I was driving one frosty morning from Rainbow towards Jeparit when I saw a car pulled off the road with the driver slumped over the wheel.  I decided not to stop and check; he might have been having a quiet snooze. And anyway, I didn't want to be late for church. There was this sermon on the Good Samaritan that I'd put together, and I was anxious about that.

On the way home, after I'd noted with some relief that the car had gone, the penny dropped. I was the priest who had passed by on the other side.

This character, who passes by on the other side, thinks he knows where to draw the line. He has worked out his priorities. The lawyer at the beginning of the story, who asks "Who is my neighbour?", wants to know where the line goes. Does responsibility stop with my own kith and kin?  The Sopranos, that fascinating soap on TV (too late, unfortunately, for me), might say that.  The Sopranos are more believable than Marlon Brando's Godfather and the Corleone clan.  But remember how poor old Don Vito rasps out that "family" is where loyalty begins and stops.

The lawyer might ask, does responsibility stop with my own kind, my own nation? Even the much maligned Book of Leviticus does better than that. The very chapter that tells the Israelites to love their neighbours as themselves also says:

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Where do we then, draw the line? By the end of the parable the lawyer realises that there is no line. As for ourselves, we might see how questionable is the old adage about charity beginning at home, if the love our faith asks of us stays at home.

Who, then, is my neighbour? One Sunday morning Anne and I went to church in Notre Dame in Paris. It was the second Sunday in July, with the Good Samaritan on the lectionary. The sermon was a bottler, I could feel it.  The preacher kept saying Qui est mon ..... (and I forget the word for neighbour). The rest escaped my schoolboy French. The question stayed with me. The organ postlude was majestic, but the question kept intruding. Who is my neighbour? I realised how hard it was to be neighbourly in a country where you don't know the language, or the ways. We should note that although the good Samaritan was an outsider in Israel, he became the world's best example of neighbourliness.

The lawyer, by contrast, wants to justify himself. Self-justification always leads away from love for others. Jesus is ruthless in demolishing our efforts to be righteous in our own eyes.

Although the lawyer knows that love of God is false unless it includes love of the neighbour in God, he wants to set limits to take the heat out of the commandments.

The man who falls among robbers is beaten and stripped naked of his clothes and his identity. He is the unknown victim of all the violence done in the world.  The robbers also are anonymous, and represent the "banality of evil." (Hannah Arendt)

The parable proceeds like one of those jokes about an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman. This time it's about a priest, a Levite and a Samaritan.

The priest is a religious professional. I imagine him as going home after his turn at leading worship in the temple. Having given his all, he is spiritually exhausted. It has been a long walk down from Jerusalem. Perhaps he is thinking of the roast dinner that awaits him at home in Jericho. In today's world he would be looking forward to a quiet evening by the telly.

Imagine his interior dialogue. "Here is this naked man lying by the side of the road. He looks dead. Ezekiel and Leviticus and Numbers all say that I'm not to defile myself by going near a dead person."  A tiny temptation intrudes: "Don't get involved. If he's still alive think of the trouble you'll have to take. No, he must be dead."

In a former parish Eddy collapsed and died outside the Church. He was an aboriginal, a stranger in town. He had come to 8 am communion a couple of times and shared breakfast afterwards. He died as I bent over him, and I confess to my shame that it didn't even occur to me to clear his mouth and try to resuscitate him. I wondered later whether mouth-to-mouth would have occurred to me if the victim had been, say, a member of my own family. However we try to rationalise things, there is a powerful and unconscious taboo against cross-cultural contact with death.

And that very morning Eddy and I had shared the body and blood of Christ, who breaks down all such artificial barriers.

The Levite, a senior layman of the temple worship, also passes by on the other side. He, too, is afraid of ritual defilement. He has his own agenda, and it is important to him.

Isn't it true that our own priorities, and indeed, our own self-discipline, can get in the way of love for neighbour? High achievers tend to be very goal oriented, and by reaching "to grab the stars.... can trample on the daisies at their feet."  (C. J. Dennis)

Shortly after September 11 the business section of the paper ran a little pearl of wisdom: "The failure of empathy is the beginning of evil." The implication was that the terrorists had demonstrated a massive failure of empathy for their victims.

Fundamentalism of all stripes is like that. The fundamentalist divides the world into the saved or the unsaved, or the faithful and the infidel. Even the American myth of the Wild West supports the sharp division between the good guys and the bad.  There is no ambiguity. Empathy is to be reserved for those on your own side. A friend, who like me owes much to America, said of the religious right that they are blind to their own shadow, their own dark side, and that was why Abu Ghraib has been so painful.

Evil begins with a failure of empathy, but even those with powerful gifts for intuiting what is going on with others can use that gift selfishly and manipulatively, as we know.  By contrast, those with a constitutional inability to empathise readily, (we speak of autism and Asperger's syndrome) can nevertheless be good people, with a remarkable capacity for loyalty. You may remember Dustin Hoffman's Rainman.

Anyway, along comes the Samaritan. Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. (There are still about five hundred Samaritans living in Palestine. I met a Samaritan once--a plumber dressed in a blue boiler suit: he shot my Sunday School imagery to pieces.)

This Samaritan on the Jericho road doesn't worry about the cultural stuff, although he too has read Leviticus. He doesn't ask whether the beaten man is a Jew or a Gentile or a Samaritan or what. He is moved with pity. That is, he lets empathy take hold of him. He is stirred in the very pit of his being. A literal reading of the Greek is that his guts are moved: he has the guts to do something.

He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii (two days wages), gave them to the innkeeper, and said, "take care of him; and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.."

Some of the old preachers used to say that the beaten man is humanity, the priest and the Levite representatives of the old, superseded religion, and the Good Samaritan Christ. Christ applies the healing oil of anointing, the wine of holy communion and the bandages of the Gospel, then brings the man to the inn, which is the Church. And the two coins he pays represent the price for our redemption that Christ paid with his own life.

(There is some truth in all of that, apart from the belief that Christianity has superseded Judaism. Rabbi John Levi once chided us strongly for suggesting that, pointing out that the New Testament provides no basis for such doctrine.)

The central point of the parable, with its injunction to "go and do likewise," is that costly love of God, interpreted as love of neighbour, is the way to eternal life. Secondly, there is no line in the sand beyond which we do not have to go. Our neighbour may live next door, or ten thousand miles away but in the same global village.

"And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."  (John 17:3)

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A sermon presented by the Rev Dr Stuart Murray at St Aidan's Uniting Church North Balwyn, on 11^th July, 2004.

IT MAY BE REPRODUCED WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENT.