Last Words

“How readest thou?” The last Chapel of the last Chapels (apart from Encaenia on Saturday, June 14th for the graduating class of 2025, though that is equally a beginning!). How wonderful that the last of the last Chapels was with the Junior School! How appropriate that the reading for the last Chapel was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the most comprehensive expression of Christian ethical teaching and one which complements in many ways the ethical concerns of other religions and philosophies. At the very least, it challenges us about our actions towards and with one another. 

 

“How readest thou?” Jesus asks, “What is written in the Law?” His questions are his response to the hostile question of the Lawyer who was seeking to test him. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he had asked. What is particularly wonderful is how Jesus’ questions draw out from the lawyer what he knows in some sense but doesn’t know that he knows. What is drawn out of him is an essential spiritual and intellectual insight that belongs to education and to ethical life. He gives us the Summary of the Law, something which Jesus also provides in the other Gospels: the love of God and the love of neighbour. “Thou hast answered right,” Jesus says, “Do this and thou shalt live.” Love is the answer.  

 

Both laws derive from The Hebrew Scriptures, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and summarize the ethical teaching of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Law is about far more than a list of duties; it is a comprehensive way of life. But the lawyer replies to Jesus’ response with the dismissive and cynical question, “and who is my neighbour?” He asks this, as Luke puts it, because he was “willing to justify himself,” as if the question relieves him from any real responsibility and agency. As if the love of neighbour could be separated from the love of God.  

 

Yet this question launches the parable of the Good Samaritan which highlights the real significance of the Summary of the Law. The parable is told to convict our consciences about our actions. How we read is really about how we think and how we think shapes how we act.  

 

The parable is a picture of our humanity at once fallen and in disarray, imaged as “a certain man,” lying half dead on the roadside between Jerusalem and Jericho, symbolically the heavenly and earthly cities respectively, but then restored and taken care of by the compassion of God imaged in the figure of “a certain Samaritan.” Unlike the Priest and Levite, who look and pass by, the Samaritan, as he journeyed on the same road, “came where he was,” and, most crucially, “when he saw him, he had compassion on him”. The key word is compassion, the deeper meaning of which we often fail to grasp. It occurs in this way of seeing and then acting with compassion several times in the Gospels, particularly in Luke’s Gospel. Other times are about Jesus seeing us for instance beholding the multitude in the wilderness or seeing the widow of Nain accompanied by her community in shared grief. Out of compassion he feeds the multitude; out of compassion he raises the widow’s son.  

 

In all of these passages, compassion signals the deep love of God for our humanity which seeks our good in spite of sin and evil, suffering and death. Compassion here is something divine that is meant to move in us in our care and concern for one another. It is not self-serving but self-sacrificing. It is about the giving of ourselves for the good of one another. It can only happen out of an awareness in some sense or another of the absolute goodness of God and the total self-giving life of God.  

 

This challenges all of our limited senses of what we think is good and right which so often defaults to self-interest however defined. We forget that we are ‘selves’ only in a community with one another. We forget that care, as grounded in compassion, is not about control and manipulation of others but rather about our being restored to the truth of ourselves as made in the image of God. The compassion of Christ, in the Christian understanding, is about the restoration of that image defaced by sin and folly. And it is about a whole way of life, a life of compassion and care towards one another. “Who do you think,” Jesus asks the lawyer, “was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” Reading is thinking! He is moved by the truth itself to say, “He that showed mercy on him.” Then says Jesus, “go and do thou likewise.”  

 

That can only happen through the questions which convict our consciences and awaken us to the transforming nature of the love of God. Chapel at the very least has endeavoured to help you enter into the understanding of these great Scriptural passages regardless of your personal faith or non-faith backgrounds. The point is that Chapel speaks to our common humanity through the questions about our thinking and doing which never go away. 

 

I am humbled by your respect for learning in my poor efforts to enter into the understanding of the things read and thought about in Chapel. I thank you for your attention and participation in singing and praying, in listening and serving. My thanks to all who have served so eagerly and frequently, such as Ewen, Caleb, Charlie, Liam, Hyatt and Gabriel and several others, to those who have read, such as Spencer and Sokha, Willoughby, Harper, Chelsea, and Isabelle, and to all who have  sung and prayed, and helped out in so many ways with the morning miracle. My thanks to our organist Michael Gnemmi for his ministry of music which has contributed so greatly to our singing, itself a form of reading and thinking! How we read and think informs what we do and how we act. Such is the meaning of an education that attends to ethical matters; in short, to what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity as grounded in the compassion of God. Last Chapel and last words. Thank you and God bless us all.