Sermon, Sunday 13th July 2025

Year C Trinity 4 2025

Deuteronomy 30: 9-14 & Luke 10: 25-37 (Good Samaritan)

Yesterday I learned how to make scones. I had a book. The recipe declared itself to be foolproof. What could go wrong? But there’s foolproof and then there’s me. You see the instructions were in English, I understood every word. Butter, yes. Self-raising flour, yes. Sugar, yes. But even though I understood the words I was a long way from making a successful scone. ‘Work the mixture with your fingers until a crumb is formed.’ But what sort of crumb? ‘Add the milk and vanilla essence and form a wet dough.’ But how are we defining wet? ‘Bake for around 10 minutes.’ But is that actually 9 or 11 minutes?

Anyone that has followed a recipe, or tried to put together an Ikea flat pack, or learned just about anything from a text book, knows that there is a world of difference between the words on the page and the way things turn out. There is something between the two, words – end product, and it’s a crucial third component that you can’t do without, replace or fake. And that’s experience.

Experience gives flesh to the bones of instruction. Experience takes us from point a to point b. Experience makes the abstract into something actual, useable, real. By the third attempt the recipe finally started to make sense. I knew that cold butter makes a better crumb. By the third attempt my scones emerged from the oven as something that might just be OK at an afternoon tea, so long as they’re hidden at the back of the plate behind Jane’s. 

‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ You know where this is going, don’t you?

Law, litigation, life; these are the things that we are asked to think about in our readings today.

First we had a little bit of Deuteronomy, when the Lord has given the commandments, the laws by which the people of Israel are to live, and Moses says, well now you’ve got to live by them, with all your heart and all your soul. But it’s a tricky calling that, far easier said than done. And thousands of years later the way the Law given to Moses should be understood is examined again this time by Jesus and this expert on religious law, whose Q and A session is wrapped around one of the most popular parables of the New Testament, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

There are five questions in the conversation surrounding this story of the Good Samaritan. Two of those questions are posed by the lawyer, three by Jesus.

The first seems to be a fairly basic one. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ But Luke says that the lawyer’s question is a test, not a genuine search for truth. The only other time this particular word for “test” is used in this book is during Jesus’ temptation by the devil in the desert at the beginning of his mission, when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy to say, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Luke is showing us that there’s devil in this question too, then, a trap set for Jesus to fall into.

So Jesus responds to the test with two questions of his own. “What is written in the law?” and “What do you read there?”

I cannot overstate how important I believe it to be that Jesus asks both, “What has been written?” and “How do you read?” These are not the same thing, and together imply that the Scriptures are living texts of interactive possibility. They are not, on the one hand, stagnant words that simply say the same thing to whoever is reading them. Neither are they blank pages for us to make up what we like. No, instead there is the written and there is the reading of the written. The recipe and the scone. They are each needed to make sense of what we read in Scripture, and the gap between the two, as the parable will set out, is experience.

The lawyer then asks the question that sets off the parable- ‘who is my neighbour?’. It’s another loaded question this. It doesn’t ask ‘how do I show love’ or ‘what is a loving action’ but rather, ‘who do I have to love?’ ‘Where can I draw the line? Who can I get away with not loving?’

What matters in the parable that follows is that the hero at the centre of it all is a Samaritan. Commentators tend to go heavy on the hatred between Samaritans and Jews, something that is true, but in Luke’s story, there is an added spice to the characterisation.

In the previous chapter, Jesus had sent messengers to find shelter, to seek hospitality for him in a village in Samaria on his way to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-55). But the villagers are having none of it. ‘You’re on the way to Jerusalem? You’re not welcome here.’ James and John Jesus’ disciples are so cross they want to call down fire from heaven to destroy the village. But instead Jesus bides his time and tells a parable where despite the lack of welcome they just experienced; a Samaritan can still be the hero. This isn’t just told for the benefit of the insufferable lawyer; it’s for the disciples too.

The fifth and final question pulls us back out of the Samaritan story and into the debate between Christ and the questioner. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

The translation we have says, which of these three was a neighbour to the man? But it should be translated as ‘which of these three became a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers.’ Jesus has brilliantly brought the question of the lawyer back on itself. He asked, ‘who is my neighbour?’ Jesus asks, ‘who has become a neighbour?’ The category of neighbour after this parable is not fixed. It is the experience of mercy that unpacks the letter of the law allowing a fuller understanding of what it is to be a neighbour, of someone worthy of mercy.

We have looked at the questions surrounding this parable this morning, and I fear we’re only really scratching the surface of what it’s about. Scones you can get right in about 3 goes. The trouble is that there are no pithy take-aways, not really. Jesus is saying something about God and the law and mercy and it can be read a thousand different times from a thousand different angles. The job of a Christian- our job, is to do just that. To revisit again and again those two questions Jesus asked the lawyer, either side of the parable. “What do you read there?” and ‘who became a neighbour to the man.’

Scripture must not be a dusty book that lives on an undisturbed shelf. It needs to be chewed, read, held up against the world we live in and come alive in us so we don’t just read about but experience the truth and life and mercy of God.

 Illustration: Vincent van Gogh, The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), 1890. Oil on canvas, Kroeller-Mueller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.