Love They Neighbour as Thyself
Date: March 8, 2026
Readings: Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42
Preacher: Sermon by Fr. Travis O'Brian
LOVE THEY NEIGHBOUR AS THYSELF
The Lord our God is One Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all
thy soul, with all they mind and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment,
and the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself
During the season of Lent, we begin each Mass with the Summary of the Law. The Summary brings together two Old Testament statements, the first from Deuteronomy, the second from Leviticus. In Matthew and Mark’s Gospels, the summary comes from the lips of Jesus. But in Luke’s Gospel, the summary comes from the lips of a scribe, a “lawyer” trained in Mosaic law. The scribe asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life” – in other words, “how can I live in right-relationship with God?” Rather than answering directly, Jesus challenges the scribe to examine his own understanding. When the scribe responds with this Summary, Jesus commends him, saying “do this, and you will live.” The Law is not simply a set of rules governing outward conduct, but is intended to shape our heart – and so our whole life – according to the shape of divine Love.
The scribe has understood this truth, the whole purpose of the Law. But when Jesus challenges him further, demanding he now live what he has understood, the scribe is plunged into self-doubt. Suddenly, he sees that he is judged; he sees himself in the light of the love being demanded of him; sees that he does not live what he professes to believe. He hesitates, because he suddenly knows that he must change his life. In one last effort to defend himself, he asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” How far, in other words, must this love-shaped life extend? In answer to this, Jesus launches into the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Again, that episode is in Luke’s Gospel. The story we read this morning, John’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, in many ways can be read as John’s version of the parable of the Good Samaritan: as a response to the question, “who is my neighbour?” Jesus is travelling through Samaria. Tired and thirsty, he sits down to rest in the shade of a well while his disciples go to buy food. While they are gone, a woman comes to the well. It is noon and the sun is strong – an unusual time to fetch water. Perhaps she comes at this hour because she has reason to avoid the other towns-women. In any case, as she comes near, Jesus says, “Give me a drink.” Even we can sense the intimacy of the situation. John’s first readers would certainly have been culturally attuned to expect such an encounter, a man and a woman meeting alone at a well, to lead naturally to a proposal of marriage. And we must read the story with that expectation as part of the context. By speaking to her, by asking her for a gift in a moment of need, Jesus is inviting her into a relationship of intimacy with him.
To understand the story properly, we need to be surprised, even shocked, by the inappropriateness of the invitation on a number of levels. To begin with the obvious, Jesus enters conversation, alone and in a suggestively-charged environment, with a woman – and a woman who belongs to another man. Secondly, Jesus is a Jew and the woman a Samaritan, and the Jews and Samaritans were enemies. Hence her surprise: “how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The woman is, we shall learn, definitely experienced enough to know what his request really intends, at least in the expected course of things. Jews were forbidden even to use dishes that Samaritans had touched, let alone marry their women. Thirdly, the woman is living in a morally degraded situation. Living with a man out of wedlock, she is a sinner; and she has likely come to the well at this lonely hour because she is shunned by the other women of her town. Fourthly, according to the Jews, the woman, as a Samaritan, was also a heretic, for the Samaritans insisted on heterodox worship practises. Jesus even acknowledges this to be the case, saying of her and her people, “you worship what you do not know.”
So their dialogue reveals at least four degrees of separation, four increasingly serious obstacles that, culturally, ought to have prevented Jesus from regarding the woman as a person toward whom he has any obligation: her sex, her nationality, her sinful life, her apostasy. Under Jewish Law, this woman is in every way untouchable. In fact, more than simply outside the sphere of his responsibility, she is taboo. And yet, even as he confirms the substance of all these truths about her life, Jesus not only doesn’t reject her, he invites her into a relation of intimacy. “Give me a drink,” he says. He invites her to reach out to him, to touch him in his need, so he might reach out to touch her in her need, she who is untouchable to him.
“Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Jesus, tired, thirsty, asks the woman for a drink. She could well have refused. Propriety would have demanded she refuse. But her mercy for him clears the way for his mercy to reach her; her act of love toward him is the pathway his love takes to reach her. It is the same Love – hers for him and his for hers: it is God’s own life awakening in her response to Jesus’ entreaty to love him, to have mercy on him. The love we give, in other words, is the love we receive from Christ himself, who is God’s own heart. We receive only as we give: this is Love’s way. And to receive God’s love, to open your heart wide to the neighbour so that God may fill you with Himself – yes, that is truly to love oneself.
The woman gives Jesus well-water to drink. But that water, it turns out, is much more than water – it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace – for it is, in truth, God’s very presence that she shares with him. The water is a sacrament, for as she gives of it – she has every reason to refuse, but as she gives of it – it becomes more than what it is: it is the presence of the Holy, the life-giving Spirit, the Heart of God, Christ himself. “Everyone who drinks of this water,” Jesus says as he receives it from the woman’s hand, “everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.” It is the same water, but transformed by God into the gift of Himself.
“Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Making ourselves vulnerable for the sake of the vulnerable, we are lifted into the presence of God: God who always makes himself so weak for us, vulnerable even unto death on a cross. Making ourselves vulnerable in response to the plea of the vulnerable, is to become a neighbour. It is to hear, in the plea of the one toward whom we have no obligation – stranger, enemy, heretic – the plea of Christ himself. It is to hear the Word of God inviting us to share in His life: share in the life of Love.
AMEN