Levite in the story passed by on the other side, not because they were bad people, but because they were on their way to the temple and would have been made ritually unclean by touching the body of a dead man. Jesus is teaching us here that reaching out to those in need is far more important than religious actions, a lesson many pious church-going people down through the ages have failed to grasp. And so we ask God to help us grasp it now……….……………………..Lord hear us
Many Good Samaritans will have come into our lives over the years. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep sense of gratitude for them and for the part, small or great, which they have played in our lives. And we pray, too, for the grace to recognize the people around us now for whom we ourselves are called to be Good Samaritans, reaching out to them in their need…………………………...Lord hear us
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