Pandemic Parables 2. Within 2 Metres

Among the best known of all Jesus' parables is that of the Good Samaritan (Luke chapter 10):

“And who is my neighbour?”

 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Robbers attacked him. They stripped off his clothes and beat him. Then they went away, leaving him almost dead. A priest happened to be going down that same road. When he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.  A Levite also came by. When he saw the man, he passed by on the other side too.  But a Samaritan came to the place where the man was. When he saw the man, he felt sorry for him.  He went to him, poured olive oil and wine on his wounds and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey. He brought him to an inn and took care of him.

Very early in the lockdown it occured to me that this parable now illustrates a fundamental Christian problem derived from the pandemic.  This has been reinforced as, with leaders everywhere, I share the agonies of trying to get some sort of meaningful restart to church life.

In this parable social distancing is seen to be the safe course, and the respectable passers by stick, I would imagine, to a good 2 metres.

But the only way to be in the will of God is to get close.  

Now to be clear, this is hardly directly relevant to the church choir standing close, or the greeting hug at the door, or serving communion in a common cup.  It is, however, illustrative of the difficulty of  doing God's will in a pandemic.  

At a stroke it has separated our church - and almost every church - from developing contacts with the lost, the poor and those we meet on the road of life.  We can keep them and ourselves apart and go to our Zoom meeting - but the result is that we are not able to be the neighbours we were told to be.

The pandemic is making it very hard to do God's work.

Literally AVD

Great regret has been expressed regarding Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, who said in a keynote speech last weekend,

It makes people so incredibly angry when you are getting up early in the morning, working really hard to try and do the right thing for your family and for your community, you are paying your taxes and then you see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.

If these people are literally in a different galaxy they are not, of course, liable for UK tax of any sort. Literally none. This is the kind of linguistic torture that many a public speaker (Guilty, m'Lud) inflicts on words.  Someone colourfully described it as AVD - Adjectival Vomiting Disease! 

Literally, for Nick, meant nothing of the sort.  In fact it means the opposite - metaphorically in a different galaxy, perhaps.

For all who claim to be Bible believers the word 'literally' is a heavily significant one.  The problem is that it is a word that serves us less well than we think.  For example,

"Do you believe there was a literal Good Samaritan?" is a fairly irrelevant question, though sometimes asked, compared to the more sobering, "Do you literally do what Jesus taught his hearer to do?"

Huge controversy surrounds the question, "Are the days in Genesis chapter 1 literal 24 hour days?" yet this is hardly a question at all.  Richard Dawkins, for example, believes that they are.  It's just that he inconveniently thinks that they are wrong.  Literal interpretation is not the same thing as faith.  Others believe that they are literal days in a piece of poetry.  Others believe they are not literal 24 hour days but believe they describe literal eras of creating.  Others believe that there were indeed seven 24 hour days but then have to wrestle with how the Word that spoke life to the dead in a moment took a whole 24 literal hours to create (or how the other 23+ hours did not constitute literal rest (which belongs to day seven)).  All of which is to say that literally is literally one of the more difficult words and concepts.

There are places where it is THE word however;

¹ Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain ³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.' [1 Corinthians 15] 

The Apostle is not vomiting adjectives; he is listing evidences.  It would reveal so much less if he had written that Jesus was literally risen from the dead.  Instead he shows how this must have happened, how we can know it happened, why it happened and why it matters.  Without a risen Saviour everything else about being human is ultimately useless.  Literally.

Help

30 . . . Jesus said, “A man was going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Some robbers surrounded him, tore off his clothes, and beat him. Then they left him lying there on the ground almost dead.

There was, last week, a man sitting on the pathway outside our church buildings . . .

31 “It happened that a Jewish priest was going down that road.

He was hypothermic and had drunk too much and it was below freezing and all he wanted was to die and his wish looked like coming true.  We called an ambulance.

When he saw the man, he did not stop to help him.

The ambulanceman talked to him for a while.  Because the man didn't 'consent' to come(though in fact he could not have moved if he did) . . .

He walked away.

He walked away and called a police officer.

32 Next, a Levite came near.

The police officer turned up in a big van.

He saw the hurt man, but he went around him. He would not stop to help him either. He just walked away.

She walked around and spoke on her radio.  Because 'the man didn't consent' she drove away too.

 

33 “Then a Samaritan man travelled down that road. He came to the place where the hurt man was lying. He saw the man and felt very sorry for him.

But the volunteer workers in our Church Drop-In centre felt sorry for the man.

34 The Samaritan went to him and poured olive oil and wine on his wounds. Then he covered the man’s wounds with cloth.

Whether he consented or not they ushered him into the hallway of the church and put a blanket over him.

The Samaritan had a donkey. He put the hurt man on his donkey,

They called the man at Wycombe Homeless Connection, a Christian Charity run by our group of churches.  He came and sat with the man.  And talked with the man.

and he took him to an inn. There he cared for him. 35 The next day, the Samaritan took out two silver coins and gave them to the man who worked at the inn. He said, ‘Take care of this hurt man. If you spend more money on him, I will pay it back to you when I come again.’”
And persuaded the man to go with him until he could enter the Night Shelter that evening (run by volunteers from the churches)

36 Then Jesus said, “Which one of these three do you think was really a neighbour to the man who was hurt by the robbers?” 37 The teacher of the law answered, “The one who helped him.” Jesus said, “Then you go and do the same.”

And thankfully for the man in 21st century Wycombe - his followers still do.