The Great Commandment

April 15, 1984
Lakeland

June 1984
Port Charlotte

Sources of the Living Tradition – III

The Great Commandment

“Jewish and Christian teachings which call men and women to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”

This third in the series, “Sources of the Living Tradition” is a recognition that Unitarian Universalism has deep roots in Judaism and Christianity. Our religious affirmations and values did not spring out of nowhere in the Age of Reason, or from critical Biblical scholarship, or from the contributions of the Enlightenment, or from one General Assembly.

The focus of this affirmation is Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10-25/37). If this parable were the only tradition we had of Jesus, we would know a great deal about his Jewish religion, about his primary attitude that religion is not what you believe but what you do, and his universalistic attitude about the dignity and responsibility of all persons, even the rejected and despised.

The jurist (scribe lawyer), meaning an expert in the law of Torah, asked the question, “What am I to do to inherit eternal life?” It is written that the law expert was tempting Jesus – tempting for what purpose? Probably to trap Jesus into saying something that would violate the law or possibly to get a response that would be contradictory or self-serving. But Jesus turned the answer right back to the expert. In his reply, Jesus validated the Jewish tradition of both the jurist and himself.

Jesus responded like unto the Socratic way of inquiry, “What is written in the law?” The expert’s answer was correct. “You must love the Lord your God, heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” That answer suggests that this brief, but comprehensive statement was commonly taught by the rabbis of the day as the condensation of Judaic religion. One scholar writes that there was need to condense the teachings, for there were 613 commandments in Torah, 365 negative and 248 positive ....

As most of you know, I cannot accept as true for me the God of the Torah, who was the God of Jesus and [the God] of the expert in the law. The ultimate mystery of the cosmic order and the human place in it remains a mystery to me. But there are those in our Unitarian Universalist tradition for whom such an affirmation is authentic. Respecting our diversity and not choosing to be dogmatic about my theistic agnosticism, there’s no problem for me in the inclusion of this source in our living tradition.

After all, there are many definitions of God, including the worship of the highest values one can idealize. Luke’s gospel says “the Lord Your God,” allowing a range of interpretation.

But the Judaic tradition did not stop there. The law expert properly goes on, “Also [love] your neighbor as yourself.” That, too, is basic in the Judaic tradition. Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, was once challenged, “Teach me all of Judaism while I stand on one foot.” Hillel did not begin to list all of the 645 commandments. He replied, “What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”

The expert on the law pushes Jesus – the Gospel says, “anxious to make an excuse for himself” - it would be interesting to know why he felt a need to justify himself, but that’s unknown. Anyway, he asks, “But who is my neighbor? Then he follows the matchless tale of the robbery and beating on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the passing by of the priest and the Levite, and the practical assistance of the Samaritan, who cared for the victim, saw him to safety to the inn, and paid the innkeeper to continue caring for the wounded man.

The power of this parable is unappreciated if we fail to understand the Samaritan good neighbor. The expert in the law must have been startled. If we, like he, were asked “Who is your neighbor?”, we might tend to give easy answers. My neighbors are on my street, men and women on the job, members of my fellowship, my circle of friends.

To understand the universalism of Jesus’ parable, recall that the wounded victim was not a neighbor of the Samaritans in any usual sense of the word. There were centuries of hostility between the people of Judea and the people of Samaria. Samaria was once the Northern Kingdom, Israel, where ten of the tribes had settled.

In 722 BCE the Assyrians invaded like a “wolf on the fold” and that was the end of the Northern Kingdom. The Assyrians took into captivity the upper class and the artisans, leaving only the poorer peasants. Unlike the later Babylonian captivity of the Judeans, there never was a return of the exiles. The Assyrians colonized the Northern Kingdom with Babylonians and Syrians. Thus Samaria in Jesus’ day was an ethnically mixed land. This was cause for much contempt toward the Samaritans.

Another reason for Judean contempt toward Samaria was religious difference. While most of the Samaritans were Jews, their differences, religious practices were the cause of both dislike and misunderstanding. Contrasting with the prevailing religious beliefs of Jerusalem and Judea, the Samaritans accepted only the Pentateuch.

Even more divisive, the Samaritans had their own sanctuary on Mt. Gerazim, where sacrifice could be offered. In Judea, the Jerusalem Temple was the center containing the Holy of Holies, the only place where sacrifice could be offered. When Jesus placed a good Samaritan as the central hero of the parable, Jesus was challenging both prevailing racial/ethnic contempt and religious orthodoxy. Today the imagery might well be a PLO partisan coming to the aid of an Israeli.

There is another tradition preserved the the gospel called John (4-21/24) which illuminates again Jesus’ attitude toward any limitations on worship. Jesus is in Samaria and meets a Samaritan woman at a well. She says, “Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.”

Jesus replied, “Neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father. But the hour cometh and now is, when the true worshiper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.... God is a spirit, and they that worship him [must worship him] in spirit and in truth....”

To Jesus, the place of worship was unimportant. The spirit in which one worshiped was central.

Such a comprehensive, non-doctrinal attitude toward the meaning of worship represents a universalistic attitude, not only rare for that day, but also must have stirred his hearers either with anger or perhaps a wider view.

Consider also how Jesus made the law expert answer a different question than “Who is my neighbor?” After telling the parable, Jesus asked the expert, “which of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among thieves?” “He that showed mercy on him.” “Go thou and do likewise.” [CJW note: and Thoreau - “Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything.”]

The question was turned around – not who is my neighbor, but to whom can I show myself a neighbor? Not just the persons next door, or at the nearby desk or others we know, but to those in need whom we may not know but whose wounds or sorrows we see.

The black poet Countee Cullen understood this in his lines called, “Any Human to Another”

The ills I sorrow at
Not me alone
Like an arrow,
Pierce to the marrow,
Through the fat
And past the bone.

Your grief and mine
Must intertwine
Like sea and river,
Be fused and mingle,
Diverse yet single,
Forever and forever.

Let no man be so proud
And confident
To think he is allowed
A little tent
Pitched in a meadow
Of sun and shadow
All his little own.

Joy may be shy, unique,
Friendly to a few,
Sorrow never scorned to speak
To any who
Were false and true.

Your every grief
Like a blade
Shining and unsheathed
Must strike me down.
Of bitter aloes wreathed
My sorrow must be laid
On your head like a crown.

Sidney Harris, one of the wise persons of our time, wrote, “Religion at bottom is a matter of relationships. If you do not have a right relationship to others, you cannot have a right relationship with any god you may pray to regardless of doctrine or belief.”

Dr. Paul Pryser, a clinical psychiatrist, cites an old German poem, the spirit of which is that if there is the existence of one’s own spirit after the grave, “we shall have to account for the two great gifts with which we have been endowed: our Heart and our Reason. The author, concluding that our deeds and our attitudes will be decisive, concludes with these lines:

At last, when I shall rise up from
death’s deep grave
To stand before the world Judge,
face to face
He will judge all my deeds without
reprieve,
But my belief -
No, that I won’t believe.” (p. 257)

Such is the force of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “To reinforce the teachings of Christ with miracles is like holding a candle in front of the sun to see it better.”

One thing more – where is our road between Jerusalem and Jericho? Where are the wounded we may help heal? Our roads are better policed than those in Jesus’ day. Our follow-through is more complex. We can, and many of us do, support causes that feed the hungry, heal the wounded and ill. Few of us individually will come upon someone who has been beaten up on Route 41, 301, or I-75, although we know it happens.

Who are the Samaritans? Jesus, in his parable, dealt with his own day. He was contemporaneous. He spoke to and about the despised and deprived of his own day.

Can we too be contemporaneous and still permit the power of this parable to pierce our prejudices? How broad is our vision? How deep our compassion? The whole world is more intertwined now than Jerusalem and Samaria were then. The issues are more complex now than those between Mt. Gerazim and the Temple in Jerusalem then. How shall I show myself a neighbor? And to whom?

Each of us can answer for himself or herself. The answers will differ. But the world is a neighborhood and Countee Cullen in his verse captured it -

Let no man be so proud
And confident
To think he is allowed
A little tent
Pitched in a meadow
Of sun and shadow
All his little own.