In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! [Glory to him forever!]

Today’s gospel reading is often seen as a command for us to be nice to one another, to help one another, to be kind to one another. Certainly at a particular level, this is true. We should help one another; we should bear one another’s burdens. But I want to take a little bit of a different perspective this morning, if you will permit me, to speak about the nature of our incorporation into the body of Christ and how it relates to today’s gospel reading.

Certainly, the commands that Jesus speaks about—and we have said many times before, these commandments really guide every action of our life, that we are called to love God, and it says not just love him, but with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our heart, with all our strength, that is, everything within us, every breath within us. We sing the first hymn of the Divine Liturgy, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” To bless the Lord means to ascribe to him the position that he deserves in our life, to acknowledge his goodness, his kindness, his holiness in everything that we do.

But this second commandment, Jesus says, is like unto it: Love your neighbor as yourself. So the question is: How do these two commandments relate to our life in the Church? In this parable, Jesus is saying something about the religious leaders of his day. If you notice in the story, when the man—it says very specifically where he is coming from and where he is going: is actually very significant. He says, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Now, in that day, of course as today Jerusalem is the center of the spiritual life actually of many religions, so Jerusalem is the city of peace, the city of spiritual peace. But it says he was going from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jericho is seen as kind of the place of sin, the place away from Jerusalem. And notoriously in that day, that road that led from Jerusalem to Jericho was actually kind of a seedy place. It was dangerous. It was dangerous to be on that road by yourself. Something could happen to you.

So because this is a parable, the meaning was not simply that a man was walking from Point A to Point B. He was walking from the place of spiritual truth and life and holiness and beauty, away from it. He was walking toward sin. It says there, along the way, he was found, he was beat up by robbers. They took everything from him. It says they left him half-dead. So the idea in the parable is not necessarily about doing good things for other people—which, again, is the right thing to do. But the parable is really for us to understand our incorporation into the body of Christ, that all of us—all of us—were born for paradise. We were born to be united to God. And when we turn away from that, when we fall away from that, it leaves us, it says, beat up, half-dead, spiritually speaking. It can even wreak havoc in our life.

So it says—and here comes the condemnation of the religious leaders—“Now by chance a certain priest came down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.” That’s not a very good thing to do, and he was a religious leader! He was a Jewish priest. He was the one who offered sacrifices to God. And it said he saw this man who was in need of help and he did nothing. It says, “Likewise a Levite”—a Levite is one who is in the lineage of the priesthood, from which the priests are taken. When he arrived at that place, [he] came and looked, and passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion. And the Samaritans are seen as kind of not even Jewish; they are the enemies of the Jews. They’re the ones who took part in the Jewish religion, that Torah, those first five books, and distort it, and add other traditions to it. So the Jews really didn’t see the Samaritans with great affection. And he said: But the Samaritan was the one who did the right thing.

In a way, to the Jewish leaders, Jesus was as good as a Samaritan. He was rejected by them. He was rejected to the point where they killed him. They hung him on a cross as though he were a common thief, a common criminal. But the irony is Jesus is the One who came to his own people and healed them. He healed them of their diseases. He healed them even of their kind of diseased way of thinking. And this is very significant, because what we have in the Church, what we have as members of the body of Christ—and this is really kind of the only point today—is that we come to the Church. We are members of the Church for one reason: to be healed. Because we are the one who is moving, always, constantly, away from Jerusalem, away from good things, toward Jericho, down that seedy road, knowing that we’re going to take the chance of being beat up.

But Jesus is the One who doesn’t look on our faults, who doesn’t look on what we did wrong. And what he says is, through his compassion, through his kindness, through his mercy, number one, he heals us. He heals us.

We gathered here on Wednesday, and it was very gratifying to see so many people here want to learn about prayer. We said that prayer is the way that we stand before the presence of God, that we acknowledge his existence, and that we attempt, through prayer, to have communion with him, to have union with him, to converse with him. This is part of our healing; this is part of our acknowledgment of who God is.

So when we come to the Church, we receive the sacraments of baptism, which forgives our sins; of chrismation, of this anointing with oil, which grants us the Holy Spirit. We receive the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ in us, to give us new life. We receive unction when we’re ill and when we’re sick, the anointing with holy oil. And it says in the parable Jesus poured oil and wine on his wounds. You know, the medicine of 2,000 years ago wasn’t very sophisticated, but if we were saying the parable today, we would say he put antibiotic ointment on the wound; he cleaned it out; he put a bandage on the wound.

This is all a metaphor for us. This is a metaphor that sin wounds us, and Jesus comes by, and through his grace, through the wine, that is, the Eucharist, through the oil, that is, unction and chrismation and mercy—it’s really taken from the Greek word for “mercy,” “oil.” They’re very close related: eleison, elaios. Christ is pouring mercy on our wounds.

So as members of the body of Christ, the best metaphor we can recall is the one that St. John Chrysostom says. He says the Church is not a court of law; it is rather a hospital for sin-sick sinners. Ultimately, all of us, in one way or another, are being constantly healed. And the entire point of the Gospel is that we are members of this hospital, the Church, being constantly healed, being constantly drawn into the life of God, becoming closer to him, becoming more like him. And what happens? What happens is, God willing, we get healed! We change. And because we recognize this change in us and this healing in us, and we in turn want to grant that mercy to each other, to other people who maybe even have harmed us or other people [who] are in need of healing—that’s the Church!

So this parable today, yes, it’s about being kind to other people and being nice to other people, but it’s really about the Church. It’s really about us. Jesus, in this parable, is the Samaritan; we are the person that got beat up. He takes us, finds us on the road, pours oil and wine in our wounds, pours mercy on us, new life into us, in order to heal us. It says he takes us to the inn. This is the inn! We’re in the inn! We’re in the hospital, the place that we’re being taken care of. And at the end, he tells the innkeeper, “Whatever it costs, I’ll repay you when I return.” “When I return”: what’s the return? The return is the second coming. Christ is coming again to repay all those who are showing mercy, who are showing the love of God and sharing that with other people.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, God has shown mercy on us. God is constantly healing us. And what he’s calling us to in this parable is to heal one another, is to love one another. Let us be merciful to everyone [whom] we meet, so that we can then show the source of our mercy, and that is the love and the life and the mercy of God himself that has been poured out on us. To him who is our life, with the Father and the Spirit, be glory, honor, and majesty, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! [Glory to him forever!]