Today I have for you an adlet and a blink.  Now you probably think that in my studies in Virginia I’ve learned some fancy new theology about things called adlets and blinks.  And you can’t wait to hear what they are.  But you’re a bit nervous because you suspect that they’ll be a bit theological and, well, boring.  But, they aren’t religious at all, and I didn’t learn about them at seminary.  No, adlets and blinks are two new ways that radio advertisers are trying to get our attention.  We’re familiar with the 30-second radio ad.  Well, to save money advertisers have reduced these ads to something much shorter and cheaper.  An adlet is a commercial that lasts five seconds.  What can you say in five seconds?  Well, a whole lot more than you can say in two seconds, which is what a blink is – an ad that lasts two seconds.  So, this would be a blink, and it’s real too: ‘The Simpsons- doh – tonight on Fox.’  There we go.  Two seconds.  A blink.  We could make some up, couldn’t we?  “Eucharist at 10 am at St John’s.  Be there.”  Or how about, “St John’s – great coffee hour.”  No?

Well how about these attempts at an adlet and a blink?  Time these: “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.”  Five seconds – it’s an adlet!  And this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Two seconds!   It’s a blink!  Ladies and gentlemen of the advertising trade Jesus beat you to it.  An adlet and a blink, when taken together they sum up what you need to do to live for God.  Love God with all you’ve got – heart (the center of the spiritual life), soul (including feelings and desires), mind (the intellect), and strength (the power to do things.  Just everything, really.  And love your neighbour as you love yourself. 

Now Jesus gave his adlet and his blink in answer to a question.  A teacher of the law stood up and asked him “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”   And he didn’t like the answer he got.  “Love God with all I’ve got and my neighbour as myself?  No other way?”  Luke says he wants to justify himself so he asks a follow up question.  “Who is my neighbor?”  And Jesus tells perhaps the greatest and well-known short stories ever told.  A story that has touched nearly every culture on earth and passed into the sub-conscious of Western culture.  So that in our country, even the most secular person could tell you something about the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Over the centuries this parable has been a source of great comfort.  It can give us a nice feeling.  It’s all about being kind to people and doing good to others.  And it can make us all fuzzy and sentimental.  But if we take the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a source of comfort then we’re actually misunderstanding it completely.  Because Jesus didn’t tell it in order to make the lawyer feel comfortable.  He meant it as a challenge not a congratulations.  So let’s get beneath the surface and get to grips with what Jesus is actually saying.  Because I promise you that when we really understand how radical the parable of the Good Samaritan is we’ll never see it as a source of comfort again.

So let’s quickly re-cap.  There’s a man on a journey, a Jew, from Jerusalem to Jericho, along a path through steep mountains- bandit country.  This road was about 17 miles long and in that distance it dropped about two miles in altitude.  And as this man was on his way he was attacked, beaten up, robbed and left for dead.  Now fortunately for the casualty there was a pastor going down the road, who would be bound to stop and help him.  Unfortunately for the casualty, this was a pastor who was late for an appointment or something- probably had a service to take and he couldn’t possibly be late and let everyone down.  Best to get to Jericho and then send help.  That may have been it – we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he passed by this man for good reasons.

Now, fortunately for the casualty there was another holy man on that road, a priest.  He was bound to help.  Unfortunately for the casualty this was a priest who had a bit of savvy about him.  He knew about those hills, he’d heard of their reputation for bandits.  He’d heard how they ambush innocent travelers – one lies at the side of the road pretending to be injured and then the gullible traveler stops to help and is jumped on from behind by the accomplices.  Oh yes, this priest knew about these sorts of things; he knew that this man lying there was faking – he wasn’t really unconscious, and that blood I’ll bet it was goat’s blood smeared on him to look convincing.  Well, they weren’t going to ambush him that easily.  And so he hurried off. To the police station, no doubt, to report the presence of ambushers.

Now, unfortunately for the casualty who should be travelling along that road but a Samaritan.  A dirty, good-for-nothing, moral delinquent.  A man who would probably go over to the body and rummage through his pockets to see if the bandits had left anything.  No way would he help.  Fortunately for the casualty, this was a Samaritan who failed to match the racial stereotype, who blew apart the prejudice of the Jewish hearers of Jesus and showed up their bigotry for the evil it was.  And we know the end of the story.

Jews and Samaritans.  They could have been Hutus and Tutsis, Palestinians and Israelis, North and South Koreans, Ulster Protestants and Catholics, Serbs and Croats, Russians and Chechens or any other ethnic conflict that we have lived through in the last generation.  Let’s understand how much Jews and Samaritans hated each other.  It was with a passion.  Jews saw Samaritans as lawbreakers, heretics, heathen, infidels, immoral, thoroughly awful people.  Samaritans saw Jews as self-righteous, pompous, arrogant hypocrites.  And here was Jesus talking to a Jewish audience and he asks, “Who is this man’s neighbor?”  Is it his fellow-countryman; is the respectable leader of his own people?  Is it the man who is ‘one of us’, the one he has everything in common with?  Or is it the man he has nothing in common with, who is despised, the man who isn’t welcome in his home, the man who would cause him to publicly disown his own daughter if he were to marry her, the man he hates?  Sit down and brace yourself because I’ve got some news that will come as a shock to you.  That person who you think is a lowlife is your neighbour.  That is the person you must love.

Imagine Jesus telling this story at a Ku Klux Klan rally, and they asked him who is my neighbor.  Jesus might tell this parable, having the Grand Master of the Klan crash into a ditch only to be passed over by a white sheriff and a white pastor.  Finally, along would come a black sharecropper playing the part of the Good Samaritan.  How do you think the people at this KKK rally would respond when Jesus asked, “Which of these three proved to be a neighbour?”  They’d suddenly find themselves pairing the words ‘good’ and ‘black’.  The good black man.  And how would they deal with that new reality? 

But maybe even that illustration is too remote for us and a bit too safe – because we’re not white supremacists and we feel untouched by the power of the parable.  It doesn’t sting us.  Maybe, to give the parable its original shock value for our time and place we should make the Good Samaritan into the good Muslim.  The good fanatical Muslim.  The good fanatical Muslim who despises the US and the UK.  Now we’re getting the true horror and challenge of this parable.  Because, you see Jews and Samaritans did use violence against each other in New Testament times.  There was terrorism between these two racial groups.  The parable of the Good Muslim Fanatic?

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq I was asked to preach and lead worship at one of the top private schools in England.  Now you’ve seen in movies the archetype of posh, upper class, stuck-up English private schools which turn out Lords and Dukes.  Well this was that kind of place.  And during the prayers I prayed for the Queen, the Prime Minister, President Bush, our troops and for peace and justice.  But I also prayed for Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi soldiers.  And by the reaction in the school chapel that morning you’d have thought I’d blasphemed.  There was an audible ripple of surprise, and hundreds of eyes that had been closed in prayer were suddenly open and looking at me in shock.  And the chaplain told me a few days later that he had had several boys say to him following my visit, “Why pray for Iraqis – we shouldn’t pray for them, they’re the enemy.”  We Christians can be so picky about which parts of the Bible we believe and act upon.  And the parts we don’t agree with we like to interpret the meaning out of them.  So we read straightforward commands of Jesus like ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… love your enemies and do good to those who hate you’, and we can say ‘Well, whatever it was Jesus meant when he said love your enemies, pray for them and do good to them he didn’t mean love your enemies, pray for them and do good to them.’  He meant something else.  It’s a mistranslation of the Greek, or something.  But he couldn’t put it clearer than those two instructions in the Sermon on the Mount.  And when we truly understand the parable of the Good Samaritan in its original context then we can’t fail to be shocked and even offended by it.  The offence of the Gospel.

CS Lewis once said, “I have an elderly acquaintance of about 80, who has lived a life of unbroken selfishness and self-admiration from the earliest years, and is, more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know.  From the moral point of view it is very difficult!  As you perhaps know, I haven’t always been a Christian.  I didn’t go to religion to make me happy.  I always knew a bottle of port would do that.  If you want a religion to make you fell really comfortable, I certainly wouldn’t recommend Christianity.”

So, according to Jesus, our neighbour is not the person next door you have nice chats with in the front yard.  Your neighbour isn’t the person you get on well with.  Your neighbour is the person you have nothing in common, the person you don’t get on with, the person who does their best to irritate you, or slanders you, or gossips about you, or stabs you in the back, or betrays you or cheats you.  And Jesus says we must love that person as much as we love ourselves.  List a few things that are difficult – swimming the Atlantic, walking on your hands to Grand Rapids, the Cubs winning the World Series – all a piece of cake next to this: loving those who hate you, loving your neighbour.

Now this is so challenging that we can end up feeling completely discouraged and think that the life Jesus calls us to is not even worth attempting because we’re bound to fail. And that’s one option.  Or, we can change the way we define love.  The love Jesus calls us to have is not the emotional, feeling kind-of love.  And that’s good because how can you produce warm feeling for someone who has done you wrong?  You can’t.  No, this love that we are called to show is a decision.  It is a choice to put the other’s person’s needs ahead of our own pain and anger and entitlement.  Impossible?  Not quite, but still pretty difficult.  But for God much easier.  So let’s ask God for the resources to love – especially those we don’t want to.