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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor on Sunday 11 July 2010
"WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?"
One of the great pleasures of living and worshipping and working in this place is that there is a constant stream of people who come here for different lengths of time to share it with us. You can get a sense of the range of visitors by looking at the stand over in the south west corner in which we keep the leaflets for them, and seeing just how many different languages there are. For many years cathedrals have talked about helping visitors to become pilgrims: in other words, someone might come mainly to see the architecture or to experience the history or to eat a cream tea, but we hope that when they leave they will also have a deeper sense of the nature, beauty, and above all the love of God.
Sometimes people save us the trouble of making them pilgrims by arriving as pilgrims. This week it has been our privilege to be host to a group of young people from a church in Harleysville, Pennsylvania. For this brief period they have been very much part of our community – in fact, I’ve a nasty feeling that they’ve attended more services here than I have. Like all pilgrims, their purpose is to grow by putting themselves somewhere new with the eyes of faith.
It is really important that we have so many people who pass through this place, whether they are strangers or pilgrims, for cathedrals, like all communities of faith, are prone to introversion. Our visitors constantly remind us that this cathedral does not exist in a little world of itself, but is a tiny part of the great purposes of God in his world, a world bound together by journeys.
Our gospel reading concerns a journey. But the story which Jesus told about the robbery victim and his Samaritan rescuer comes bracketed by a brief dialogue, and that conversation is really rather odd. A religious expert tries to put Jesus to the test, but Jesus gets him to answer his own question; he then asks ‘Who is my neighbour?’ This is frankly a rather pointless question, because if the person asking it doesn’t know who his neighbour is, there’s absolutely no reason why a comparative stranger should. For example, who are your neighbours now? – the people sitting immediately around you. I know that my neighbours are the people who live in nos. 22, 23, 25, 47, 48, and the residents of the College of Matrons: even if I’d never met the residents of these places, I could tell that they were my neighbours by walking round our house or by looking at a map. ‘Neighbour’ is one of those words with a fairly simple definition.
But in keeping with the oddness of this dialogue, and in response to the question ‘who is my neighbour?’, Jesus tells a story, and then asks the man to answer his own question. And in doing so, he completely changes the meaning of this rather basic word. Because instead of this fixed geographical sense, it is now all to do with movement and practical help. The Samaritan becomes a neighbour because in that chance encounter he goes over to and does something about the need he sees.
There’s more to it than this, of course. The Samaritan was a member of a heretical religious group, one of those annoying excrescences surrounding the body of pure religion. The priest and the Levite were so keen to preserve their religious purity that they didn’t dare touch what might be a dead body, to touch which would defile them. The heretic, not being pure, is not so hampered, and responds generously to the need he sees. So Jesus is pointing out what the Jewish prophets had long pointed out when they said things like ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’: searching for religious purity is a dead end if it neglects human need and justice.
This is quite genuinely an upsetting story, because not only is it saying that your neighbour can be anyone whom you happen to pass, but it’s also saying that no one is ‘in’ or ‘out’; and also that for our examples, we are to be taught not by the religious experts but by the people we most despise. In a similarly upsetting way, Jesus tells us we have to be taught by little children. Isn’t that food for thought?: wouldn’t you learn more by going over to our Sunday Clubs than by sitting there listening to me?
The General Synod of our Church is meeting at the moment; indeed my colleague Mark Bonney is there as a member. Now I like Mark, and he has been a friend for 33 years, but I really do find it hard to understand why anyone in their right mind would want to go to Synods. For decades I have bored anyone who listened by arguing that the kingdom of God would advance more if the meetings were scrapped and delegates instead went and had a cup of tea with their neighbours. When the Church talks to and about itself it often does more harm than good. For all the good people who are at the Synod, for all the important matters they are discussing, they are our Church’s rule-making body, they make the definitions, they decide, if you like, who is ‘in’ or ‘out’. And definitions are what the lawyer in conversation with Jesus was looking for; they were what Saul was looking for until he met Jesus and was so changed that he became Paul, who realised that rules bring death but the freedom of the Spirit brings life. We will never make the body of Christ perfect by getting the rules right. We will never be pure until we get our hands dirty.
Ours is the task of loving God and loving our neighbour. A simple task, as simple as having a cup of tea: but an endlessly challenging one, because it calls us out of our own enclosed surroundings and onto the dusty road, and who knows what we may encounter as our neighbour there? That journey to make new neighbours is our daily pilgrimage.
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Sometimes people save us the trouble of making them pilgrims by arriving as pilgrims. This week it has been our privilege to be host to a group of young people from a church in Harleysville, Pennsylvania. For this brief period they have been very much part of our community – in fact, I’ve a nasty feeling that they’ve attended more services here than I have. Like all pilgrims, their purpose is to grow by putting themselves somewhere new with the eyes of faith.
It is really important that we have so many people who pass through this place, whether they are strangers or pilgrims, for cathedrals, like all communities of faith, are prone to introversion. Our visitors constantly remind us that this cathedral does not exist in a little world of itself, but is a tiny part of the great purposes of God in his world, a world bound together by journeys.
Our gospel reading concerns a journey. But the story which Jesus told about the robbery victim and his Samaritan rescuer comes bracketed by a brief dialogue, and that conversation is really rather odd. A religious expert tries to put Jesus to the test, but Jesus gets him to answer his own question; he then asks ‘Who is my neighbour?’ This is frankly a rather pointless question, because if the person asking it doesn’t know who his neighbour is, there’s absolutely no reason why a comparative stranger should. For example, who are your neighbours now? – the people sitting immediately around you. I know that my neighbours are the people who live in nos. 22, 23, 25, 47, 48, and the residents of the College of Matrons: even if I’d never met the residents of these places, I could tell that they were my neighbours by walking round our house or by looking at a map. ‘Neighbour’ is one of those words with a fairly simple definition.
But in keeping with the oddness of this dialogue, and in response to the question ‘who is my neighbour?’, Jesus tells a story, and then asks the man to answer his own question. And in doing so, he completely changes the meaning of this rather basic word. Because instead of this fixed geographical sense, it is now all to do with movement and practical help. The Samaritan becomes a neighbour because in that chance encounter he goes over to and does something about the need he sees.
There’s more to it than this, of course. The Samaritan was a member of a heretical religious group, one of those annoying excrescences surrounding the body of pure religion. The priest and the Levite were so keen to preserve their religious purity that they didn’t dare touch what might be a dead body, to touch which would defile them. The heretic, not being pure, is not so hampered, and responds generously to the need he sees. So Jesus is pointing out what the Jewish prophets had long pointed out when they said things like ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’: searching for religious purity is a dead end if it neglects human need and justice.
This is quite genuinely an upsetting story, because not only is it saying that your neighbour can be anyone whom you happen to pass, but it’s also saying that no one is ‘in’ or ‘out’; and also that for our examples, we are to be taught not by the religious experts but by the people we most despise. In a similarly upsetting way, Jesus tells us we have to be taught by little children. Isn’t that food for thought?: wouldn’t you learn more by going over to our Sunday Clubs than by sitting there listening to me?
The General Synod of our Church is meeting at the moment; indeed my colleague Mark Bonney is there as a member. Now I like Mark, and he has been a friend for 33 years, but I really do find it hard to understand why anyone in their right mind would want to go to Synods. For decades I have bored anyone who listened by arguing that the kingdom of God would advance more if the meetings were scrapped and delegates instead went and had a cup of tea with their neighbours. When the Church talks to and about itself it often does more harm than good. For all the good people who are at the Synod, for all the important matters they are discussing, they are our Church’s rule-making body, they make the definitions, they decide, if you like, who is ‘in’ or ‘out’. And definitions are what the lawyer in conversation with Jesus was looking for; they were what Saul was looking for until he met Jesus and was so changed that he became Paul, who realised that rules bring death but the freedom of the Spirit brings life. We will never make the body of Christ perfect by getting the rules right. We will never be pure until we get our hands dirty.
Ours is the task of loving God and loving our neighbour. A simple task, as simple as having a cup of tea: but an endlessly challenging one, because it calls us out of our own enclosed surroundings and onto the dusty road, and who knows what we may encounter as our neighbour there? That journey to make new neighbours is our daily pilgrimage.