Day 216 - Neighborly Compassion

A Sermon given at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN July 14, 2013

readings: Amos 7:7-17; Luke 10: 25-37

Have you ever started into a discussion with someone knowing it was going to end up in an argument and hard feelings?  I had two fellows working for me once. One was a lay holiness preacher up near Dunlap and the other was a young fellow who was a Seventh Day Adventist.  Now I admired this fellow’s commitment. Taking on the commitment a layperson makes to take on preaching and pastoral duties.  It is a big and responsible job. This preacher imagined that he knew his bible pretty well. He seldom let us forget it. He also thought he knew Seventh Day Adventists pretty well. He knew they do not celebrate Easter Sunday and Christmas as most Protestants do. The young Seventh Day Adventist was overly sensitive and defensive of his religious heritage. It was a situation ripe for conflict.

The preacher concluded that because Adventists do not celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday or the birth of Christ on December 25, they are heretics and the work of the devil. He would constantly raise this accusation to the young employee. It always ended up in hard feelings and argument until I was forced to step in and stop it.

The preacher would never acknowledge that Seventh DayAdventists follow a very basic idea of Christian worship and what the church should be. They seeks to follow what they believe are the traditions of the earliest Christian congregations. They believe in the resurrection but know that the day of resurrection Sunday was instituted rather arbitrarily in the 4^th and 5^th century and given the name Easter in the 8^th century in what is now England. Eostre is the name of the fertility goddess of spring in pagan Germanic and Anglo-Saxon religious lore. Although that pagan celebration had died out, the name Easter stuck for the weeklong celebration of the Anglo-Saxon Christian church. Seventh Day Adventists believe that celebration distorts the true meaning of the Resurrection. The same logic applies to how Seventh Day Adventists acknowledge Jesus was born. They maintain we really have no idea exactly when Jesus was born; thus it does not make sense to celebrate it on an artificially contrived date. (Although a local church or some of its members may celebrate it on Dec. 25.) My preacher-employee refused to acknowledge or realize that Seventh Day Adventists do in fact acknowledge the resurrection and birth of Jesus. He could only see that their practice differed dramatically from his and that religiously justified his self-appointed duty to taunt and trip up this young Adventist.

This is basically what the Jewish lawyer was trying to do with Jesus concerning the question of how one attains eternal life. He knows Jesus violates the Law, he healed people on the Sabbath, he said you could ignore the dietary laws. The lawyer was a respected, highly educated man or priest who spends many hours a day studying the Torah and coming up with interpretations of the Law to guide persons’ response to particular events. He knew the people spoke of Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, and that Jesus regularly criticized the priesthood for its focus on the Law rather than repentance; and His job is to reduce Jesus’ claims to heresy.

We also have to remember there was an ongoing not-to-friendly religious argument about the reality of the resurrection between the Pharisees who were lay enforcers of Judaism and believed in resurrection of the body as eternal life and the Sadducees who were of the ancient priestly class and denied eternal life except as the continued existence of Judah, the Jewish state and its people. So Jesus words may also address this religious conflict.

Most of us are familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan and the earlier exchange on eternal life between Jesus and the lawyer. I could talk about several messages in this text, but I want to focus on two basic points.

The first point: When the scholar asked Jesus about eternal life he sought to place literal and rigid adherence to the Law as the path to it. Jesus in his effective way refutes this position with a question, “What does the Law say?”

The lawyer said adhering to the Shema, Love God, is the path; but he did not want to be caught ignoring the remaining commandments so he encircled the first commandment with the last, “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The lawyer offered a neatly closed logical argument: “If God created humanity and the universe and pronounced that creation good, and if God promised his steadfast love in his covenant with the Hebrews, then the Hebrew is bound to reciprocate the ultimate Love of God by loving his fellow Jew as God loves both him and his neighbor. The only way to love God fully is to love your Jewish neighbor fully.”  Jesus has set the hook. He acknowledges the truth of the scholar’s remark and that causes the scholar to push the issue one further question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus then uses this parable to lead the scholar to an unwelcome conclusion; namely, the neighbor is the one who has compassion for others.

Jesus makes his point with the example of the two religious figures and Samaritan who encounter a man on the side of the road robbed and perhaps beaten to death. The two religious figures go out of the way (cross the road to the other side) to avoid the man. Numerous rabbinical interpretations of the Law teach if one of these Jewish priests gets involved with this injured man whether he is dead or simply bleeding, they are required to undergo an extensive purification process before they can enter the temple and participate in worship. If they find out the person is not a Jew then they also face purification rituals if they touch the person.  In their rigid view, neither violated the Law as they understood it by avoiding the victim, in fact they followed the purity laws to the letter. However Jesus is pointing out that following part of the law rigidly caused them to ignore the other essential part of the law about neighborly love. Point one by Jesus: salvation requires neighborly love.

This brings me to the second point. The Jewish scholar might jump in here and say, wait a minute, this Samaritan that stopped to help, he isn’t a Jew so there is nothing to stop him, he isn’t going to the temple or is bound by the Law. We are supposed to Love God as God loves us Jews, but what is the rule for strangers?  Love your neighbor as God loves your neighbor?  Love your neighbor as you love yourself? This fellow is not a Jew.

The answer is bound up in the Greek word “compassion” used to describe the emotion felt by the Samaritan. Depending on the specific translation you will find other words such as  “had pity on” or “felt sorry for.” This is another case where translations fail. This Greek word for feeling compassion has a special meaning. It is the compassion that comes from the most deep-seated sense of passion that invokes the kind of emotional power of grief over the death of a loved one or a loved one’s child. It could be translated as “heart-wrenching” or “gut-wrenching” compassion. In the entire Gospel the word is used only nine times. Seven of those describe the response of Jesus to a person in destitute helplessness. This clearly shows the word means “Godly compassion” - the compassion God offers us through the gift of his Son.

It is the compassion of Jesus described in Matthew 14 and Mark 6 in the evening when in the evening he looked over the 5,000 ill and hungry people who followed him around the Sea of Galilee to hear his words and be healed. Jesus healed and fed them. It is the compassion of Jesus described in Matt 15 and Mark 8 when he looked over another crowd of 4,000 lame, maimed, mute, blind and hopeless people seeking healing. Jesus fed them.  In Matt 18, it is the feeling of the King of Heaven when he decided to call his debtors to make good their debt to him. If unable to repay he would have all their possessions, the slave and family sold into slavery to recover what he could. But the slave wit the greatest debt at his feet begging for mercy. The king had compassion and forgave the debts. In Matt 20, it is the compassion that led Jesus to heal the two blind men before he entered Jerusalem for his passion.  Or the time in Mark 1 when he healed a leper. It is the compassion that caused Jesus to raise from the dead the only son of a poor widow in Luke 7.  It is the compassion begged from Jesus by the father of the epileptic son in Mark 9.

Jesus’ point is inescapable compassion and neighbors are tightly bound.  The degree of compassion that neighborly love requires is exceedingly large and applies to strangers. But Jesus asks the question, “Who was the neighbor?” The answer the lawyer gave to Jesus reveals a very subtle and important twist.

The neighbor is the one who helps, not the one who is helped. We know this already because we use “neighbor” the way Jesus teaches. You’ve heard the saying “That is very neighborly of you.”  Being neighborly does not imply the person who lives next door, it describes how should treat the person next door.

We know Jesus saw the Law not as a set of rigidly interpreted and applied rules that bound a Jew to a behavior but rather as a way of living that set the Jew apart from the rest of the world.  As such, Jesus showed the Law is tempered with compassion. It was better to heal a person on the Sabbath rather than let the person suffer until Sunday. The law is not a rigid straight jacket binding the Jew to a set of activities that leads to salvation. It is a guide to a way of living by a chosen race that honors every person as God’s creation regardless of any other consideration such as nationality or religious orientation.

So how do these two points about the Law and compassion relate to my example of the holiness preacher and the young Seventh Day Adventist?

Jesus equates the questions, “Who is the neighbor?” and “What is neighborly love?”  We asked our Vacation Bible School students “who is your neighbor,” and we got the answer we expected, “everybody.” That is a perfectly true statement and a good place to start. We see in Jesus’ parable that neither being a Samaritan or a Jew is important to compassionate action.

We do have this problem of Jew and Samaritan. The closest I can come to describing the relationship between them might be the way we are tempted to compare Christians and Muslims given the trade center bombing, the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the brutality of ultra-conservative Islam in the middle East and Africa and persecution of Christians there. Jews loathed Samaritans because they are the remnant of the ten renegade tribes of Israel that broke and established their own heretical traditions.

The wise biblical reader of today cannot escape the radical implication of Jesus’ parable that all people merit compassion. But I’m interested in what it means at the practical level of my holiness preacher and Seventh Day Adventist, and us here today.  Compassion does not demand we stop before we act and ask if the person before us is right or wrong, or one of us or not.  The neighborly compassion that Jesus expects is to love your neighbor enough to put aside disagreement and find harmonious solutions.

It is said that the greatest barrier to compromise is not fear of losing an argument but fear of injured pride or losing something of small value. That something lost is often ego, or living with a decision that bruises our own sense of justice though it may not actually impact us, or God’s justice in the world.

I’m not sure any of us really exercise enough compassion to really forgive. We often forget that we are not called to judge and condemn; we are not called to hate; we are not called even to argue, we are called to bring to our fellows the heart-felt, gut-wrenching compassion God feels for his creation that caused him to give his Son for us.  If my preacher and Seventh Day Adventist had understood that, both would have been much happier and effective at work and worship.

I have said our history is a vocation to act as Christians; not to judge but to love our fellow as compassionately as God loves us. All God’s children are our fellows, whether the person in the pew near us, or the person on the street whose ideas about faith clash with ours. Neighborly compassion is a hard job because opinions and feelings get in the way, but when we get it right, folks listen and notice. There is no greater feeling and reward than God’s blessing of us for it. AMEN.