Sunday
July 10
Ode to Mercy
By Marsh Chapel
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Against a dark background of economic need revealed in violent thievery, our Gospel sings out a majestic ode to mercy.
Against a dark background of cultural violence revealed in highway robbery, the taking of what is not one’s own, our parable pronounces a poetic ode to mercy.
Against a dark background of racial contest, revealed in the starring role of the Samaritan, our Lord acclaims a gemlike ode to mercy.
Against a full and darkly difficult background of taking what is not one’s own, Luke’s own biblical theology starkly epitomized in chapter 10, perhaps and rightly the best known and most beloved passage in Scripture, gives melodic voice to an ode to mercy. We listen this beautiful Sunday morning, first for a moment to Luke, and second for a moment to the Samaritan.
What meets us in St. Luke this summer?
Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 85-90 of the common era (though there is now some significant resistance to this view). Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us. We know him only through the writing itself.
What do we find? Or what shall we find in prayerful conversation with Luke across the summer?
Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients. First, Luke uses most of Mark: like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earliest gospel, Mark. But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases. This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. This requires that so long left behind over fifty years, a sound liberal biblical theology. Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew. An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service. Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the Beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’. Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, very much including the pinnacle parable this morning, are all his. Examples include some of your favorite parables, like today’s Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward. We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories. Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.
Luke weaves together his own perspective and materials with that of the rest of the Scripture. Luke has a passion for compassion, and sings out as today a song, an ode, an accolade through and through to mercy. To justice. Real religion, by Luke’s measurement, is not ever very far from justice, from a concern for justice, for the just cause, the just word, the just deed, the just perspective. Including today. Luke draws from the whole, the whole of Scripture to craft his two books, the Gospel and Acts. So, look for a moment at the rest of Scripture. Tragically, sadly, in this last month, we may be closer than we have been in a long time to real, though harshly administered, reflection on matters of interpretation of ancient documents, whether the Holy Bible from thousands of years ago, or the US Constitution, from hundreds of years ago. Interpretation really matters. Biblical theology, a sound mode of interpretation, really matters, counts, and lasts. A purely originalist view, whether for Constitution or Scripture, will bring its own maladies, as bear witness following the Supreme Court decision, leaked earlier, but announced last month. Are we to read these documents only as collections of topics from the past, cemented in antique times and places? Or are we to read them regarding their themes, their living themes, not just their topics, and the lasting, growing, consequential outworking of these themes, in both history and theology, or in both history and philosophy? Topics of themes? Origin or meaning? There is a biblical theme, today, undergirding the Samaritan, the most marvelous of parables, the theme of justice. It lives throughout Scripture.
Read the books of the Law, like Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt….For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat.”
Remember: the Hebrew Scripture, our Older Testament, was largely composed in the dark days of a later slavery, the bondage of Babylon. In that moment of memory, the community of faith recalled keenly their earliest history of God’s love and power, the God who brought them up out of the land of slavery to the land of milk and honey. They mused: We know what it means to be poor, to be oppressed, to be outcast, to be downtrodden. Once we were ourselves. THEREFORE, there will be justice in our land for the poor. You and you all know that too, and may need to search your extended family histories and memories for what happened to your people in the Great Depression. We learned something, or were reminded of something, then, as were the Israelites dragged again in chains to Babylon in 587 bce. Luke writes in earshot of Babylon.
Read together the books of the Prophets, the very heart of the Old Testament. In all of religious literature, in all human history, there is nothing quite as sobering, as piercingly and stingingly direct, with regard to justice, as these 16 voices, four the louder and twelve the lesser. Malachi teaches tithing. Isaiah affirms holiness. Hosea preaches love. Micah shouts, ‘do justice, love mercy, walk humbly’. Together the prophets consistently rail against human greed, human selfishness, human covetousness, human apathy. The harvest here for our theme is so plentiful it is difficult to select an exemplar, there are so many.
Perhaps Amos will do best, our lectionary guest this morning. In the eighth century BCE, a shepherd boy from Tekoa went down to the gates of the big city, Jerusalem, and cried out against it. He pilloried the shallow religion of his day. He assaulted the reliance, the naïve over-reliance of his government on weapons of war, he bitterly chastised the amoral, post moral practices of human sexuality of his day. But he saved his real fierce anger for injustice.
“I will not revoke the punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes—they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2:6-7). “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5: 21-24). Recall Martin Luther King reciting these verses, down in the sweltering little jail house of Birmingham Alabama, 1963.
Read together the books of Wisdom, especially, as we do each Sunday, the book of the Psalms. Let us read together the books of Wisdom. Love is for the wise, and justice is the skeleton of love.
“When the just are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan…The just man knows the rights of the poor; a wicked man does not understand such knowledge…(Proverbs 29)
‘Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now arise’, says the Lord; “I will place him in the safety for which he longs’ (Psalm 11: 5). “You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge’ (Psalm 14:6).
In an odd way, the most sobering judgment about justice is offered by Ecclesiastes, who speaks least directly to the theme. But his philosophy is clear, his thematic emphasis. He looks at all the toil of the sons of men, and sees—vanity. He warns: that for which you strive will not last, that for which you suffer will not endure. “What has a man for all the toil and strain with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation; even in the night his mind does not rest’’(Ecc. 2:23). As an Indian proverb puts it: ‘In his lifetime the goose lords it over the mushroom. But in the end, they are both served up on the same platter’. Each a reminder: Justice lasts, not acquisition.
More: to understand, or interpret, the Good Samaritan, this magisterial parable, one needs more than origination, more than topics, more than the geography between Jerusalem and Jericho. One needs to hear it in the heart of Luke, and in the fullness of Scripture. One needs a sure grasp of the great themes of Scripture, not just the topics.
So, listen second, this morning again to the Samaritan. Against a full and darkly difficult background of the taking what is not one’s own, Luke’s own biblical theology is starkly epitomized in chapter 10, perhaps and rightly the best known and most beloved passage in Scripture, which gives melodic voice to an ode to mercy. An ode is: something that shows respect for or celebrates the worth or influence of another (Webster). An ode in the general sense, and one…full of surprises. Surprises…Notice them…In Luke 10…
The breadth of life promise, do this and you will live…
The honesty about random peril, hurt, along the road of life…
The abject failure of the clergy—priests, levites– to respond…
The heroism of the excluded, the heroism of the Samaritan…
The touch, time, treasure, tenacity of the care (seeing, anointing, bandaging, carrying, paying, returning)…
The timely, welcome open space at the inn unlike Christmas…
The jarring turn of neighbor from object to subject (not who to care for but, who cares)…
The questioning of the questioner…
Such a Diamond! Gem! Masterpiece! Parable…
In our own moment, we may be nourished by such an ode. How dearly we need that nourishment.
For we now awake every morning, unlike those mornings prior to November of 2016, when still there lingered the prospect of a common hope, arising to see in every direction–the taking of what is not one’s own. Pollution, Putin, Pandemic, Politics, Prejudice, Pistols, and Pain. Climate pollution, the taking of the green earth by one generation, when it surely belongs to future generations. The taking of land by one country, in inch-by-inch slaughter of another. The taking of public health, like water and air a common good, not one’s own, but taken nonetheless, mainly by not facing it as a whole, as a nation, together, as in the pandemic. The taking of political activity, engagement, and truth, and making of it into a seedbed for autocracy. The taking of the tragic history of racial injustice—THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD—and making of it into a mode of argument, jousting, contest. The taking of freedom from fear of gun violence, a freedom owed children in schools and at parades, as if their freedom from trauma were ours to take. And now, in addition, the taking of women’s bodies, and the coming frightful multiplication of needless and heedless pain. Women’s bodies are women’s bodies. The theme underlying all these: the sordid taking of what is not one’s own, the rapacious seizing of what is another’s, what belongs to another.
How utterly, staggeringly different, our Samaritan gospel today, the picture judging us from antiquity, the account of love of neighbor. Yet, there are glimmers of encouragement, in every day and week. We have had a week and more of reminders, like that of the Samaritan himself, of how good life can be.
One loves his northern neighbor by the honoring of Canada Day with a Maple Leaf flag…
One loves her next door neighbor with anniversaries and birthdays with strawberry pies…
A community loves the neighborhood by funding block parties for dancing, county fairs for the dairy princesses, symphony concerts on village greens with the star-spangled banner all standing, some Strauss some dancing to it, the requisite John Williams compositions all nodding, and a Sousa march as cherry on top…
Our own existential plumb line inherited from Amos and the truth of Holy Writ, of biblical theology, is not entirely forgotten, in our common culture, nor is our own existential call to mercy in the glorious example of the Samaritan. And that is truly good news.
What shall we do?
Jesus answers, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…
What shall we do?
But you are doing it. By private prayer. In attendance on ordered worship. In a ministry of outreach to the shut in and home bound. In preparation for a holiday barbecue. In the planning for choirs and programs, and study groups to come. In offering a kind word. In charitable, generous giving. In noticing hurt and offering help.
What shall we do?
Jesus answers, learn from the Samaritan…
Jesus answers, show mercy
And Jesus gives us something we can do to preserve a glimmer of personal encouragement, the practice daily of the love of neighbor
An Ode to mercy…
Go and do likewise…
An Ode to mercy…
Go and do likewise…
An Ode to mercy…
Go and do likewise…
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
