The Good Samaritan

To truly have eternal life with Christ, you need a heart that loves God completely and loves every neighbor sacrificially.

Let me start by saying that when I plan out my sermon schedule, it’s usually for 6 to 8 months in advance. For example, right now we are planned out through Easter, and this means that I don’t know what will be happening in the world when I eventually sit down to prepare these sermons from the scheduled passages. But I am often amazed by how much that work of prescheduling ends up aligning passages of Scripture with things that are happening around us in the world. I believe that is a work of the Holy Spirit that he’s doing behind the scenes. Today is a good example of that. Back in April, when I scheduled the preaching of Jesus parable on the Good Samaritan for November 3rd, for today, I certainly could have known that the election day would be two days away. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I could have known that. But what I could not have known was just how tense the world would be around foreign neighbours, or how hateful and vitriolic the language would be in the centerpieces of our debates. I didn’t know Haitian people would be slandered, causing ripple effects of hateful language toward them. Anti-semitism was on the rise back in October of last year when the war broke out. But I didn’t know that the US House and Ways and Means Committee would this summer find that the hatred of Jewish students has only grown worse since then. I didn’t know that when we looked at Jesus’s parable of cross-cultural mercy, we would be doing so when a lack of mercy and hatred for people who are different or who disagree would be shouted at us leading up to a contentious election. I didn’t know that. So, church, I believe this to be a fantastic gift of the Holy Spirit to be looking at a passage today that is so corrective and that is so helpful. You may feel at points today that I am being political. I am not. In fact, I even had our pastoral staff pray for me this week. Pray for you this week as I was preparing. We don’t preach politics here. We preach God’s Word here. But God’s Word does inform and challenge everything in our world, including our politics. So there is no political party or platform or policy or politician that should go unchallenged by the gospel of Jesus Christ. So today, Jesus, in one of his most famous parables stories, is going to teach us about the heart, love and sacrifice of a person who truly has eternal life. To truly have eternal life with Christ, you need a heart that loves God completely and that loves every neighbor sacrificially. You’ve heard the parable that was read to you just a moment ago. The conversation Jesus has with the lawyer hinges on three big questions.

There are more questions in the passage, actually, but it hinges really on three questions, two from the lawyer and the last one from Jesus. And so let me take us through it beginning with the first question that the lawyer asks. A lawyer stands up it says to test Jesus, and he says, teacher, What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Now this would be a mosaic law lawyer, okay? Someone who really knows the Old Testament mosaic law. The word used here, lawyer is the same thing as a scribe in the other gospels, right? So you’ve heard of the scribes and the Pharisees.  Luke’s word for scribe is lawyer, because that’s what they would do. This is someone who would interpret and apply God’s law found in the first five books. So Exodus and Leviticus, all those laws that are in there. So this lawyer is one of the religious leaders that is sitting in the crowd listening to Jesus, waiting for him to say something that is a contradiction of God’s law so that they can arrest him. And he steps up, it says, to test Jesus. He tests him about how to inherit eternal life. Now, this is not a discussion about how to be blessed by God today. This is a question about eternal life someday. That’s where we get this word inherit. It’s talking about the future here. This is a future focused question. Sometimes you’ll hear people argue that in the Old Testament, people didn’t care about eternity. They didn’t care about the future. They were only concerned with the Lord today. I’m telling you right now, they absolutely were concerned about the future. They were very much concerned about eternity. In Daniel’s prophecy concerning a future day when the righteous would be separated from the unrighteous. I want you to listen to what will happen. This is from Daniel chapter 12, verses one and two. And there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been, since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered. Everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep, who’ve passed away, who are dead, many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. Some to everlasting life, Some to shame and everlasting contempt. So did the Old Testament people of God have questions about which landing spot they were going to have  when they entered into eternity? You bet they did. They wanted to know what was where they were going to be. Now, we do learn a lot more about eternity in the New Testament.  But God’s Word in the Old Testament pointed believers to a future fork in the road. They knew they were coming to it. There would be this future fork in the road that was that was coming, and that sent people in one of two directions. You either were in everlasting life or you were in everlasting shame and contempt.

So this lawyer is asking a question that everybody wanted to know the answer to. But the question is a test. It’s not a true information seeking question. It’s a test to see if Jesus will give the answer that the religious authorities expect. See, they had an answer for this. They had an answer for this question. They just wanted to see if Jesus would give the answer that they would give, if he would get it right in their eyes. Now, before we look at Jesus answer, let me pause here and say this. This is a question that all of us are asking. Everybody asks this question whether you’re a Christian or not. You have asked this question. You are asking this question. It’s a question that, according to Ecclesiastes, is written onto our hearts. It’s part of being a human being. What is eternity? What is coming next? What’s after death? All people groups across the globe, throughout all of recorded history have asked this question, and they formed some answer to it. Native American peoples believe that you enter the spirit world with your ancestors, and there are a lot of worldviews around the world that have something very similar to that. Hindus believe in samsara, that your soul is reincarnated into different physical bodies until it reaches the top level of purity through karma, at which time then you are released from the physical world and you become entirely a spirit being. We could spend hours this morning just talking about what the different people groups around the world believe about eternity. We won’t, but we could. There are so many different views out there. Even if you’ve answered this question in a very popular way today, which is to say that we can’t know and it doesn’t matter. That’s an answer people give. We can’t know and it doesn’t matter. Please understand if that’s your answer. You have in fact given an answer to the question. You’ve answered it. Saying it doesn’t matter doesn’t make it matter less. You haven’t done anything with it. You’ve made a doctrinal statement. You’re saying that question asked by everyone who has ever lived is not important. I’d like to know how you came to that conclusion. How did you get there? And saying we can’t know is even more theological still. Don’t you think it’s likely that there’s something to be learned about eternity, given that roughly 117 billion people who have ever lived throughout time have sought an answer to that question? Is everybody wrong? Is everyone asking the wrong question? Is everyone seeking answers where they can’t be found to questions that cannot be answered? For someone to say we can’t know anything about eternity is a theological conclusion given in the face of mountains of contrary opinions. And again, if that’s your view, I’d just like to know how you know that. I would be very interested in that answer. Let’s consider Jesus’s answer. So he answers the question with a question. Which is a very Jesusy thing to do. He loves to do that, loves to answer questions with questions. He says, well, what is written in the law? How do you read it? What’s written in the law? How do you read it? This is exactly what a lawyer is supposed to do. He’s supposed to read and interpret the law. So Jesus is saying, do your job. What does it say? And the lawyer gives the classic correct summary of the whole mosaic law. It’s a combination of Deuteronomy 6:5 that tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And Leviticus 19:18, which tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That was considered a way of summarizing the entire law. And if you look at every part of God’s law there in the first five books of the Old Testament, you’ll see that every one of them is an expression of one of those two commandments. That’s why together, loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, Loving your neighbor as yourself have been combined and some have called it the Great Commandment.

The law is not just a list of things to do and not to do. It’s a blueprint for how to love God completely and how to love people around us sacrificially. And Jesus tells the lawyer that the answer he came up with is the correct answer, meaning Jesus agrees with this answer. He tells the lawyer, do this and you will live. Now, those of us who know the New Testament pretty well might be feeling a little bit squeamish here, because we know that salvation comes through trusting in the saving work of Jesus, who died on the cross on our behalf. So we look to his work, not to our work. And yet here Jesus is saying to this guy, if he loves God completely, and he loves other people the way he loves himself, that he will have eternal life. What is going on here? What is Jesus saying? Well, the first thing to note is that Jesus is talking about the heart. Jesus is talking about the heart of love. Loving God completely and others sacrificially is a way of expressing faith and devotion to the Lord. So saving faith is what produces this heart of love. You can’t have true love for God unless your heart has been transformed through faith in Jesus. So Jesus is not saying what we earn it through our works. He’s saying that  eternity is for those who have a heart of love for God that would be evidence of his grace at work in you. But there’s something else here. There’s something that the lawyer is missing. See, the Mosaic Law does show us how to love God and others, but it also shows us how far we are from that. It shows us how far the gap is between what God requires and what we have accomplished. In fact, the law condemns us. The law points us to our need for God’s grace. See the scribes and the Pharisees they taught that fulfilling the law was it. That was all you needed to do. That was enough. They missed the part where they weren’t able to accomplish that. Where they messed up. Where they needed God’s intervening grace to come along and free them from the condemnation of the law. So while Jesus and this lawyer are in agreement on the answer, the lawyer is thinking, I can do it. And Jesus is thinking, are you sure? Are you sure you can do it? Do this and you will live is an instruction that has a built in test to it, right? It’s a built in test. Jesus says flip the script. He was being tested. Now he’s going to do the testing. He sends that test back to the lawyer. He flips it back to us as well. You say you love God. Good. Good. Do you love him perfectly?

Do you love God perfectly? Is your every thought and action and expression of your desire to glorify God? You say you love your neighbors. Fantastic. Good. But do you love them perfectly? Do you honor everyone always? As Jesus instructed. Do you love your enemies? Do you pray for those who persecute you always? Is that always your reaction to them? Is that your only inclination? See if eternal life is only found in carrying out this law your answers here are pretty important.  What tends to happen for people who are trusting in that, who are trusting in their performance,trusting in their good deeds to earn eternal life, what tends to happen is they begin to look for loopholes and make excuses for why their lack of love is justified. And that’s exactly what this lawyer does with his next question. But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor? Boy we love to justify ourselves, don’t we? We are really, really good at coming up with why we are not at fault. We are always looking for why what we did was the right thing, even when it is clearly the wrong thing. You let your feelings take over and you manipulate other people around you, and then you tell yourself that you’re the victim, not them. You’re the victim. You fly off the handle, you yell and you scream, but they deserve it because of what they did, right? Make some comment about people in the world or you pass along some hurtful thing that you saw online and you justify it by saying, well, it’s true, isn’t it? But it may not be true, and it’s definitely not kind. You’ve heard me refer several times from up here to that little inner lawyer that’s inside of all of us, always making the cases, right. We all get that little inner lawyer that’s in there making a little case for ourselves. It’s constantly justifying our sin to ourselves. Well, here is an actual lawyer doing the very same thing out loud to Jesus. Okay, this is actually happening in real life. It’s not just in your brain. This is happening. The next time your inner lawyer begins to make the case in your mind, I want you to remember this actual lawyer that did  this to Jesus. His argument runs like this to get eternal life, I need to love my neighbor but who is my neighbor really? I mean, who is it really? See, here’s the thing this lawyer, he knows what he’s really like. Just like all of us. We all know what we’re really like. This lawyer, he knows what he’s really like. He wants to limit the scope of who is included so that he can continue hating certain people and not have it affect his eternity. He wants a loophole. He wants Jesus to validate his lack of love.

So Jesus tells him a story. It says a man gets robbed and he’s beat up. He’s left for dead along the side of the road. And the man is unidentified. We don’t know who this man is or where he comes from. It’s because it doesn’t matter who he is. He’s in Jerusalem. He’s on his way north out of Jerusalem. He’s heading toward Jericho, which is in the Judean Samarian region. So it’s still in Judea, but it’s right on the border with Samaria. Do you remember the burning question is, who is my neighbor here? I bet the lawyer, when he first starts to hear this story, thinks that the man on the side of the road is going to be the one who is the neighbor, and I’m sure he’d love to know if this man’s home is in Jerusalem and he’s just heading out, or if he’s on his way to his home, which could be in Samaria. That would actually matter a lot for this guy. But here he is he’s on the side of the road, this man unidentified on the side of the road, and a few people passed by. By chance, the first one is a priest. Do you see that in there, by chance it says in verse 31 how incredibly fortunate. It’s a priest. Oh, it couldn’t go better than this. This is about to be a hallmark movie.This is going to be fantastic. This is great news, because a priest of the Lord’s temple would be an ideal person to help a guy. Nope nope nope, he’s actually just going to keep walking. He’s going to pass on by. Okay, so how about a Levite then? A Levite would be just as good. See, the Levites were a tribe of the Jews of Israel that from which they would get the priests. And so these guys would be trained up in the law. It was from the Levites that the priests were selected. So a guy like this who knows God’s law and he loves the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind and. Nope. No, apparently this this Levite was Midwestern. He just was, oops, scuse, move right past you here. He’s on his way. He’s going to take off too. Our heroes are out of the story before the story really even begins. What Jesus is doing here is he’s showing the imperfection of the people who know the law. So these are the people that would know the law. These are the people who would be able to do what that lawyer did and echo back to him exactly what it means to love God and love others. And they’re out of the story now.

And then he does something no lawyer would have seen coming. He introduces a Samaritan to the story. Now, we are so far removed from the first century that we really don’t feel how disorienting it would be for Jesus to bring a Samaritan into the story and make the Samaritan a hero. We’re so used to the phrase Good Samaritan that we almost don’t even think of Samaritans without putting good in front of the name. So we think of Samaritans they’re all good, right? I mean, look at the Bible. Good Samaritan, they’ve got to be good people, right? That’s how we think of it. We don’t have a negative view of Samaritans at all. So to give you a sense for how this lawyer would have heard this story. Okay, now you’re the lawyer. This is how the lawyer would have heard the story. Let me suggest for you that we rename the story just for this morning. Let’s call it the good illegal immigrant. Let’s call it the good gang member. Let’s call it the good Muslim terrorist. See Samaritans they live just over the northern border from the Judeans. They were despised by the Jewish people living both in Judea and in Samaria. So they were sandwiched in their region. They were sandwiched in between the Galileans in the north and the Judeans in the south. And they were despised by both of them. That’s because back in 722 BC, so about seven centuries before Jesus walked the earth, the Assyrian army from the north came in and swept in and conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel, wiping out all the people. And the way the Assyrians would dominate in a new land is that they would take the people out of the land, leaving a remnant behind, and they would put in their own people, their own Assyrian people, into that region. Over time, the region became mixed with what Judeans considered half breed Jews. That’s how they saw Samaritans. So Samaria decided in response to create its own place of worship. So they didn’t have to go down to Jerusalem anymore. So they built their own temple. They built it up on Mount Gerizim, and they acknowledged only the first five books of the Old Testament as God’s Word. And you know what that leaves out, right? It leaves out the whole Davidic monarchy. It leaves out all the promises made to David and Jerusalem and all of that. That’s all gone for them. And they had their own version of those first five books that was rewritten. It’s called the Samaritan Pentateuch, and it has about 6000 changes in it from the Bible that we have. The Samaritans believed that they were the ones that were the true Jews, that the Judeans and the Galileans, they were the ones that had gone off and gone the wrong direction. They were the false people of God, and that they were the true religious community before the Lord. In 128 BC, there was a brief period of history where the Jewish people were not dominated by an outside group, an outside nation. A military leader named John Hyrcanus was raised up, and he came in and he destroyed that temple that was sitting on Mount Gerizim. He came and destroyed it. A few years later, in six AD, the Samaritans came down to Jerusalem. They went into the temple and they took human bones, and they scattered it all over, making it an unclean temple. You see what they’re doing? They’re attacking each other’s temples. In 52 AD, Galilean Jews, the ones in the north were traveling down to the south, traveling to Jerusalem, and they were murdered by a group of Samaritans. We have record of this, and we have good reason to believe that this was a very common occurrence, actually. So common, in fact, that people traveling between Judea and Galilee would travel outside, making a big arc all the way around Samaria so they didn’t even have to pass through it. Jesus himself experienced this animosity. You may remember from Luke chapter 9, Jesus is traveling south through Samaria. He’s on his way to Jerusalem, and there are villages of people that will not allow him in because they found out he was on his way to Jerusalem. They said, we want nothing to do with you if that’s the place that you’re going. Do you remember the disciples response? Jesus, let us call down fire from heaven and destroy these people. As if they could do that, right? But that’s the level of animosity. They thought that would be a holy and justified reaction to what the Samaritans were doing. And Jesus rebuked them of course. There was great hatred, sometimes violence between these groups. So when I say to you that as we’re telling this story, that when Jesus says that there’s a good Samaritan in here, that that lawyer would have heard good terrorist, I mean it. That’s how they felt about it. So what does this Samaritan in the story do? Jesus says he has compassion. He suffers with the suffering. He sees this guy in this terrible predicament, and he enters into the predicament with him at great personal expense, financial cost. He binds his wounds with oil and wine, which would have been ancient medicine. He sets this guy on his own animal. Now Jesus is sure to point this out so that we know that this Samaritan is now going to walk in this man’s place. This man who was near death is taking the place of the man on the animal, and the Samaritan is the one walking. He stays with him at the inn. He doesn’t just drop him off. Stays with him all night. Takes care of this guy. Clearly, the Samaritan had some place to be. We know this because he was out traveling. You don’t do that unless you got someplace to be. But what does he do? He changes his entire direction, changes his plans completely so that he can take care of this guy. And the next day, he gets up, he forks over two days wages. Two denarii, two days worth of work, gives it to the innkeeper and says, here, use this. And if you spend more than this, I will get you back when I come back, I will pay up when I come back. You know what that means, it means he’s coming back. He’s not going to just leave this. He didn’t just do his part. He’s going to take it to the very end to make sure that this man is healed.

And then Jesus asks this final question, which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? The answer is so obvious, isn’t it? It’s completely obvious, but the lawyer can’t even bring himself to say it. Did you notice that in the story he doesn’t even say the Samaritan? What does he say? The one who showed him mercy. What’s so interesting is that nowhere in this story does Jesus answer the question, who is my neighbor? Never tells him. He simply displays incredible sacrificial mercy that is graciously given, and he makes his character choice answer the question. Loving your neighbor has nothing to do with their race or religion or any other defining feature. Loving your neighbor is showing abundant kindness and mercy at great cost to yourself, to everyone, regardless of their identity. Church, if there is a group that for some reason we are leaving out of our category of neighbor so that we can excuse ourselves for not showing them love, we are in violation of God’s commandment to us, and we have good reason to question our eternal life. Right at the end, right there at the end, Jesus says, there you go, Mr. Lawyer go do that. Go and do that. Overcome all of your biases and your hatred. Stop looking down on all people, especially those people who are like the Samaritans, who you think are unworthy and violent half breeds who you talk bad about and who you avoid. Show those people kindness and love and compassion and mercy of the one who truly loves the Lord. And then you know you’ll have eternal life.

Now we don’t get to see what the lawyer does. We don’t. It doesn’t tell us how he responds, what he does next. But you can hear it. You can hear the conviction of his voice, can’t you? And the answer that he gives there, clearly he identified in the story with the priest and the Levite. Those were his people in that story. He knows that by his own reading of the law, he does not have what the law required. How can we be sure to secure eternal life, and not an eternity of shame and everlasting contempt? We need a heart that beats with the love of God and compassion and mercy for all people. Everyone. Church, there is no one in this world who is outside our neighborhood. They are all our neighbors. There is no one who stands outside the circle of our compassion. And if we find that we’ve placed anyone there thinking that our disregard or our slander or our judgmentalism is justified, we need to repent of that. If you’ve placed someone there, you need to repent of that. What the talking heads on TV screens are telling us to think about groups of people in this world is wrong. It’s wrong. And that kind of hatred, that kind of slander, if it resides in your heart, is damnable. I don’t use the word lightly. I mean it literally. You cannot have racial prejudice resting in your heart and hurtful words coming out of your mouth and somehow think eternal life with Jesus is yours. That’s evidence not of a heart transformed by Christ, but of a heart that is still very much in love with the world and is seeking eternal life through self-justification. That’s what it is. And we need to go before the Lord and admit that we’ve sinned against him by sinning against our neighbor in our hearts, with our words and attitudes and actions. God commands that we show the mercy that we’ve been shown. That’s it. That’s really what this is all about, showing the mercy that we’ve been shown. Jesus’s parable is a Samaritan doing exactly what Jesus has done for us. Think about it. Think about this story for just a moment. Isn’t it interesting that the lawyer asked about eternal life? And Jesus gives us a story about near death? What does Jesus done for us? What has he done? He came and he found us, didn’t he? Not just dying, spiritually dead. He came and he found us. He bound up our wounds with his grace. He pays our spiritual sin debt with his own righteousness. He stays with us to nurse us back to health. He leaves the Holy Spirit to restore us while he’s gone, and he promises he will be back. When Jesus tells this man to go show other worldly compassion to his neighbor, he’s telling him to do in part, what Jesus has done for us in full.

Calvary, let’s be famous for this. Let’s be known for our complete love of God with every facet of our being for our heart, soul, mind, and strength to be given over to God so much that it spills over into every word and deed that we have for all people, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done or what they believe. Would you pray with me?