Sunday
July 15th 2019 15th Sunday Ordinary Time (Cycle C)
Rule Breaking Compassion
The tie in
between today’s readings: The Law of Love
Just
as God the Creator has physical laws that govern the universe. The Lord is also
God the Judge with moral laws that apply to everybody, everywhere, everyday.
Our reading in Deuteronomy 30:10-14 has Moses rhetorically asking, “Where can
anyone find these majestic directives of the Almighty? Up in the unreachable
heaven? If so, who would come down to give it to us? Or, maybe, we need to send
the bravest among us to a strange land beyond the sea? Does anyone know the
way? “It’s not necessary,” Moses answers. The great God of the cosmos planted
His sublime code in each of our hearts and if we pay attention to them, we’ll
discover that...
Psalm 19:8-11 New American Standard Bible
(NASB)
8 The
precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; The commandment of the
Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.9 The
fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; The judgments of the Lord are
true; they are righteous altogether.10 They
are more desirable than gold, yes, than much fine gold; Sweeter also than honey
and the drippings of the honeycomb.11 Moreover,
by them Your servant is warned; In keeping them there is great reward.
It would be hard to find anyone
to disagree with the Psalmist’s conclusions about the Law of God, especially
when you see two people who are usually at odds, Jesus and a lawyer, both
agreeing on it’s summation in Luke 10:25-28.
Luke 10:25-28 New American
Standard Bible (NASB)
25 And a lawyer stood up and put Him to the
test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 And He said to him, “What is written
in the Law? How does it read to you?” 27
And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your 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.” 28 And
He said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”
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It gets trickier, though when you go from the abstract and try to move
it to everyday life where the rubber meets the road.
Luke 10:29 New American
Standard Bible (NASB)
29 But wishing to justify himself, he said to
Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Kindness
Even During a War
We had just searched a
small village that had been suspected of harboring Viet Cong. We really tore
the place up-it wasn't hard to do, but had found nothing. Just up the trail
from the village we were ambushed. I got hit and don't remember anything more until
I woke up with a very old Vietnamese woman leaning over me. Before I passed out
again I remembered seeing her in the village we had just destroyed and I knew I
was going to die. When I woke again, the
hole in my left side had been cleaned and bandaged, and the woman was leaning
over me again offering me a cup of warm tea.
As I was drinking the tea and wondering why I was still alive, a
helicopter landed nearby to take me back.
The woman quietly got up
and disappeared down the trail.
Unknown author
The thing that makes Good
Samaritan stories different from all others is their rule breaking compassion.
These people free themselves from the chains of the expected and challenge
themselves to do God things. She broke the rule of “an eye for an eye” to give
aid to a dying soldier that shot up her village. He broke the rule of self
preservation to risk himself by saving a beaten stranger on the Jericho Road,
also known as the “bloody pass”. The biggest rule breaker of them all is God
Himself. In His plan to save mankind, He turned the universe upside down: the
master became the servant, the offended became the conciliator, the beloved
became the forsaken. Romans 5:10 tells us that though we were His enemies, God reconciled us to Himself
through the death of His Son. That idea is reinforced in our reading today in
Colossians. Jesus, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all
creation did it all to reconcile us back to the Father by making peace through
the blood of His cross. I’m sure that you can think of other examples.
The actions of the Almighty
don’t make sense because we measure them with our perspective. We live
according to our rules: the rules of human nature, the dictates of society, and
the truisms of prejudice. God, however, is looking for revolutionaries that
want to be compassionate rule breakers like Himself. God has written His laws
in our hearts! He wants us to think like Him, respond like Him, and love like
Him. This is not natural. It can only be achieved by the radical change of
Christ in our lives. The Law giver wants us to become law livers! The challenge
of the Good Samaritan is daunting because it costs us something up front in time,
money, commitment, and especially the command to die to ourselves. The Holy
Spirit can empower us to fulfill the Law of love by breaking the hold of the
lesser rules of “me first”. Our Father
commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the Law written within.
Let us show that we love God with all our hearts by seeking His power to
fulfill love of neighbor. The Samaritan did. Let’s go and do likewise and be
law livers!
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