The One Who Showed Him Mercy

Almost exactly one year ago today, I set foot on the St. Albans campus for the first time. I went to chapel and sat in the back right over there. What sticks in my mind is that you were eating apples with honey. I didn’t know until later that you were celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish new year. Apples and honey represent hope for a sweet and fruitful new year. If you’re hungry, you’re in luck! We’ll continue that tradition after chapel today.

But Rosh Hashanah isn’t just about sweetness and light. It’s a solemn day of rest, a chance to examine our lives. In synagogues today, someone will blow a special trumpet—a ram’s horn—as a wake-up call. This sound reminds the people gathered that they have ten days to think about how their actions have fallen short of their call to be God’s people. They turn those actions around. They say they are sorry if they’ve hurt someone’s feelings; they repair broken friendships. In the Jewish tradition, what you say you believe isn’t the most important thing; it’s what you do that matters.

So what does all this have to do with us at St. Albans, an Episcopal school? We haven’t even been in classes a whole week, and we are all still in our best clothes and on our best behavior. We haven’t had time to offend anyone or be anything other than our best selves. If we’re new, we’re still trying to figure out where we fit in, whether or not we’ll be popular or liked.

But our reading today (Luke 10:25-37) reminds us that if we want to be a community of kindness, of open hearts and minds, and of choosing the hard right over the easy wrong, we can’t just let the words in the student handbook stay on the page. What we do matters. Our actions define us as a community.

So hear again the Story of the Good Samaritan: The path from Jerusalem to Jericho is steep and windy. Jerusalem is high up on a hill like Mount St. Alban. Jericho is way down low—a 3,000-foot drop. On this windy road, there are lots of places for robbers and bullies to hide. As a Jewish man walks down this road, some men jump on him, beat him up, steal everything he has, kick him, and leave him to die on the side of the road. A priest walks up. He’s not supposed to touch bloody people. He needs to stay clean for chapel. So he passes on by. The man who is hurt hears another fellow Jew coming. But that guy hurries past, maybe scared the same thing could happen to him. The man who is hurt soon hears a third set of footsteps. He can barely see out of his swollen eye, but when he realizes it’s a Samaritan, he groans.

There’s no hope. Jews and Samaritans hate each other. The footsteps slow and the Samaritan asks, “Are you alive? Can you get up on my donkey?” He cleans and bandages the man’s wounds and carries him to a hotel. He pays for the room. He tells the manager, “Here’s some money. Take care of him. Feed him; change his bandages. I’ll come back and pay whatever else it costs.”

Jesus asks, “Which of these three men was a neighbor to the man who was hurt?” The lawyer responds, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus tells us, “Go and do likewise.”

You’re going to hear the word “empathy” a lot this year. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But Jesus doesn’t say that the true neighbor was the one who showed the hurt man “empathy.” He doesn’t even point out the obvious: that the one who did the right thing was the one who didn’t have to, the one everyone least expected to do it. Simply put, the true neighbor was “the one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy is “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone when it is within your power to punish or harm,” when it’s within your power to ignore or walk past. Showing someone mercy with your actions changes you. If you are powerful, strong, or higher up by grade, legacy, or seniority, use your power for good and see what it does to you.

New or old, we all have power in this community to be merciful to each other and to ourselves. Headmaster Robinson said last week that we are a community of high expectations and we are also human. We are going to make mistakes. We help each other through the day when we are forgiving, kind, and attentive instead of judgmental or mocking. So in the next ten days, I challenge you to show mercy to yourself and to someone else. Mercy is not about what we or they deserve. It’s about choosing to act with love and compassion when it’s not expected or required.

You already do that in so many ways here. You do community service together to remember and feed those who are food insecure. At the lunch table, even “kill it, fill it,” can be a small act of mercy: you take the last roll, but you see that your neighbor is hungry, and you go refill the basket. Being kind to someone new is an act of mercy. When I visited last spring, I was sitting in chapel near the organ and heard a small commotion behind me. A teacher came over and whispered, “You’re sitting on that boy’s tie!” I looked behind me and saw the boy smiling right next to my head, pinned with his tie behind my back. I quickly moved and said, “I’m so sorry!” He said, “No! It’s OK! I’m sorry!” The situation was funny, but the boy and his friends did everything in their power not to laugh or make me feel embarrassed as a guest. They showed me what a community of mercy looks like.

So as you leave this place, remember, what you do matters! Get your apples and honey (gently without elbowing your neighbor out of the way). Strive to be the one who shows mercy in everything you do. And have a good and sweet new year!

Amen.