8:20am Wednesday 2nd July 2008
By John Inge
Last week I visited Worcester Royal Hospital to lead a service to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service.
The reading at the service was the parable of the Good Samaritan which Jesus tells in response to the question: who is my neighbour?
The parable is about a man who fell among thieves and who was helped not by respectable members of society but by an outcast.
It illustrates graphically the point that Jesus was wanting to make – that everyone is our neighbour, even the most unexpected people, and that being a neighbour means showing care and concern to those in need.
Few people nowadays would make much of a connection between the NHS and that parable, but the connection was very clear to its founders.
It was that story in particular and Christian values in general that were the inspiration of those who worked so hard to see the NHS established, of whom one of the prime movers was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple.
The NHS is a very effective institutional answer to the question: who is my neighbour? The answer is everyone.
It puts into practice, too, the moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan – that it is the responsibility of all of us, as neighbours, to care for those in need.
I never cease to be moved when I see cars moving over and stopping when they hear an ambulance siren – the path that is cleared for the ambulance to rush to the aid of someone who urgently needs help symbolises for me more clearly than anything else the immense value of the NHS in responding, on behalf of us all, to human need and suffering. People complain about the NHS but it is a very precious thing.
As the keystone of the welfare state, the intention of its founders was to put the NHS at the centre of a humane society based on such Christian values of mutual caring, aiming at fair shares in what caring there is.
I hope that we will cherish it and be reminded by it of the answer to Jesus’s question: who is my neighbour? So that we can put into practice as individuals the care that the NHS offers institutionally.
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