John 21:15-25 (Matins)
Galatians 6:11-18
Luke 10:25-37

"Who Is My Neighbor?"

Perhaps a better translation would be, "Behold, a certain Biblical scholar stood up and asked Him a probing question." Now, I'm stretching a bit. The verb here is ekpeirázo / εκπειράζω, which means "to put to the test," "to tempt." But I hasten to add that this word is never used in Scripture (expect in this solitary instance) to address other people but only used to with respect to God: "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." It appears almost not at all in the Bible and only four times in the New Testament, and the other three have to do with not tempting God. Therefore, there is no analogue or reference point for its usage. So you see the cosmic irony here. He is putting God to the test though he does not know it.

This man was an expert in Halakah, that is, in the written and oral tradition of the Mosaic Law. He is a Pharisee, therefore. (The Sadducees had no interest in such discourse, and he certainly was no an Essene.) He rose to his feet — a posture of respect before the seated Teacher. For example, God is seated (with Jesus seated at His right hand). Kings are seated. Judges are seated. Petitioners before them must stand.

The Pharisee addresses Jesus as Didáskale / Διδάσκαλε a title carrying great respect. He is not antagonistic. He merely displays the manner of the Pharisees which is continual debate. They interrogated each other endlessly much as a sustained investigation conducted by Socrates would be characterized by question after question.

Nicodemus was just such a man. A member of the Sanhedrin and scholar in Halakah, he was very likely a Pharisee. Jesus calls him a "teacher of Israel" (Jn 3:10). And his method also was to ask challenging questions.

The Pharisees were theological seekers as the Greek philosophers were seekers of truth. For example, Saul was a theological seeker — a Pharisee born into a family of Pharisees. The city of his birth was Tarsus in the Roman province of Syria, renown for its learning and respected academy, where (if he attended) he would have learned rhetoric, Greek philosophy, and Greek literature. He says that he sought out Gamaliel in Jerusalem, an internationally renown scholar in Halakah. It was Gamaliel, head of the highly respected School of Hillel (Jewish Encyclopedia) and a the member of the Sanhedrin, who counseled the other members to keep an open mind concerning the Jesus movement:

(Here is the idea of ekpeirázo again though not the same word.) Gamaliel's disciple, Saul (Acts 22:3), did follow this new Master, Jesus, discovering that "this work" was of God.

Yes, he had a dramatic encounter on the Damascus Road but Saul's intensity and extreme dedication were already a defining part of his nature and formation. Certainly, he was a seeker from his youth and turned his energies to the teachings of Jesus because this was the vein of gold for which he had been digging and mining all his life.

The Pharisee standing before Jesus is also a digger and a miner and goes straight for the gold petitioning the Teacher:

That is, what's it all about?

Jesus replies with a question, participating in the Pharisaic method:

The Pharisee answers in two parts. The first part is the Shemah, the greatest prayer of the Jews, which he probably wore on his person, in tefillin, or phylacteries, which were little, leather boxes strapped to your forehead and upon your arm. Inside the box was a scrap of parchment reading:

The second part of his answer — "'and thy neighbour as thyself.'" — is found among the Books of Torah, only in Leviticus, in five brief words, yet adduced by the great Pharisee Hillel as a defining element for all the Scriptures.

You probably have heard the famous story. It is high noon. The two men face each other. Hillel declares

Shammai accepts the challenge. So Hillel assumes the crane-like posture and recites the formula offered to Jesus by this scholar:

Jesus agrees. He tells the scholar, "Do this, and you will live" (Lu 10:28) — only positives.

All of this is to say (and this is my main point) that the Pharisees have much more in common with Jesus than they do with the Sadducees. The Sadducees did not believe in the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, or the existence of angels .... all articles of faith firmly held by the Pharisees. In fact, by the time of Jesus' birth, the Pharisees had been carrying out a longtime struggle to dislodge the Sadducees.

The Sadducees were not a spiritual movement but an aristocratic class, whose privileges were handed down father-to-son. Typically, they were merchants who pursued a daily life among the rich and powerful. They supported their local gymnasiums with its Hellenized education, called Paidea. And they sent their sons to Rome to complete their education and to forge important social alliances.

It is believed they descended from the High Priest Zadok who had served under King David. Zadokites made up the Temple Hierarchy down to the second century B.C. with the advent of the Maccabees.

During the first century A.D., the Sadducees were entrusted with the administration of the Temple, which was not a great spiritual center but an efficient machine designed to offer blood sacrifice.

While the Outer Hall admitted Jews who were ritually clean, no gentile might enter any part of the Temple. A gentile is irredeemably unclean. Advancing further into the Temple complex was not possible for anyone except priests and Levites. Needless to say, the Sadducees were priests par excellence. A priestly guard of twenty-four units patrolled the Temple constantly. Each guard was composed of three priests and twenty-one Levites. For to permit access to anyone of a lesser ritual-cleanliness was believed to contaminate the sacrifice. Before each man entered, a priest or a Levite bathed and carried out certain other ablutions to ensure he was ritually clean. They dressed in clothing, stored and maintained in the Temple, suitable to their offices, which included the Chamber of the Hearth, the Laver, the Incense Service, and the Tamid Sacrifice. A blood sacrifice carried out daily.

It is well worth noting that following the collapse of this complicated system and structure in 70 A.D., the Sadducees disappeared. Could the Temple have been rebuilt? Yes, of course. Had not Hebrew refugees, who fled to Elephantine, built a temple without the oversight of Sadducees? Had not Hebrews fleeing the Aramaic-speaking, Babylonian returnees (after the Exile) built a temple on Mount Gerizim in nearby Samaria?

You remember the story. The exiled Judean elite return from Babylon. They do not speak Hebrew, but Mesopotamian Aramaic. They are dressed in strange garb. They are in close alliance with the Persians who brought them. Who are these people?! And many Hebrews fled, to Egypt in the south and to Samaria in the north, with the religion of the Patriachs lashed to their hearts and minds.

But the Sadducees vanish with the collapse of the Zion Temple. The problem was that the Sadducees had no spiritual foundation on which to build. There was no common thread to bind them together, much less to mount a full-blown movement. Unlike the fleeing Hebrews with their deep commitment to the religion of the Patriarchs, Sadducee religion was a thing of empty rituals. Where their inner, spiritual life should have been developed, there was only blood sacrifice and desolation.

Oh yes, they were diligent .... in the acquisition of wealth, surrounding themselves with luxury, and the pursuit of power and privilege. In the words of our contemporary, the Chinese dissident Jimmy Lai, "Hong Kong is so poor. The only thing they have is money." By contrast, the Pharisees toiled daily to develop a spiritual life within the stifling constraints imposed by the Sadducees.

Let us pause to get perspective. The occasion for the Incarnation was the bondage of God's people beneath a double yoke. They were subjugated by the Romans and their Hebrew religion had been hi-jacked by the Persians, who set up their pawns the Sadducees. They have no hope. And with the coming of the Maccabees, this Persian hybrid religion, Judah-ism, is pushed ahead to dominate the whole Levant. The synagogue is invented. A whole program of training, or should I say propaganda, is rolled out to indoctrinate the people. It is on this occasion, with the people hopelessly languished under this double yoke, that God is born among us. And what does He bring? He brings the religion of intimate relation with God Who is our Father opposed to the aloof god worshipped in the Temple. Of course, we cannot be sure who this god is because his name has been banned. One cannot say or write YHWH. Only the terms adonai and elohim may be used, which mean "lord." But that is the word the Persians used to address their god Marduk — baal or bel, which mean "lord."

The Pharisees, on other hand, strive to build a spiritual life from inside this prison. Their purview was broad ranging from from the mysticism represented by the Kabbalah to the development of a rich virtue tradition exemplified by their teacher Hillel. Yes, Jesus often criticized their excesses, but we should not lose sight of how much they had in common. A case in point is the parable Jesus tells the scholar, whose departure point is a question: "Who is my neighbor?" And far from "teaching this man lesson," Jesus lays out the territory specifically which He and the Pharisees held in common.

The Samaritans were hated especially by priests and Levites. For the Zion Temple, which was their everything and their all, was patently a phony.

By the second century B.C., living in the shadow of the "true Temple" on Mount Gerizim (built as a remedy post-Exilic Judah-ism), the High Priest in Jerusalem, Jonathan Hyrcanus, could stand it no more. Why, he was in the midst of promoting Babylonian Judah-ism across the Levant! And here was an alternative Temple, whose worship hearkened back to the Patriarchs, pointing an accusing finger back to Jerusalem! So he led a group of priests and Levites and laborers into Samaria, and he destroyed that Temple on Mount Gerizim.

This is the background for the Parable told to a seeker of truth in the Pharisaic tradition, concerning the Temple system, a Temple priest, a Temple Levite, and the pursuit of virtue. Are these not the constituent elements of the Parable?

A certain man is set upon by thieves on the Jericho Road. Now, if you've ever traveled on the Jericho Road, you know that it is an arid place, littered with sharp rocks. This man was "stripped of his clothing," beaten, left "half dead," and certainly bleeding as his unprotected flesh was thrown to the ground with these daggers of rocks.

Along came a Temple priest. What did he see as he surveyed the scene? Did he see crying want? Did he see a life-and-death emergency? No. He said to himself, this man could be a corpse. Now, drawing near to a corpse would render one ritually unclean. Now, no ablutions could overcome the ritual uncleanliness of a corpse. Seven days must be observed in a kind of quarantine away from the Temple and then followed by an elaborate process of sprinkled ashes and bathing. Likewise, being touched by blood would require seven days of quarantine followed by a mikveh bath. The priest had a choice to make. From his point of view it was choice between dedication to God or service to his neighbor.

Along came a Levite down the same road. The point of the Levite in the story is that he will make the same decision. In fact, any number of priest and Levites would do the same. This was the mind of the Temple, whose ethos was a wasteland and whose sacrifices were in vein.

The example of the Samaritan showing mercy, which is the true worship of God (and, remember, the Pharisee where in a virtue tradition) finally answers the question with which we began:

As Jesus sends the Scripture scholar on his way, imparting a blessing:

He sends him off with the blessing of life!

We can only imagine that this young Pharisee is fulfilled. For he has obtained that thing for which he had come to the Teacher: a way of seeing, a truth for which he has spent all his hours seeking, and a life worth living.

He has come to Jesus Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.