Breaking down Barriers
Breaking down Barriers
Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Sunday 13 July 2025- 9:00am and 10:30am
Colossians 1: 1-14 and Luke 10: 25-37
One of the secular versions of a spiritual practice that’s noticeably been adopted in our modern culture in recent times is a renewed appreciation for gratitude. From the gratitude journals you can buy in book shops, to the practice of sharing with your family around the dinner table, or with your partner before falling asleep, the things you’re grateful for at the end of each day, the practice of being thankful is deemed a positive thing to engage in, encouraging positive thinking, and an increased awareness of others. The practice of being thankful comes originally from religion; Christianity teaches us that life, and all its opportunities, are a gift, as is the healing grace that lifts us when we fall. Even when we’re having a terrible time, perhaps especially in those times, it’s good to consciously hold in mind all the things we’re thankful for, whether it’s access to skills and resources that can help us in trauma and difficulty, or just saying thank you for the support and kindness of family and friends and those who mean so much.
I guess we’ll never know, from the story of the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan, in the Gospel reading we just heard, whether the injured man ever got chance to thank the Samaritan for what he did. This story is so well known, and has been interpreted so many times, and in so many different ways down the ages. But the details given in the story itself are actually quite sparse. We don’t know who the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan were, beyond those labels, and we find out even less about the victim of the crime, “a certain man,” who gets beaten up and left for dead. The man is simply a human being, a neighbour, in need.
The story of this compassionate Samaritan begins with a lawyer asking Jesus a question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus believes that the lawyer can answer his own question, and so turns the question back to him. The answer: “You shall 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 your neighbour as yourself.” This so-called Golden Rule is the bedrock of Christianity, and- in its basic sentiment- of many other world faiths too. Its demand on us to love God so completely is an emotional one, involving heart, soul, strength and mind, and this love of God evokes an equally emotional response to people. The Samaritan, in the story that follows, is “moved with pity.” This is less earthly than the Greek original, which literally translates “His guts were churned.” It’s not in our brain or heart that we feel compassion, but in our guts, according to the bible, the sort of response we have to news of casualties in war, or victims of famine. The impact of seeing another human being in pain is “gut-wrenching.”
But the lawyer is caught up in the details. Who is my neighbour? he asks. Rabbis of the time debated whether love for one’s neighbour meant love for fellow Israelites only, or whether this love should be extended to other races and nationalities as well. For some, “neighbour” was a limited term, with endless discussion about which classes of people the Law excluded from the scope of the commandment. A long history of enmity between Israelites and Samaritans meant that the high-status priests and Levites regarded the latter as half-breeds or dogs, despising them as unclean sinners because historically they had intermarried with other races and indulged in pagan practices. By contrast, priests and Levites, like this lawyer, regarded themselves as people of exemplary piety, self-evidently righteous in their behaviour, due not to their training or skill but to their ancestry, having been born into priestly families.
Jesus tells the story of the compassionate Samaritan to challenge this tribal consciousness. Many of those listening would quite naturally have assumed that the unknown injured man was a sinner, or at least that he could have been. They would, most likely, have thought that the priest and the Levite were right to keeping walking, or at least have sympathised with their desire not to get involved a dangerous situation. By helping the lawyer to reframe the question not as “Who is my neighbour” but “Who acted as a neighbour,” Jesus challenges not just the lawyer, but his listeners too. The Samaritan’s response was exemplary. What would they have decided to do?
There are many examples we could give, from the news or from closer to home, of ways of thinking that have evolved whereby people of one nation or group are urged to think of people in another, neighbouring one as being lower status, of questionable morals or worth less, or culturally inferior.
To break down this us and them thinking is very difficult, and not something that can happen overnight- especially when people have a lot invested in it, and it’s been engrained in them for years and years. The story of the compassionate Samaritan is about doing something. Sometimes it’s hard to know what we can do, but one thing at least is to engage with other people’s stories and their very different experiences.
At the moment, in the Cathedral, we have a “Living Water” exhibition. Lubaina Himid’s Lost Threads in the Cloisters is a large-scale artwork using 400 metres of vibrant African fabric, sometimes known as Dutch wax print, arranged randomly across the pillars to reflect the movement of the ocean and rivers historically used to transport cotton, yarn and captured people who would become slaves, and the oppression of Black people by colonial traders. Its companion installation Fire Brigade, a painted fire cart by the West Doors, near where we will have coffee. As well as the faint name of a stately home in Cumbria whose occupants’ wealth was built through the transatlantic slave trade, the sides of the cart also include painted faces that reveal the hidden stories Black people connected to colonial wealth, reminding us of the suppression of many lives whose histories have been erased through colonialism.
Like the first hearers of the story of the Samaritan who knew that road from Jerusalem down to Jericho so well, like the back of their hand, it’s the everyday details- the cloths, the waves of the oceans and rivers, a cart or vehicle used to suppress fire, that make these stories powerful, and that make them stories not just about other people but also about us, and the complex history of our country. Belonging is important; being part of a tribe gives us our identity. But it should never lead us to deny or fail to acknowledge, the human dignity of others, or to treat each other with disrespect.
Paul’s letter to the Colossians, the start of which we heard as our first reading, is a majestic work, in which Paul describes his vision of Christ, of the church, and of the mystery of God hidden for ages. Later in the first chapter, he reminds us that once we ourselves were “estranged” from God, God’s enemies, until God’s love saved us through Jesus.
To love not just our neighbours, “those like us,” but our enemies too, is hard. Stories help. As the art critic Jenny Uglow reminds us, “Stories often offset fear.” (Grayson Perry: Marking Meaning by Jenny Uglow). Stories like the very human story of the Samaritan move us in our guts, compelling us to listen and hopefully to act. It’s tempting to simplify today’s Gospel, to make it about the “good” compassionate Samaritan versus the “bad” hard-hearted priest and Levite. But the anonymity of the victim and the exemplary character of the Samaritan mean that this could be story about anyone. Whoever is the victim and whoever has the power to help, this is what love looks like. This is what God’s love looks like. This is what being a neighbour means.