Father Stephen De Young: We’re going to be picking up in Luke, chapter 10, verse 25, which will be the parable of the Good Samaritan. And once again I’ll say my usual, that if you missed it or you just want to hear it again, if you listen to, on the website, the first Bible study on Luke, you’ll hear my long rambling introduction to the Gospel of Luke. But I’m not going to go through all that again.

But just to kind of get us caught up to where we were last time. Just last week we reached sort of a transition point in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus had been teaching in Galilee. We talked about how he was sort of using the city of Capernaum which was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. That was sort of his base of operations. Peter had his home there, his family there and from there Jesus and his disciples were going out and preaching in the little sort of pop-up villages that we talked about that sort of followed the harvest and followed other sources of labor in the area around Galilee. And so Jesus was traveling and preaching. There were fairly big crowds of people following him. As I said, we reached this transition last week where Jesus began his journey to the city of Jerusalem. And we talked about how that journey from Galilee south to Judea and Jerusalem in particular took him through Samaria. And so we saw that Jesus sent out the 70 or the 72. We talked about how numbers get a little shaky in Greek sometimes, but he sent out the 70 ahead of him to go to the villages and the towns before he got there to preach and sort of prepare them for him to come. We saw how some of the Samaritan villages did not receive him, as well as some of the Jewish villages did not receive him. And then over the course of this journey Jesus has continued to teach his disciples and his followers and to teach in the towns that would receive him as he goes.

So, we’re now in this sort of second major part of the Gospel according to St. Luke which the first phase was sort of Jesus ministry in Galilee. Now we have this journey to Jerusalem and spoilers, I think we all know what’s going to happen, that once he arrives in Jerusalem is not going to go well and then that’s going to be sort of the finale of St. Luke’s Gospel. So unless there were any questions left over before or any issues, we’ll go ahead and get started here in Luke, chapter 10, verse 25:

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Lawyer is not necessarily the best translation because of course, when we hear lawyer, we think attorney, sort of the local attorney. This is not an attorney, this is a lawyer, as in an expert in the Torah, an expert in the Old Testament law. So this is one of the scribes or one of the Pharisees, sometimes people refer to as teachers of the law. So this is a religious scholar, not someone who tries cases or helps write contracts and notice, he stands up… doesn’t say he stood up and inquired of him, stood up and made a request for information or that he was one of Jesus’s followers or disciples. It says he stood up and tested him. The word that’s translated as tested there is the same word that’s often translated “tempted” or “temptation”. So this is reflecting the fact that right from the get go, this isn’t an honest question. There’s an adversarial relationship here.

Interlocutor: Maybe that’s why they use the word lawyer?

Fr. Stephen: Well, they didn’t have an adversarial legal system at the time, but yeah, this is an adversarial thing. He’s not coming to Jesus to try to learn from Jesus. He’s coming to Jesus to challenge him publicly in front of these other people. And so when he says, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He’s not asking a legitimate question about the way of salvation. He’s, based on his knowledge of the Scriptures and his understanding of the Old Testament, he’s now going to test Jesus to see what Jesus knows and see if he can catch him out in something.

He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?”

This is also why it’s important that he’s a teacher of the law. He comes and asks Jesus this question. So Jesus is here already, pointing out that it’s not an honest question. What are you reading in the Law? That’s what this guy basically does all day, just read and study the Torah, read and study the Law. So he says, “Why are you asking me? What does it say in the Scriptures? You’re an expert on the Scriptures, you should know what you need to do to inherit eternal life.”

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So he answered and said, ” ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ “

Now, it’s important to remember, we see this quoted from the New Testament all the time, and Christ refers to these elsewhere, as we’ve seen in Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ refers to these as the two greatest commandments. But this isn’t something new, right? This isn’t something new. And that’s part of the point that St. Luke is making here. This isn’t just something that Jesus came up with. Jesus didn’t say, “Oh, yeah, forget all those rules of the Old Testament, all you have to do is love people and then everything’s fine,” the way it’s sometimes presented, right? That’s not what he’s saying.

These are both quotes from the Book of Deuteronomy. And so he’s really answering the question that Jesus asked him, right? Jesus asked him, “What does it say in the law that you’re supposed to do?” And so he quotes Deuteronomy. This is what the Torah, this is what the law says we should do in order to inherit eternal life. Love the Lord our God, with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”

And that phrase, do this and you will live is also a reference to the Book of Deuteronomy. Remember the Book of Deuteronomy starting in chapter 28. I know it was four years ago that we talked about Deuteronomy, and many of you weren’t here at the time, but starting at Deuteronomy, chapter 28, really 28 through 30, it’s laid out that there are two paths. God says to the people of Israel, “I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. You need to choose today which of these two paths you’re going to go down.” He says, “if you obey the law,” because this is coming at the end of Deuteronomy, “if you obey all the commandments that I’ve given you in this law, then you will have blessings in this life, you will live, you will prosper. If you disobey and rebel against this law that I’ve just given you, the consequence of that points of that is going to be death and destruction.”

The teacher of the law here quotes Deuteronomy. Jesus refers to Deuteronomy. He says, “Yeah, well, that’s what Deuteronomy says at the end. You do these things and you will live. That’s where life is, is in doing these things.” Okay, so this should be end of discussion, right? That’s right, we follow the commandments of God, right?

But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

The word “justified” gets thrown around a lot. But what this means is the person who is justified, or declared righteous, is the person who wins a court case. Now, we tend to think about court cases in terms of criminal law in our modern American setting. So we think of this as being found innocent. But the legal system, especially the legal system of the Old Testament, was more like our civil suits. We have two people engaged in a lawsuit. The judge hears the case. One person is found to be in the right, and the other person is found to be in the wrong. And then there’s reparations accordingly. That’s more like as we saw when we were going through the Old Testament law, the legal system in the Old Testament.

So the person who was justified, the person who was declared righteous, was the one who was declared to be in the right. So when it says he was seeking to justify himself, what that means is he’s trying to structure this question so that he’s on the right side of it, meaning he’s not asking, “What do I need to do so that I can inherit eternal life”? That’s not really his question. We’ve now established, okay, these are the things you need to do to inherit eternal life. And he wants to get Jesus to agree that, “Oh, yeah, you’ve done them, you’re fine, you’re good. You’ve achieved eternal life because you’re such a warm, loving, good person, who’s kept all the commandments.” That’s what it means. He’s trying to justify himself. He’s trying to frame this in a way that he’s the person who has eternal life.

And so he says, “Who is my neighbor?” Well, why is that related to justifying himself? Well, it’s the second commandment. The first commandment is pretty clear. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, right? That’s pretty clear, what that means. But love your neighbor as yourself. Now, all of a sudden, we get into sort of vague territory. We have some wiggle room for interpretation here, and the piece of wiggle room he chooses is, “Well, who’s my neighbor? Who is it who I have to love? Is that my literal neighbor, the guy who lives next door? The guy who lives on either side? As long as I love them, I’m okay? Is that just my fellow Jews? Is that just my fellow Pharisees and not Jews who are quote unquote, ‘sinners?’ Is that just my family and friends and relatives? Is that just all of us who are oppressed by the Romans? Because I’m sure that doesn’t include the Romans. We don’t have to love them. I know that much, right? So who is included in that?”

Because if he could narrow down that group, that’s going to help him a lot, because he could say, oh, well, if that’s just like my family and friends, yeah, I love them. If that’s just the people who live in my village, well, I pretty much get along with most of them, right? So who is included in that? Who am I obligated to show love to is the question he’s asking, hoping that it’ll be a small enough group that he can have it covered. That he can have it covered, no repentance required.

So now Jesus in answering him doesn’t just give him a direct answer. He tells him a story. Now, we’ve talked before, obviously, about parables, and we’ve talked before about how parables, the parables Christ uses, are, for the most part, so that the everyday people he’s talking to, remember he’s talking to first century peasants, these are people who do back breaking work for as long as the sun is up and may or may not have a meal every day. These are people who are doing hard farming labor for as long as there’s sunlight, who are doing other physical labor as stonemasons as what we would call now carpenters, right? They’re day laborers. These are not people who are literate. These are not people who sit around musing about Greek philosophy, right?

So, Christ is communicating deep spiritual truths to those people, using stories that they can understand and relate to. Now, in this case, we’re in a little different situation than that because the person he’s talking to is not that the person he’s talking to here is literate, is highly educated, has this background in the Old Testament scriptures, has this understanding of the Scriptures, and remember, sets up this adversarial relationship with Jesus and isn’t asking honest questions where if Jesus gave him a direct answer, he would accept that direct answer. If Jesus gives him an answer he doesn’t like, that doesn’t justify him, if Jesus gives them an answer that says, “Well, you know what? You’re not keeping the law,” he’s not going to accept that. And so what Jesus does with the story is he tells this story essentially in order to get this man to answer his own question with an answer he doesn’t like. So this man came to trap Jesus, right? Jesus is going to use this story to trap the man and get him to say the truth and arrive at the truth, even though it’s a truth he’s not going to like.

Then Jesus answered and said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.”

So this is a person in Judea. They’re going from the city of Jerusalem to the city of Jericho in the south. This route was known for having a lot of bandits and a lot of trouble along it. Jericho was not a big settlement at this time in history, so it wasn’t one of the main Roman roads that they would patrol. So this setup happened quite often. He is beset by these bandits, right? They take everything. They even take his clothes. They strip him naked; they beat him. They leave him for dead. They leave them expecting him to just die on the side of the road to bleed to death.

“Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.”

So one of the priests from Jerusalem is walking around and sees this guy, crosses over the other side of the road. Now, when we read this, there’s an obvious thing, right? The obvious thing is, “Well, this is a person who isn’t very compassionate, right? This is a person who doesn’t have a lot of empathy. This is a person who doesn’t want to go out of his way even a little to help someone who’s in dire straits, who’s in trouble.”

But there’s something else to note here. Why would a priest not go help somebody who he sees bleeding on the side of the road? If this guy is nearly dead, the priest may think he is dead as a priest according to the law, according to the Torah, that this fellow is an expert in, if he goes and touches him, he gets this person’s blood on him, or if this person’s dead and he touches a dead body, he’s unclean, he can’t serve as a priest. And so from the perspective of the Pharisees, this priest, by not helping the man, is keeping the law from the Pharisee’s perspective, right? From the Pharisees perspective.

“Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side.”

So, the Levites were sort of the second tier under the priests. There are a lot of analogies in the church fathers where they compare the priests of the Old Testament to the priests of the New Testament and the Levites of the Old Testament to the deacons of the New Testament. So these are people who are also from the tribe of Levi, but they weren’t from the priestly line which came down through Aaron. But so, they would sort of assist, they would do other functions around the temple other than the priesthood which did the sacrifices. They would help with the other affairs of the temple.

So the Levite once again, if he’s going to be in the temple, if he’s going to be in this place that is holy, that is sanctified, he has to remain clean. So from the perspective of the Pharisees, of the teachers of the law, he’s keeping the law by ignoring this person.

“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion.”

We talked last time a little bit about the Samaritans and the hatred that the Jewish people had toward the Samaritans because from their perspective they were these foreigners. They were at best half breeds. Some of them wouldn’t even admit that they had any Jewish blood in them at all. They were foreigners who were there posing as Jews, who had taken part of their land, who were religiously heretical as far as they were concerned, so they had no use for the Samaritans whatsoever.

But now Jesus is pointing out, this Samaritan comes walking down the road, he sees this guy lying in the ditch and he has compassion on him.

“So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.’”

So not only does he come and personally take care of him bandages, wounds, put oil on them, which was the equivalent of today, giving him medication, giving him medicine, antibiotics but he takes him to an inn, to a place where he can sleep, and then he leaves to denarii. And remember, a denarius is what you got paid for one full day’s work, so this is two days’ pay. Then he takes down, gives the innkeeper, and says this will cover his expenses for as long as he needs to stay here, food and lodging and everything. So he does all this for this stranger who he finds on the side of the road, even though he’s one of these hated lowlife Samaritans.

And who, by virtue of being a Samaritan, remember, is automatically, from the Jewish perspective, unclean, right? They’re worse than Gentiles. Automatically unclean all the time. But he helps this person. And Jesus said:

“So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?”

And he said, “He who showed mercy on him.”

So Jesus says, to which one of them was the neighbor to him? Now, notice what Jesus has done with the word neighbor. Remember he asked the question, who is my neighbor? He’s using neighbor as a noun, right? Neighbor as a noun. There are some people who are my neighbor and some other people who aren’t by virtue of who they are in his mind. And he only has to love the ones who fall into that category.

Whereas Jesus is using neighbor as a verb, which one of these was a neighbor to him? Meaning I could choose to be a neighbor to you or not to be a neighbor to you. It’s not something that’s set in stone, I’m your neighbor or I’m not your neighbor. And so, Jesus is pointing out to him already, by the way he phrases that, that he’s asking the wrong type of question, that loving your neighbor means being a neighbor to everyone whom you encounter by loving them. It isn’t restricting how many people you have to love.

That man gets that because this story is kind of trapped in because what’s he going to say, “Oh, the priest was a good neighbor, right?”. Well, no. He’s been trapped by the story. And so you notice and he said, he who showed mercy on him, you notice he doesn’t say the Samaritan. The word Samaritan doesn’t come out of his mouth. He just says, oh, that one. He was that guy who was merciful to him, I guess, right? Because he’s been trapped into saying that.

Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

So there are several points here, sort of in layers. The most obvious one, of course, is that we need to have compassion for people who are in need. Going beyond that, as we just saw, Jesus is telling us we have to be a neighbor to everyone by loving them. It’s not a question of determining whether this is a person I need to love or not. We become their neighbor by loving them and caring for them, showing compassion and mercy on them.

But also, we have to keep in mind again, who he’s talking to. He’s talking to a teacher of the law. And the beginning of this discussion, see, sometimes we read the parable of the Good Samaritan and we read the first part about the two great commandments separately, again. Not in the context of each other. This is told in the context of Jesus and his teacher of the law having a discussion about, what? What it means to keep the law, and by keeping the law receive eternal life, right? That’s what the discussion is about.

And so, the priest and the Levite are, from this teacher of the law’s perspective, keeping the law, by keeping themselves clean, by keeping themselves pure, by keeping themselves clean, by keeping themselves separate, right? By not being a neighbor to this man. And what Jesus is pointing out is by keeping the holiness rules, by keeping these cleanness rules, they’ve broken what the teacher of the law just said from Deuteronomy was one of the great commandments, by not loving their neighbor as themselves.

Since they haven’t loved their neighbor, since they weren’t a neighbor to this man, they’re in violation of the law in a far more grievous way. They’ve subjected themselves to death, he goes so far as to say, despite having kept these sort of unimportant cleanness rules.

Why do I say they’re unimportant? Well, I say they’re unimportant relatively because remember, we read all the lists in Leviticus of all the things that make you unclean, right? But then we also read how you become clean again, how you become clean again. And some of the things that make you unclean in the book of Leviticus are things you pretty much have to do, like go to the bathroom, right? These priests aren’t able to not go to the bathroom. Believe it or not, you find some things in Second Temple Jewish literature where there were priests who would not go to the bathroom on the Sabbath, or try not to for that reason. So yeah, some of them took it that far.

But the idea wasn’t, “Oh my gosh, if you go to the bathroom, you’ve sinned horribly.” That’s not the idea. The idea is after you go to the bathroom, you need to clean yourself. You need to clean yourself before you come to the temple, before you present a sacrifice to God, before you pray, before you go back about your business.

So those laws were not made to stop the priest and the Levite from helping this person who’s dying on the side of the road. That’s not their purpose. Their purpose was after you go and help this man on the side of the road and you get covered in his blood or he dies and you’ve handled a dead body in order to go and give him a proper burial, before you go to the temple, before you offer a sacrifice to God, before you go pray, before you go and spend time with your family, you clean yourself. You clean yourself. That was the point of the rule.

And so, the core of the point that Jesus is making to the particular person he’s talking to, is that by trying to follow these details of the law, they’ve invalidated the whole point of the law. When St. Paul talks about this, he’s going to refer to this as the letter of the law, literally the writing of the law, what’s written versus the spirit of the law, which is the Holy Spirit, God’s purpose in giving the law in the first place. And if you’re trying to follow the writing of the law, right, follow the word for word, literal meaning of the law, if you do that in such a way that it violates the purpose for which the law was given in the first place, if it causes you to not help someone in need, then you’ve violated the whole law and your attempt to follow has been worthless.

So we talked last time a little bit about how St Luke’s Gospel and all the Gospels have these two contexts. There’s the person who Jesus is speaking to. In this case, Jesus is speaking to the teacher of the law. We’ve been talking about that. What he’s saying to this teacher of the law, about the way he views the Torah, the way he views the law, the way he tries to keep the law, and that he’s missing the point, essentially. Even though he gives the right answer at first, by the second question, he shows he doesn’t understand the answer he just gave.

But now the second is, why does St Luke include this? Because, remember, St. Luke is writing to another audience. St. Luke is writing to the church, once there’s a church, to these churches that have been planted by St Paul that are all over the Roman world that include mostly Gentiles who have become Christians. Well, as I just mentioned, St. Paul talks about the law and how to keep it quite a bit. We’re going to see that especially when we get into Galatians, but also Romans, especially the early chapters.

And remember, the big crisis that’s particularly addressed in the book of Galatians is the fact that there were Jewish Christians who are trying to force the Gentile Christians to be circumcised, to follow all of the food laws of the Old Testament, to keep all of these rules about cleanness and uncleanness, and to follow all of these rules. St. Paul’s going to come along and say that if you do that, you are not following Christ. You are negating what Christ did.

And so this is often misinterpreted. You’ll see a lot of this on the History Channel and the National Geographic Channel. National Geographic is doing this more than History Channel nowadays, so I should probably switch to complaining about them. But when you see these documentaries and there’s books published about it all the time, where they try to put, “Well, Jesus thinks the law is a good thing and St. Paul thinks it’s a bad thing, and St. Paul says all that Old Testament stuff and all that law stuff is bad and you should just follow Jesus and he puts them in opposition to each other.” But I would say the point that St. Paul is making is essentially the point that St. Luke is making here and that Jesus was making. So there’s not a disagreement, but that by trying to follow certain details of the written law, you miss the point of the law as a whole. By trying to force the Gentiles to still follow all the rules of the Old Covenant, you miss the fact that there’s a New Covenant. You miss the fact that we don’t worry about circumcision anymore, now we have baptism. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore, we have the Eucharist because Christ sacrificed himself. He offered his own body and blood for us.

So, none of these things are done away with, but they’re changed. And if you try to go back to the old way of doing things, you’re essentially saying, “Well, Jesus was the reality these are pointing to, but I like the shadows of the predictions better than the reality.” For St. Paul, for St. Luke, Jesus was the point of the law, right? The whole point of the Old Testament law was to point us to Christ to show us who Christ is going to be.

And so, when this teacher of the law came to Jesus and saw what Jesus was doing in healing and casting out demons and what he was teaching, the correct response from the teacher of the law who supposedly has spent all this time and understands the Torah and understands the Scripture so well, he should have recognized Jesus immediately. He should have become Jesus’s follower. He should have followed Jesus’s teaching if he really understood it. But the fact that Jesus, the reality, the Messiah that all this was pointing to is standing right in front of him, and he’s wanting to have an argument about who his neighbor is, so he knows who he has to love and who he doesn’t have to love, so that he could come out on the good side on the Day of Judgment, right? He shows that he doesn’t get it at all. He doesn’t get it at all. And that’s the same point St. Paul is going to make to these Jewish Christians who are still obsessed with these Old Testament regulations, is maybe you missed it, but Jesus died and rose from the dead, that’s kind of more important than whether or not I can have a ham sandwich or whether I can have cheese on my hamburger. That kind of pales in comparison. Why are these still the things that you’re obsessing over and these are the most important things to you?

And so, this is important. And now I’ll move to us today, in that the church has plenty of rules. We got big books of canons. We’ve got all kinds of rules about things. One of the most obvious examples right now, since we’re in the middle of Lent are the fasting rules. The fasting rules, despite what some people may tell you, are not optional. This is not just like, “Hey, if you feel like it, you might try and do something like this.” They’re not optional.

On the other hand, on the other hand, they have a purpose, right? And that purpose is not just we like telling people what to eat and what not to eat, somewhat arbitrarily, right? It was not a conspiracy by the seafood industry to sell more seafood every spring, right? That’s not the purpose. Let me tell you, the purpose was not for you to spend 3 hours buying groceries because you have to read all the ingredients on the label and make sure there’s not whey at the bottom of the list. That’s not the purpose either. The purpose of the fasting rules is that during Lent, we’re not supposed to be focused on what I’m stuffing into my mouth. I’m not supposed to be focused on my next meal and how good it is. I’m not supposed to be mentally focused on it. I’m not supposed to be spending a lot of my money on it. I’m supposed to be eating simply, eating what I need and not more than that. Because my money is going to those in need, not to stuffing myself and feeding myself. It’s going to those in need. My mind isn’t focused on eating and being full. My mind is focused on Christ and his sufferings and his death that we’re preparing to commemorate and then on his resurrection. My time is not focused on going and buying food and preparing meals. My time is focused on prayer and attending the extra services for Lent. That’s the purpose.

But some people become so obsessed with the food rules and keeping all the food rules, that they’re spending more money, more time, more of their thoughts are focused on what they’re eating than the rest of the year. And in that case, you’ve defeated the whole purpose. At that point, you might as well not fast because you would have more time and more money and everything to focus on Christ if you didn’t, right?

So there’s the same balance now as there was then, that the law wasn’t optional. “Well, some of this is good stuff, so I’ll stick with that, right?” Jesus isn’t saying that. He’s not saying you don’t have to wash your hands right after they get dirty. But the point he’s making is these rules are all there for a purpose, for you, to help you towards your salvation. And if you take them and do anything else with them that leads you in a different direction or that’s going to harm other people, leading you to judge other people, then that’s not keeping the rules, because by violating the purpose for the rules, you’ve violated the rules.

And so, this is how we have to understand, this is a big part of what St. Luke is saying here by bringing us this parable from Jesus in this context, how we understand the law, how we understand the commandments, how we understand the rules, and what they’re for. What they’re for. And this is a conflict we’ve seen constantly in all the Gospels we’ve looked at so far, right? When Jesus heals somebody on the Sabbath, “Oh, how dare you. There’s a rule you’re not allowed to do things on the Sabbath,” right? And Jesus said what earlier in St. Luke’s Gospel? He said, “Is it right to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil? Was the rule about following the Sabbath made to stop me from helping people who are suffering? God wanted to make sure that there was one day a week when people who are suffering didn’t get help, and that’s why he made that rule”. No, that’s absurd. That’s absurd.

But there are plenty of people then and there are plenty of people now who don’t understand that, who can’t find that balance. And it can be tricky. This is one of the reasons we go to confession to somebody and they talk with us about these things, because it can be tricky to find that balance between just ignoring the rules, going down that road, and just they’re not important at all, on the one hand, or on the other hand, sort of making an idol out of them, where that’s all we care about is following all the rules. And anybody who doesn’t follow the rules is a bad person, and we follow all the rules, so we’re a good person. Down the middle is where we’re called to go. And sometimes we need some help with that. And that’s why we have spiritual fathers, everybody here, including me, who help us sort that out when it gets tricky.

So we’ve got another here: “Now it happened.” And as we talked about last time, what’s translated here as “now it happened” is a Greek word that’s sort of covering a Hebrew and Aramaic word that’s used throughout the Old Testament, that word being hinneh, which means sort of it’s usually translated as “behold” in the King James Bible, you’ll just say “behold”, and it’s a transition, right? So we’re at the end of one story now. We’re starting a new piece.

“Now, it happened as they went.” Now, this “as they went”, this is on that journey toward Jerusalem.

Now it happened as they went that He entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house.

First person who invited them into their home, that’s where they went. They weren’t supposed to try and sort of trade up, “Oh, hey, now this rich guy down the road heard my preaching, so I think I’ll move on over there.” You go to the first person to invite you. So Martha welcomes him into her house. Now, although we’re not told here, we’re going to be told in St. John’s Gospel what town this is. But the fact that it’s referred to as her house does not mean that she was a wealthy woman. Because there were not wealthy, unmarried Jewish women. This time in history, we’re going to find out. And St. John’s Gospel that this is in Bethany. Bethany being sort of the transliteration of the Hebrew bet-ani, which means the “house of the poor”. We know from St. John’s Gospel that Martha and her sister Mary lived in a slum outside of Jerusalem, essentially.

But why is this important? This isn’t a wealthy person who invites Jesus and his disciples to come and stay with her, that she’s going to feed them and take care of them. This is a poor woman, but who still goes out of her way to extend hospitality to Jesus and his disciples.

And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesusí feet and heard His word.

While the wording here may not mean anything to us, we just sort of have a mental image, okay? Jesus is sitting there and he’s teaching and she’s sitting on the floor. Disciples are probably sitting on the floor and she’s sitting there listening to him. But that phrase sat at Jesus’ feet. Sat at Jesus feet is an idiom, right? It has a meaning unto itself. To sit at someone’s feet is to be their disciple. It’s a more formal relationship than that, to be their student. So if you ask St. Paul where he studied, he would say that he sat at the feet of Gamaliel the Rabbi, right? That would be how he used the expression. So this isn’t just she’s sitting there kind of like, “Oh, this is neat,” listening to what Jesus said with her legs crossed. And that’s why there’s that “also”. She also sat at Jesus feet. Also, in addition to who? In addition to the disciples, meaning her sister Mary is also a disciple, a follower of Jesus is what this is saying. So Martha, this is probably how Martha knew who Jesus was, because her sister is one of his followers. It’s someone who’s been traveling and listening to Jesus. And so when they come to their village, Martha invites them into her home.

But Martha was distracted with much serving

But Martha was distracted with much serving. She’s so hospitable, she’s cooking, she’s cleaning, she’s straightening up, and she’s running around trying to take care of everybody because it’s not just Jesus, it’s Jesus and his disciples. So she’s got this small crowd. She’s running around trying to take care of everybody.

and she approached Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me.”

This sounds a lot like my wife when we have company over, because she’s usually running around trying to take care of everybody. And I’m hanging around talking because as you may have noticed, I like to hear myself talk. And she will occasionally come and gently nudge me and say very politely that I should come and have assist her in the kitchen. So this is a similar kind of sentiment. Martha is trying to show hospitality, trying to take care of all this stuff. From her perspective, Mary’s sitting there not doing anything, listening to Jesus talking, come on, right? I need some help here. So she asked Jesus, “Come on, tell her to get off her duff,” right?

And Jesus answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things.  But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”

So what does he say? He’s not saying to her, “You need to be more like your sister.” He’s not saying, “You’re the bad sister. Mary’s the good sister”, right? Showing hospitality is a good thing, right? When he says you’re worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed, alright? He’s saying it’s good, what you’re doing, showing hospitality, but there’s a piece of the puzzle you’re missing here. And Mary has chosen the good part and your sister has it in that what? She’s become Jesus’s disciple. Right? And that will not be taken away from her.

So he’s not telling Martha, hey, quit cooking and come sit here too, right? But he’s saying, he’s saying in addition, you need to hear what I have to say also, right? Martha needs to also become Jesus’s disciple.

Why is this important? Well, you’ll hear a lot, especially the people here who are women. You’ll hear a lot of women’s Bible Studies about you need to be a Mary and not a Martha. Have you heard a couple of them? Yeah, you’ve heard a couple of them again, where Martha is the bad sister, right? And Mary is the good sister, right? And I don’t know how exactly that would be applied. Like. you shouldn’t show hospitality and have people over to your house? You should just listen to Christian radio all day? I’m not sure exactly where you would go with that kind of understanding.

But what’s going on here is something very important because, again, I just mentioned women’s Bible Studies. When we think about men and women in our modern age, we sort of take for granted a lot of things that couldn’t be taken for granted then. Most civilized people in American culture consider men and women to be equals, right? At least religiously, right? That was not the case then. At this time in history, remember we’ve talked about this before, right? The Jewish perspective was a little better than the Roman perspective. The Roman perspective, remember we talked about how Aristotle said that women were basically defective men, right? That every baby that starts developing in the womb is trying to become a boy. Some of them don’t quite make it and get born as a woman. And they’re kind of weak and silly, and so we need to take care of, right? And that’s basically the Roman perspective on women and the Greek perspective on women. Women were basically there because, well, we have to reproduce to have a next generation of people. I need an heir, right? I need a male heir to inherit things, and the only way for me to do that is to be married to a woman and have children until we get a boy, and that’s it.

But we talked about, this as part of why homosexual relationships were so prevalent in Greek society, is because the men in Greek society didn’t consider women to be their equals. So how can you have a loving relationship if there’s no equality? And so you will find a lot of these times where they’re writing love poetry and that kind of thing, it’s generally other men, right? But then they all have a wife and a family sort of on the side while they’re going out and having these same sex romances. There’s a little bit of that with certain people, Oscar Wilde and certain people of the Victorian period.

But so this was common in Greek culture and common in Roman culture. So just the idea that Jesus would have a woman as one of his disciples is ridiculous and absurd, in the Roman world, Plato had zero female students at the academy. And the idea that you could have one would have been ridiculous to them, it would have been ridiculous to them. So we’re going to see the same thing again with St. Paul, but part of what you’re seeing here and why St. Luke includes this story, it seems like this little sort of semi-irrelevant story that St. Luke includes here is important, is that there’s this struggle in the early church, remember, a lot of these converts are gentiles from a Jewish background. It’s not as if the Jews were practicing equal rights for women at this point in history either. They were a lot better. They at least had in the Old Testament, they had some of the grist for the mill, right? If they read Genesis one and two carefully, they say, oh, God created human beings, male and female, right? This at least means that a female isn’t a defective male. This at least means that God created and intended to create both. This at least sets them in parity to one another.

So, the raw material for understanding both men and women, as equally human and equally loved by God is sort of there, even if it took them many centuries to get there, whereas it wasn’t there at all in Roman culture. But we’re dealing with Gentile converts to Christianity who St. Luke is writing to, who came from that Roman background, understanding of women, where it was sort of like Roman citizens, non-Roman citizens, slaves, women, women and children. And then, I guess, women and children slaves would be the absolute bottom. They’re coming from that mindset. So there was this idea that the women in the church were basically there to sort of do the busy work while the men talked.

Interlocutor: Pilate’s wife and other upper class Roman women weren’t considered citizens?

Fr. Stephen: No. As opposed to Greece, in Roman law, there were a few little strides where, like, women could inherit.

In Greek culture, if a man died and didn’t have a male heir, his wife didn’t inherit his estate. The estate was taken by… they’d figure out a male heir, it’d be like his cousin’s son or something would receive everything and his widow would receive nothing, in Greek law. Roman law was a little better than that in that the woman would inherit something. But then if the woman the woman couldn’t represent herself in court and couldn’t make business contracts, meaning she’d have to get married again in order to function. And once she got married again, whatever she inherited from her first husband became the property of her second husband. So, when they say that women could inherit, that doesn’t really mean they could inherit and run the family business. That means it could sort of be held in escrow in the woman’s name until she got married again and it went to a male or until her son was old enough to take over. And then he would take possession of it all, and the mother was dependent on her son taking care of her.

So, yeah, even Roman women, I mean, Pilate’s wife can’t, like, tell him what to do or anything. Women didn’t vote in the Senate. Women couldn’t be a senator. Until the Christian period, there were no empresses. I mean, the empress was the emperor’s wife. But you don’t see the emperor dies and his empress runs the Roman Empire.

Now, once the Roman Empire is Christianized, you do see that several times. But that’s part of the transition to Christianity; in the pagan Roman world, that never happened. So, yeah, Roman women were better off than peasant women, but not by a lot. Peasant women were non-persona. They were non-persons. They were not legally considered persons. So if a woman who wasn’t a Roman citizen was raped, murdered, whatever, there was no legal recourse under Roman law because they’re not a person.

So there were laws governing what could… women could be victims under Roman law, if they were a Roman citizen, there would be consequences if you did something to them. So they had a little better status but not anything like what we would consider equality or even protection under the law, really, because they were basically still seen as property, right? If a Roman woman was raped or murdered, that would be seen as basically a crime against the husband or the father or the son. You did this to his woman and therefore you’re responsible to him. So even in that case, it’s not really their legal rights. It’s the husband’s rights to the women in his household.

So, there’s this very negative view of women. And so in the early church, there were a lot of people who carried that over, right? So remember, they celebrated the Eucharist in the context of a meal. So the women came to the gathering to prepare the meal, right? We’ll go over here. We men will go over here and hear the preaching and do all this. The women can go cook the food right over there in the corner, and they should probably keep quiet while they’re doing it because I don’t want to hear them gossiping while I’m trying to listen to the sermon. There’s a lot of that attitude.

Well, St. Luke here, part of the reason he includes his story is he’s questioning that attitude, right? Because what he has here is Jesus praising the woman who’s his disciple, who’s listening to what he’s saying, learning from him, understanding him. So what does that say about the women in the Christian community that St. Luke is writing to? They’re just as responsible as the men to hear the preaching, to come to know Christ, to keep the commandments. They’re not just a function of their husband or their father, but they have this standing before God of their own that they need to pursue. They need to also be a Christian. It’s not enough to just be married to a Christian man. “Well, he understands all this stuff.” That’s not enough. So that’s two-fold. Number one, that’s elevating the status of women in the Christian community a lot, but it’s also placing a lot more responsibility on Christian women than was normally placed on women.

Women, by the same token, couldn’t then use that as an excuse. “Well, my husband worries about that stuff. I’m just going to go cook the lentils and not worry about the preaching and all this stuff. Oh, it’s too much for me to understand”, right? On either side. So this little story, while it seems like this sort of little one off story about a sister being mad that her sister is not helping her in the kitchen, the point here that’s being made is very important in its original audience in terms of the role and status and expectations for women who are Christians.

Interlocutor: There’s also a reason he puts it in that place, because it’s right after the story with the young boy. It’s sort of a parallel. Who does this guy who is obsessed with studying the law and doesn’t care about his neighbor. And then we have Martha who is admirably wanting to serve everybody, but she’s not studying the law.

Fr. Stephen: Well, she’s allowed something to become a distraction. The teacher of the law has allowed the details of the law, and it’s sort of scholastic mental games with it, to become a distraction from the actual purpose of the law, which is showing love and mercy and compassion. In the same way, Martha has sort of allowed these things, which are good things in and of themselves, just like the law is a good thing in and of itself. She’s allowed this good thing of showing hospitality to become a distraction from the more important thing, the one thing that’s still needful. So there is a parallel there. Between those two stories.