1
Legal Service
Bradford Cathedral
1 Feb 2015
Leviticus 19: 9-18
Luke 10:25-37
Take my words, Lord and speak through them
Take our minds, Lord, and think through them
And take our hearts and set them on fire for love of you, for we ask this for the sake of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Thank you for the honour of inviting me to preach at this service. I must say, as a new bishop, that I thought we had a difficult time in terms of the robes we are expected to wear on formal occasions! I see now that we’re quite well off in comparison to some!
Nevertheless, there is a point to the dressing up, and that is at least partly about reminding ourselves of the history and the legal heritage of which we are grateful and rightly proud, and to which we are re-committing ourselves in this service.
Being reminded of this heritage is all the more poignant this year, as we commemorate the granting of Magna Carta, 800 years ago. It may be that only three clauses of the 1225 Magna Carta remain on our statute books today, but the fundamental importance of that document remains the principle to which it pointed even then that all, even the King, are subject to the law. As the famous 39th Clause states,
“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
Of course 800 years ago that was about ‘free men’ and left out the vast majority of the population. It has been a long and difficult struggle to widen that circle to bring more within the bounds of equality and the law, and that struggle isn’t over yet, not least here in Bradford and District.
And law, as you know better than I do, has its limits. The biblical law might command us to love our neighbours as ourselves, as we heard in the first reading, but British law doesn’t pretend to do anything of the kind. We would rightly be wary of any theocracy that would try to enforce such a law.
We have also been reminded since the Paris atrocities last month of the difficult balance our societies hold between allowing in law the right to free speech, and encouraging the use of that right in a way that honours one another and enables our communities to flourish.
Yet the law is vitally important to our relationships with each other as neighbours. What are my rights and responsibilities in relation to my neighbour? Pushing up against our equality under the law is the deeper question of our relationships as neighbours across gender, wealth and poverty, ethnicity, religion, disability, nationality, sexuality and other categorisations.
Human relationships are far broader and deeper than legal obligations to each other, but increasingly it is to the law that we turn to arbitrate some of these boundaries. If we think simply of religious boundaries, it is the European Convention on Human Rights which sets the framework, for example, around a decision as to whether we may tolerate in this country people who want to slaughter animals without pre-stunning. Is circumcision an infringement of the rights of a child? What religious dress or symbols can a person wear in a given context? The answers to these questions, increasingly decided in the courts, determine whether communities of people feel included or excluded from our wider society. There are no easy answers.
The impact of the European Court of Human Rights is changing the way we approach these issues: pushing our traditional British pragmatic attitude towards a more principle-orientated decision making. I can understand and appreciate where this is coming from, but I think that has its dangers.
So it is not a surprise for us to read that when Jesus told his famous story about loving our neighbours, the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we heard in our second reading, he told it in the context of a conversation with a lawyer.
“A lawyer,” writes Luke, “stood up to test Jesus.”
Of course a lawyer in that context was not quite what we know as a lawyer today. A lawyer, or ‘teacher of the Law’ was an expert in the Mosaic law, the Torah, the first five books of what we call today the Old Testament.
He, and it was almost always a ‘he’ in those days, would have been called upon to give judgements, especially about religious observance. His role was to take the text of the law and apply in a given context, based on a huge body of scholarly debate and previous legal rulings? So it’s not surprising that his conversation with Jesus is a discussion about texts.
The question that the lawyer asked Jesus was, 'What must I do to inherit eternal life?' This is about the most fundamental question anyone could ask. Jesus responded by using a familiar technique of rabbinic debate and asking question in return, 'What is written in the Law? How do you read it?' The lawyer's answerbrings together two of the most important texts in the Jewish Scriptures.
The first is from Deuteronomy 6:4, known as the shema from its Hebrew introduction,
Hear [shema] O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
The second text cited by the lawyer comes from Leviticus 19:18, the reading we heard earlier in the service: '...love your neighbour as yourself.'
The context, then, is one of the most fundamental questions of Jewish law answered by two of the most fundamental and indeed beautiful texts in the entire Jewish scriptures. We need, therefore, to be wary of reading it simply as an admonition to be nice to people we don’t particularly like.
One of our difficulties, today, in reading this passage is that the word Samaritan has been re-defined by the passage itself. Today, a Samaritan is someone who offers to talk a deeply troubled person out of committing suicide. A ‘Good Samaritan’ is someone who does a good deed.
In Jesus’ day, for many Jews, a Samaritan was a despised foreigner. Jews and Samaritans had a long and painful relationship. Theirs was an ethnic, religious and political conflict that had been rumbling on for centuries. Like the relationship between Christians and Muslims today, there was a lot of shared history and shared doctrine.
But there was also sharp difference, made all the more painful because the two communities were so deeply related and shared so much. If a stranger insults me, it doesn't hurt that much. If a member of my own family insults me, it’s a different matter.
Sometimes the two communities had lived more or less in peace. But there were other times when the ethnic, religious and political differences were exploited or bubbled up into outright hostility and even bloodshed. If a Jewish pilgrim like Jesus wanted to get from Galilee in the North of Israel to Jerusalem in the South or back again, the direct way would be to go through Samaria. But for a Jew that meant travelling through Samaritan territories, one could call them, ‘no-go areas’. A few chapters earlier, Jesus travelling that route as a Jewish pilgrim found himself in a Samaritan village where the locals refused to let his disciples buy food. You can imagine how Fox News would have reported that story. “Banner headlines, “Samaria almost as bad as Birmingham!”
So most Jewish pilgrims would have taken the long route around Samaria to the city of Jericho and then the steep, lonely and dangerous desert road from Jericho to Jerusalem. In Jesus’ story, a traveller on that road falls into the hands of bandits who mug him, beat him up and leave him ‘half dead.’
The word 'dead' is important because if the traveller had been completelydead, and the priest had touched him, the priest would have had to turn around, go back to Jerusalem and spend a lot of money and a lot of time doing the legal processes necessary to become ritually clean again (see Numbers 19:16-21). 'Death', said the Jewish oral law, 'is one of the fathers of uncleanliness.'
The Levite may have known that a priest was riding his donkey down the road in front of him, and may have thought, 'Who am I to question a priest's application of the law in this situation?' So he too passed by on the other side. Eventually, a ritually unclean (according to Jewish law) Samaritan came along, stopped, and went out of his way to take care of the victim.
Jesus ends his story with the question: 'Which of these three was a neighbour to the mugged man?' It is important to note that Jesus did not answer the question that the lawyer originally asked. The lawyer asked, 'Who is my neighbour?' Jesus, however, turns that question around by asking, 'who actually turned out to be a neighbour in the story?' The lawyer was thinking in ethnic, political, and religious categories. He was an insider; what were his obligations to those who were defined as 'outsiders'? He answered Jesus, “the one who showed mercy.” But he couldn’t bring himself to use the word, “Samaritan.”
Jesus' parable, playing on other passages of Jewish scripture, deliberately muddled the lawyer’s categories by talking about a Samaritan, an 'outsider' who acted like an 'insider' by doing what two 'insiders', a priest and a Levite, had failed to do. The conversation had started with two scriptural texts which were used to define the core values of God's chosen people. Jesus seems to be pointing to an unclean outsider as one who lived according to those values. That was not a comfortable thought.
When I was last a parish priest, in Birmingham, our church was situated opposite a mosque. The Imam was a lovely man, and made me welcome when I became the vicar. I used to go and visit him, and one day, he telephoned me and asked if I would attend the naming ceremony for his newborn daughter. I agreed, and asked when the ceremony would be. He told me it was that evening. So I knocked on the door of his little terraced house and found myself welcomed in to a front room full of heavily bearded imams.
My friend then introduced the programme for the evening. There would be a recitation of the Qur’an, some prayers, and speech by our Vicar. I quickly looked around, but there were no other vicars in sight. I must say that I also detected some slight irritation from one or two of the other imams who had not been chosen for this honour.
Swallowing hard, I realized that I was down to preach the following day on the parable of the Good Samaritan, so I told the story taking a few liberties, for example, ending with the line that the one who took care of the mugged traveller was a member of the Ahmadiyya community. There were looks.
The following morning early, I happened to see my friend on the street outside the mosque. I reflected with him that he had done a brave thing. He had publically honoured me, a Christian, over other colleagues in his own community. He smiled. “There are things that I can’t do in the mosque that I can do in my own home.”
And as I preached on the passage in church, I reflected that although I had told the story of the Good Samaritan. He had actually been the Good Samaritan.
One of the great tensions in a multi religious society is how we balance the two commandments: of loving God and loving neighbour.
The command to love God is a command for religious purity. What does that look like? It is about pure worship using appropriate language and rituals, with people who share our beliefs. It’s about keeping ourselves from being corrupted by idolatry and sin. Religious purity is often seen in terms of unadulterated traditions, drawing lines around our religious practice that keep ourselves pure, but at the expense of others who are seen as impure.
But where do we draw the lines? If there are no lines, no definitions, then anything goes and we are in danger of losing our religious identity altogether. If we draw the lines too tightly, we risk becoming exclusive bigots.
The same tendency can be at work when we think about patriotism and love of country. Love of country will mean protecting our nation from harm, a proper concern for borders and immigration, a concern for British values and a willingness to stand up and fight when they are under attack, as we saw in Paris last month. But there are dangers to patriotism too, as we all know only too well. How easily a good and proper love of country can drift into something more ugly: bigoted nationalism or racism that excludes people who are different and demonises minorities who don’t fit in.
Jesus’ story forces us to hold our love of God, our sense of identity, together with our love of neighbour. And, in proper Yorkshire style, it’s very practical and down to earth. “Leave aside that discussion about who you think belongs and who doesn’t. Who turned out, in their actions, to be the neighbor?” asks Jesus.
“The one,” replies the Lawyer, “who had mercy.”
“Go and do likewise.”
Jesus is not saying, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, it only matters what you do.”
But he is saying, “What you do says a lot about what you really believe.”
“For Jesus,” as the theologian Tom Wright says, “Israel’s God is a God of grace for the whole world, and therefore a neighbour is anyone in need.”
As we reflect on this story as individuals, it is worth asking,
What do our own actions say about our beliefs (whatever they are), our worship, our relationship to God (whoever we conceive God to be, and even if we don’t believe in a God)?
As we celebrate Magna Carta this year it is also worth asking, “What do our laws, the application of those laws and the ability of people here to find justice say about our beliefs and values as a nation?”
I pray God, even when the public purse is squeezed, and the xenophobic voices are shrill, that our laws, our lawyers and our lawmakers will continue to demonstrate that justice and compassion are at the heart of who we are as a nation.