Homily for the Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost & Eighth Sunday of Luke in the Orthodox Church

 

Galatians 1:11-19; Luke 10:25-37

             It is terribly tragic when people fall into the delusion of thinking that they love God and neighbor, when in reality they are using religion to serve only themselves and perhaps others with whom they identify for some worldly reason.  We do that when we narrow down the list of people who count as our neighbors to the point that we excuse ourselves from serving Christ in all who bear His image and likeness.  When we do so, we disregard not only them but also our Lord Himself, the God-Man born for the salvation of all.  Our actions then reveal that we are not truly conforming our character to His.  Instead of uniting ourselves to Christ to the point that we convey His mercy to all His living icons, we serve only ourselves with our vain imaginations of being truly religious and moral.

    That is precisely the attitude that the Savior warns against in today’s gospel reading. After describing how the Old Testament law required loving God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer wanted to justify himself by limiting the type of people he had to love.  That is why he asked, “And who is my neighbor?”  He wanted to limit what God required of him so that he could continue to believe that he was a perfectly righteous man who had already justified himself by his good deeds.

             The Lord’s parable does not allow us, however, to place any limits on what it means to love our neighbors.  He tells us about a man who was robbed, severely beaten, and then left on the side of the road to die. Surely, anyone who saw him in that condition would have an obligation to help him.  All the more is that the case for the religious leaders who were going down that same road.  They knew that the Old Testament law required them to care for a fellow Jew in a life-threatening situation.  Like the lawyer, however, they must have come up with some excuse not to treat him with even an ounce of compassion.  We do not know exactly what they were thinking, but they somehow rationalized passing by on the other side without helping him at all.

       Ironically, a Samaritan—a hated foreigner, a despised heretic-- is the one who treated the unfortunate man as a neighbor.  The Samaritan did not limit his concern to his own people.  He did not restrict the demands of love in any way.  Even though he knew that the Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, he responded with boundless compassion and generosity to this fellow’s plight.  He did not figure out how little he could do and still think of himself as a decent person.  Instead, he spontaneously offered his time, energy, and resources to bring a stranger back to health. Even the lawyer got the point of the story, for he saw that the one who treated the man as a neighbor was “The one who showed mercy to him.” 

             The Lord used the story of the Good Samaritan to show us who we must become if we are truly united to Him in faith.  Purely out of compassionate, boundless love, Christ came to heal us all from the self-imposed pain and misery that our sins have worked on our souls.  He came to liberate everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, from slavery to the fear of death, which is the wages of sin.  Like the Samaritan, He was despised and rejected as a blasphemer.  In the parable, the religious leaders were of no help to the man who was robbed, beaten, and left to die.  They passed by and left him to suffer in the state in which they had found him.  Likewise, the legalistic, hypocritical religious leaders who rejected the Messiah were of no benefit to those who needed healing from the ravages of sin and liberation from the fear of death.   They interpreted and applied the law in order to gain power in this world and were powerless to heal anyone. We must be on guard against the temptation to become like them by distorting our faith in ways that would excuse us from seeing and serving Christ in every suffering neighbor, including those considered enemies according the standards of our fallen world.    

            Christ has brought salvation, not by giving us merely a religious or moral code of conduct, but by making us participants in His divine life by grace.  By becoming fully human even as He remains fully divine, He has restored and fulfilled the basic human vocation to become like God in holiness.  Only the God-Man could do that.  If we are truly united with Him, then His boundless love must become characteristic of our lives.  Among other things, that means gaining the spiritual health to show our neighbors the same mercy that we ask for from the Savior.  Doing that even for those we love most is difficult because our self-centeredness makes it hard to give anyone the same consideration we want for ourselves.

 The challenge of conveying Christ’s love to people we fear, resent, or do not like for whatever reason may seem impossibly hard. Remember, however, what the Samaritan in the parable did for the robbed and beaten man.  He administered first aid, took him to an inn, paid the innkeeper to care for him, and promised to pay for any additional expenses when he returned.  Christ does the same for us in baptism, the Eucharist, and the full sacramental life of the Church, which is a hospital for our recovery from the wounds of sin. Through spiritual disciplines such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we open the chronic weaknesses and festering sores of our souls to receive His healing strength.  As we prepare to celebrate His Nativity during the upcoming Nativity Fast through such practices, we will simply offer ourselves in humility to receive the healing necessary to convey His mercy to our neighbors, even when they are strangers and enemies to us according to the corrupt standards of our society.  

 Even as the parable of the Good Samaritan challenged assumptions about who counted as a neighbor in first-century Palestine, we must remain constantly on guard against the temptation to see any of our neighbors through the lenses of the factions that line up against one another in the debates and divisions of our culture.  Regardless of our opinions about any controversial matter in society, we must manifest the reconciling and sacrificial love of Christ to those who need our assistance, attention, and care.  If we allow ourselves to narrow down our list of neighbors to those we imagine are worthy of our concern, we will fall prey to the temptation of trying to justify ourselves by limiting the vocation that is ours in Jesus Christ.  He calls us to become radiant with His gracious divine energies to the point that we embody His infinite love and mercy for all who bear the divine image and likeness, irrespective of who they are.   

 Our Savior not only spoke the parable of the Good Samaritan, but also showed shocking concern and respect for St. Photini, the Samarian woman at the well.  He praised the faith of the Roman centurion as being superior to that of any of His fellow Jews, cast demons out of Gentiles, and brought healing and restoration to notorious sinners.  His mercy extends even to people like you and me, not on the basis of where stand according to any of the divisions of this world, but because of His infinite grace and love.  If we dare to claim such grace and love for ourselves, how dare we try to narrow down the list of our neighbors according to our own preferences.  The only question that we should consider is how to gain the spiritual clarity and strength to “Go and do likewise,” especially in relation to those whom the world encourages us to hate, fear, and resent.