In this gospel passage St Luke uses the words of a lawyer to pose two universal human questions: “What must I do to be saved? What kind of life works?” and “Who is my neighbour? For whom will I be held responsible in the eyes of God?”  Christ’s response is challengingly simple and direct.  To be saved, you must love God and your neighbour, and your neighbour is everyone.  In God’s eyes, you are to one degree or another held responsible for everyone.

We must constantly resist the comforting temptation to build an image of ourselves as Christians out of complicated bodies of doctrine, precise rituals, and even more complicated bodies of law.  In order to be saved, it is not really very important to understand the inner working of the life of the Trinity or to be able to quote the official church regulation on every possible issue.  Rather, in order to saved, it is important to understand the hopes, the needs, the satisfactions, the frustrations of every human being we will meet today, tomorrow, or anytime.  Once we have at least begun to understand, then to do something about it, to literally go out of our way, like the Samaritan in the gospel, to meet those needs.

And because all of that is true, it is pretty clear that when we have to admit that our faith can lose its cutting edge, that the impact of the Church on the world can be less than it should be, then the fault is not with our doctrine or law or liturgy, the fault is with our hearts.  It is never really structures or rituals that need reform.  It is people.  Christianity doesn’t need to be defended or explained or justified.  It needs to be practiced.

Years ago, it was a fairly common thing to use these two figures, Christ and the lawyers, as a sort of scriptural condemnation of organised religion, a way of putting down the establishment, out of Christ’s own mouth.  But, of course, that wasn’t the point at all.  Christ came to establish a Church, and he fully intended that his people adhere to that establishment.  But he intended that they do so totally and honestly.

God’s law, God’s will, is a law of love.

We must become more sensitive, more responsive to the presence of God in one another.  It seems natural enough to say that we must have compassion for the hopeless, the poor and the sick.  But it is just as natural to say that we must have compassion for the powerful, rich, the proud, the indifferent.

That is the way to be saved.  It is the only way.  Once we have said that, all that is left is to follow Christ’s last words to his questioner in the gospel today, “Now, go out and do it.”