8th Sunday after Pentecost, July 10 2016
Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 130 (CH4 87); Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
Who is my neighbour?
When Amy-Jill Levine was a child, she wanted to be pope. “You can’t,” her mother told her. “You’re not Italian.” These days, that is no longer an insuperable obstacle.
A more fundamental stumbling-block is that Levine is a Jew.
Seven years younger than me, she grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a predominantly Roman Catholic and Portuguese neighbourhood. She was introduced to the church through ethnic Catholicism, and to her it was marvellous: feast days and festivals, pageantry and mystery, food and more food.
When she was seven, she asked her parents if she might attend catechism with her Catholic school-friends. Her broad-minded parents agreed. “As long as you remember who you are,” they said, “go learn.”
She loved it. It was easy to see the parallels between the Jewish stories she learned at Hebrew school and the Christian stories told in catechism class.
The only thing she didn’t like was the parable of the good Samaritan. She didn’t like that the Levite in the story was a bad guy.
Amy-Jill Levine is, as her name suggests, a Levite. She took the parable personally.
I have good news for her. Not that she much needs it, since she is today a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee.
*
The Levite in the parable may be a bad guy, just as the priest is. You’re not supposed to pass by on the other side and leave a half-dead man to die.
But that’s in the story, which – not just when it comes to the Samaritan, but right from the start – goes against all the expectations of its Jewish hearers. Parables often do that.
Jesus of Nazareth, who tells the parable, doesn’t condemn Levites, any more than he condemns priests. He doesn’t even condemn ministers of the Church of Scotland.
What he does do is provoke. He stirs things up. He tells uncomfortable stories. He pulls the rug from under our complacent feet and lets us fall on our butt, because he is desperate for us to change.
And in this he is in the same line as the Hebrew prophets, such as Amos, of whom Levine learned in Hebrew school.
*
Who is my neighbour?
It’s not enough to be a priest or a Levite, or a minister, or even just a Christian in the pew. We need to listen to the prophets.
Amos was a shepherd from Tekoa in the southern kingdom of Judah who prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel eighth centuries before Jesus.
The book that bears his name opens with ringing denunciations of the kingdoms neighbouring Israel: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon and Moab. These denunciations, we may imagine, went down well with his Israelite listeners.
But Amos isn’t content to leave well enough alone. He goes straight on to denounce in the same or stronger terms the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. That, we may imagine, was less palatable.
No one likes to be told that theirs is a society that crushes and oppresses the vulnerable. No one likes to be told that theirs is a society that sells the poor for a pair of sandals. No one likes to be told that their society is heading, recklessly, for self-destruction.
Say that about other societies, especially those we dislike. Don’t say it about us.
Amaziah is a priest of Bethel, the chief sanctuary of Israel. He has no reason to like Amos, who condemns the worship of Bethel because it is divorced from economic justice, who warns that Bethel will be destroyed, who threatens the king.
In the ancient Near East, priests like other royal officials were the eyes and ears of the king, his ancient security service; so Amaziah sends a report to King Jeroboam. Amaziah also forbids Amos from ever speaking at Bethel again. For Bethel is committed to the interests of the state: It “is the king’s sanctuary, and … a temple of the kingdom.”
Working Preacher is a website run by Luther Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota, and I often find it helpful. This week it was mostly helpful in a negative way.
Writing on Amos, Blake Couey says this:
“It’s easy to cast Amaziah as the villain in this story, but closer examination reveals a more sympathetic character. No doubt he sincerely believed he was doing God’s will by supporting the ruling powers. … [O]ne can even admire his commitment to the security of the institution he served. Faithful leadership frequently requires Amaziah’s brand of pragmatism.”
This, I’m afraid, is to miss the whole point of Amos. One could scarcely miss it more completely. But it demonstrates nicely how hard it is for those of us who live in or come from the western societies that dominate our world to hear the prophets – and yet how much we need to hear them.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way:
The prophets are “… the most powerful and effective voices ever heard … for keeping religion honest, humble and compassionate. Prophets sniff out injustice, especially injustice that is dressed up in religious garb … Prophets see through hypocrisy, especially hypocrisy that assumes a religious pose … A spiritual life that doesn’t give a large place to the prophet-articulated stance will end up making us worse instead of better, separating us from God’s ways instead of drawing us into them.”
A spiritual life that doesn’t give a large place to the prophets won’t help us to act neighbourly.
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Who is my neighbour?
“My neighbour is all mankind, especially those who persecute or calumniate me.”
In my Christian Brothers school in Dublin in the 1950s, catechism was part of the curriculum; and I still remember this answer.
I knew what it meant to be persecuted: I was bullied in the school playground. I wasn’t sure what it meant to be calumniated, but it didn’t sound like much fun. (It isn’t.)
But, even in primary school, I got the point: My neighbour is everyone. Or to follow Jesus in flipping the answer, I should be a neighbour to everyone.
I’m still not very good at that. None of us are. And in this land, it’s almost impossible.
A 13-year-old girl, sleeping in her bed at home, is knifed to death. A 15-year-old boy, riding in a car with four friends after swimming in a pool, is gunned down and killed. A 23-year-old young man with Down syndrome is shot in the stomach and dies a month later. A father driving with his family comes under assault rifle fire in a drive-by shooting and dies at once.
It is easy to feel compassion for some of these victims and increasingly hard to feel compassion for them all, because they come from different sides in a conflict that threatens to overwhelm all our humanity. It is easy to say that these victims, dead or half-dead, are our neighbours and those victims are not. It is easy to yield to that temptation.
“And the worse that things get here,” writes Bradley Burston in Haaretz, “the stronger the urge to give in to it, to decide that one side is composed of human beings and the other, animals.”
“I need to realize that if I feel only the pain of one side,” he adds, “then I can’t trust my senses at all. If I am outraged only by the killings of one side, I am complicit in the killings of both.”
Burston is a Jew who gets the point.
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Nine days ago, Dr Ali Abu Sharkh, a physician from the West Bank village of Dahariya was driving north to Jerusalem, on his way to prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque, when he saw a car overturned ahead on the highway.
It was the car of the Mark family of Otniel, a Jewish settlement not far from the doctor’s village. He pulled over, and he, his wife, and his brother rushed to help the four family members trapped in the vehicle.
They were unable to save the father, Rabbi Michael Mark. But they saved the life of his wife, Chava, and treated and calmed their two children.
Dr Sharkh has probably not read Amos and may never have heard the story of the good Samaritan. But he too gets the point.
“It’s my duty as a doctor to save lives,” he told Israel’s Channel Two. “It doesn’t matter if they are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian.”
*
“Which of these three,” Jesus asks the lawyer, “was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
And, perhaps ruefully, the lawyer responds: “The one who showed him mercy.”
To act neighbourly is to show compassion. To act neighbourly is to respond as a human being to other human beings.
“One day,” writes Bradley Burston, “a generation of young people will arise here, as it does everywhere, strong young people who will come to realize, all at once, that their parents were stark raving idiots.”
When we learn as last to respond humanly – not as Jews or Palestinians or expats, but as human beings one to another – then we can cross over from the other side and meet in the middle and embrace each other. When we learn to be neighbours, then we can claim at last to understand what it means to love God.
Sources
Bradley Burston, “Israel: The best horrible place in the world to live”, Haaretz, July 5 2016
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperCollins, 2006)
Gideon Levy, “After shooting a Palestinian with Down syndrome, Israeli soldiers fled without looking back”, Haaretz, July 2 2016
Gideon Levy, “Heinous killing on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide”, Haaretz, July 2 2016
Eugene H Peterson, The Message Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2003)
Working Preacher