At various times in sermons, and on other occasions too, I’ve said that one of the most important things we can do, as Christians, is read the Scriptures on a regular basis. Having said that, I do know that the Scriptures aren’t always the easiest of things to read. Quite apart from the difficulty we can have in pronouncing some of the names, in the Old Testament in particular, it isn’t always easy to understand what a particular story in the Scriptures is about, what the message of the story is. And that’s sometimes made worse because, at times, one story in the Scriptures can seem to contradict another story. For that reason I’ve also said, on occasions, that when we’re reading the Scriptures, it’s often a good idea to have a Bible commentary to hand to help us get a deeper insight into the part of Scripture we’re reading, so that we can understand it more easily and in a better way.
That said, if we are going to use Bible commentaries, whether that’s in written form or a spoken commentary such as we can find on the internet, we do need to make sure that we use a good one. We need to make sure that the person giving the commentary knows and understands the particular text we’re reading and, just as importantly, is giving an accurate commentary on the text and not distorting it in any way to push their own agenda.
One thing we always have to be aware of when we’re reading or listening to what people say about the Scriptures is that some people are quite willing to distort the Scriptures in an attempt to make the Scriptures say what they want them to say rather than what they actually do say.
For example, when I was a student at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield, I was once in a lecture during which a book by an American theologian was being quoted by the person giving the lecture. At one point one of my fellow ordinands, who was himself American, from Texas, put his hand up to speak, and when he did speak, what he said was that we should always be very wary of what American theologians and biblical commentators say because what a lot of them actually do, is preach American values and pass them off as scriptural and Christian values.
But it’s not only American theologians and biblical commentators who do this kind of thing. One of the most blatant, and I would say shameful examples of it I’ve ever come across, occurred at a CMD event I once attended. CMD or Continuing Ministerial Development to give it its full name, is something that all Anglican clergy are obliged to do these days. CMD events are designed as opportunities for the clergy to meet, sometimes for a full day, sometimes for half a day, to study either a topic, such as safeguarding, for example, or a biblical text together. And they are, as I say, compulsory. At one CMD event I attended, we were given a lecture on the well-known story from 1 Kings about the two women who come before king Solomon wanting him to settle their dispute about which of them was the mother of a child.
I’m sure you all know the story but just to remind you. Two women who live in the same house both give birth to sons within a few days of each other. One child dies and the women argue about who’s child has died and who’s is still alive. To solve the problem, Solomon orders the child cut in two so that both women can have half a child. One woman responds by telling the king to give the child to the other woman because she doesn’t want the child killed, but the other woman is quite happy to see the child killed and for neither of them to have him. Solomon, realising that a mother would never want any harm to come to her own child, makes his decision and give the child to the woman who wanted him to live.
Just before this story, we read that Solomon asks God for ‘an understanding mind’ so that he ‘may discern between good and evil’, and, because Solomon hasn’t asked for long life, earthly riches or victory over his enemies, God grants Solomon’s request. And at the end of the story about the two women we’re told that,
‘…all Israel heard of the judgement that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.’
So this is undeniably a story about the wisdom of Solomon. And yet, the person who spoke to us about it that day, a canon theologian, as I recall, said it isn’t. Despite what the Scriptures plainly say, he said that this isn’t a story about Solomon’s wisdom at all, it’s a story about the wisdom of women. In his interpretation of this story, Solomon showed no wisdom at all in this case, he would have just had the child killed and cut in half. In his interpretation of this story, it was the woman who intervened to stop him from doing that, who showed wisdom. That’s not what the Scriptures themselves say about this story and I think the deafening silence from virtually everyone in the room, including the female clergy, both when he finished his lecture and when he was thanked for it by the bishop at the end of the day, showed what the clergy thought of his rather distorted interpretation of it.
I think this example in particular shows just how careful we have to be when we’re reading or listening to commentaries on the Scriptures. It shows how even a well-known and well-understood story can be distorted to make it fit the personal agenda of the person writing or speaking about it.
So how do we avoid being drawn in by people who distort the Scriptures in this way? One very good way is to take each story in the Scriptures as part of the whole of the Scriptures rather than taking them out of context by reading and interpreting them as stand-alone stories. That was the trap the person who so appallingly distorted the story of Solomon’s wisdom fell into; he failed to take into account (or worse, perhaps deliberately ignored) what comes before and after the story of the two women and took the story out of its scriptural context in order to change its meaning. And that’s something we could very easily do, and has on occasions been done, with this morning’s Gospel story of the Good Samaritan.
We interpret the story of the Good Samaritan as a teaching on how to love our neighbour, as a teaching that we’re supposed to be good to them, to love them and care for them, whoever they are. And you might think it’s impossible to misunderstand the meaning of this story or to distort it to give it a different meaning; but it’s not, I’ve heard it done, and it’s been done by treating it as a stand-alone story so that it’s been taken out of the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole. And it’s very easy to do that if we treat the story of the Good Samaritan as a stand-alone story, because then we can put a very different interpretation than we normally do on how it answers the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’
We know that the Jews and the Samaritans were not on good terms with one another because of their cultural and religious differences. It could even be said that they hated each other because we also know that during the 1st Century, fighting between the Jews and Samaritans because so bad that Roman legions had to be called in to stop it. So for a Samaritan to help a Jew would have been unthinkable. And yet, it’s the Samaritan in the story who shows himself to be a neighbour to the man who was robbed and beaten. And this fits with Jesus’ teaching in general. In St Matthew’s Gospel we read,
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”
And St Luke’s Gospel tells us,
“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.”
So if we take this story of the Good Samaritan in the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole, the answer to the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ is ‘Everyone is my neighbour’, even those who hate me are my neighbours, even Jews and Samaritans are neighbours, and we’re to love everyone, even them, as we love ourselves and treat them as the Good Samaritan treated the man who was robbed and beaten in the story.
But just think about what we read towards the end of this story;
“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?”He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
If we take this story out of the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole, we can read this to mean that my neighbour is the one who acts as the Good Samaritan did. In other words, my neighbour is the one who does good to me and cares for me and it’s those people who we’re called to love as ourselves. And I have heard that interpretation put on this story. But that contradicts what Jesus says about loving our enemies so it can’t be the right interpretation of this story.
What all this shows us is just how careful we have to be when we’re reading and interpreting Scripture. It shows us that we can’t treat stories in the Scriptures as stand-alone stories but that we have to treat them as part of the whole and we have to read them both in the context in which they’re set in the Scriptures and in the context of the whole of Scripture. And it shows us too that, as helpful as commentaries can be in helping us to understand the meaning of what we read in Scripture, we have to be careful that we use good commentaries and good interpreters rather than commentaries and interpreters who are trying to push their own agenda by distorting Scripture to make it say what they want it to say. People who, in effect, are trying to turn the Word of God, into their word.
Amen.
The Propers for the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 