GO TO JERICHO!

Lake County Mail, Issue 15, 3 September 1947, Page 3

GO TO JERICHO!

There are several towns or villages in the world, there is even one I believe in New Zealand, called Jericho; but the most famous of all is that town situated in the Jordan valley some distance from the capital city of Palestine, Jerusalem.

Jericho itself was a busy commercial town, being on the main thoroughfare of anyone desiring to go into’ the countries East of the Jordan, and bgi-ng a busy commercial town and trade route the moral tone of the city was pretty bad. One morning early, an hour or two before sunrise, a man left a city and walked out into the country—there were no N.Z.R. buses nor trains in those days, but if there had been they would have been labelled “Jericho,” if they had been going in the same direction as this man. Just before it was daylight, when the man had covered about seven or eight miles of his journey, the road rising to a ridge entered a thicket, and there a bami of thugs and robbers attacked the traveller. They were disappointed perhaps that he had so little money, so they took what he had of value, even stripping him of his clothes and kicked him #bout pretty badly, and left him bleeding and half dead. Several people passed along the road — avc know of two anyway —both people who might have been expected to help for they were both connected with the Church of the land. Then came a foreigner whom the other two passers-by would have despised, and he rendered first aid to the poor chap lying on the road, cleansing the wounds with wine and olive oil from his own supplies. Then he bandaged him up and put him on the animal he had been riding himeelf and took him to the nearest lodging house and made arrangements for his proper care. It is probably the world’s bestknown story, told by the world’s greatest teller of short stories, in answer to a question asked Him by someone standing by as He sat on the. roadside just beyond Jericho one day. Let us have a line or two of it. “And Jesus answering said: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.” The story was told to illustrate a particular point, but for us it has a deeper meaning too. • Jerusalem was the capital city of Palestine, and in it was centred the worship of God for the Temple was there. People made pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship God. Jericho on the other hand was a place of sensual and worldly pleasure, where any and every vice could be indulged in freely.

At some time or other we have gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho from the Holy City to the highest ideals and the highest things we once set before us, to the place of personal comfort, and the place where we can most easily satisfy our selfish and sometimes evil desires.

We never get there. We never get the enjoyment out of it that we thought we should. We are robbed of what we had, and we get precious little in its place. And then there conies this Jesus, pretty generally despised as the Samaritan was in His day, and ho cleans and cures us with the rather sharp ■ stinging wine Of repentance, and the healing oil of His love and care, and. sets us back in our right relationship with God and men and things, taking us to the church, where He sees that wc are provided for and cared for, and sends us out to life again, men in the full sense of what He meant a man to be when He made him.