The Reformed Church of Newtown
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
The Parable of the Good Samaritan(AE)
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked,
“what must I do to inherit eternal life?”(AF)
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[c];(AG) and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d]”(AH)
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”(AI)
29 But he wanted to justify himself,(AJ) so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.(AK)
32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
33 But a Samaritan,(AL) as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.
34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.
35 The next day he took out two denarii[e] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Who is My Neighbor?
Sept 28, Newtown Reformed Church By Pastor Chris Koch
Intro 1:
This week we continue our series on the Outward Facing Life by studying a theme related to Mission, about our call to ministries of mercy and social justice. When I talk about ministries of mercy I am just talking about how we are called to put our love in action, to show compassion and mercy to other people. And social justice is related. It is how we are called to promote the blessing of those around us, how we seek the thriving of the city and the thriving of our world in the name of Jesus Christ. Over the past weeks we have discussed mission in terms of relational evangelism and our call to go out into the pluralistic world around us with the gospel. So this week we are talking about the other side of mission, the call that we see in our passage this morning and in other passages to share the gospel message through both our words AND our deeds.
And as we study our passage from Matthew we see that two questions arise that really get to the heart of our call: and the first one is obvious: “who is my neighbor?” but the second one is not as clear: “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” Yet the ways that we answer both of those questions reveal what we really believe about who God is, what God is doing in the world, and how we are called to respond.
So this morning we are going to study the ways that Jesus answers those 2 questions in our passage and what his answers reveal to us about the costly love of God and the ways God calls us to respond.
What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?
We begin in V 25, where the gospel writer Luke writes: On one occasion an expert in
the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit
eternal life?
The text says that this man who came up to Jesus with this question was an EXPERT OF THE LAW. This means that he wasn’t a lawyer in our modern sense. He wasn’t an expert in the Mosaic LAW, the first 5 books of the Bible. There were over 700 laws written down in the first five books, which is called the Torah, and this man would have memorized them all. He would have studied them since childhood and spent all day every day reading interpretations of the law and debating with other experts.
So this man knew what he was talking about, and he didn’t need to go to Jesus for answers, but the text says that this expert was trying to TEST Jesus. He wanted to discredit him and expose him as a fraud. And that is why the law expert asks him: “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” It was a loaded question, because every Jewish person would have known the answer at the time. The way to inherit eternal life is to follow the LAW. The law brings salvation. So I am sure that his man was hoping that Jesus would say: ‘the laws not THAT important. God accepts you as you are and doesn’t need for you to follow the law. Just come to him and he will accept you.“
But we read that Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead he turns the conversation around. Instead of getting questioned he starts ASKING the questions. Notice how the dialogue goes in verse 26-28: instead of answering the law experts question Jesus asks: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And the law expert then gives the very famous summary of the law in v27: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus then responds with a short sentence in v28 that turns the tables on the law expert: “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Do you see what Jesus did there? As soon as this man gave the summary of the law he knew he couldn’t keep it. To love God with all your heart soul and mind means that you must continually think of God; continually work for God, continually bless God 24/7, and if you forget for just one minute you have broken the commandment and are in peril of losing eternal life. The same with loving your neighbor as yourself; you forget to do that one time, or you have one angry or unforgiving thought and you are in trouble.
So Jesus here is exposing a PROBLEM in this man’s THEOLOGY, a GOSPEL problem. The word “gospel” simply means “good news” and what was this mans “good news” or gospel? FOLLOW EVERY LAW PERFECTLY. And that would be great if you could do it. Even Jesus affirms the intention: “do this and you will live.” But the problem is, NO HUMAN BEING CAN DO THIS. No human being can follow the law. It doesn’t leads us to life, but it leads us either to pride or despair. So when Jesus says: “do this and live” he is really exposing this mans FAULTY GOSPEL. Jesus was exposing that this man’s gospel was not good news and would not lead to real goodness and life for him or for others.
And that is also ultimately God’s concern for us as well. The question: “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” reveals what we REALLY believe about God. And it reveals the spiritual condition of our hearts. So when we think about the call to social justice and mercy we see here that there is a deeper issue that just what we DO. First and fore most, how we love and serve others has to do with what we BELIEVE. It has to do with the GOSPEL we believe in and share.
So, we have to ask ourselves, before we do anything, and especially in our responses to others, “which gospel do I believe in?” Which gospel am I following? Which gospel am I portraying through my words and actions? Because if we are not centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ it is easy to become centered on another gospel, a faulty gospel that is ultimately not good news for you or for the world around you.
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
So, as we go back to our passage we see that by v29 the expert of the law is frazzled. He set out to trap Jesus and in the end he got trapped by Jesus, so Luke writes that “the expert in the law wanted to justify himself, so he asked: “who is my neighbor?”
To justify means “to absolve, to prove right, or to declare free of blame,” so we see here that the law expert comes back at Jesus with this question, who is my neighbor,
to try to redeem himself and prove himself righteous. Basically he is trying to whittle down the bare minimum of what a neighbor is and to make it doable, so he could say that he was following the law and therefore still inheriting eternal life.
And knowing the historical context, it is safe to say that this lawyer was confident that he already thought knew the answer Jesus was going to give. In Jewish society at that time the common definition of a ‘neighbor’ was family, relatives, or another Jew. This was a time in Israel’s history where other religions and people groups were crowding in on Jewish life and faith, and the response from the Jewish community was: we take care of our own. If you are one of us we will take care of you, if not, live or die, we don’t care.
So that was the answer the expert of the law was EXPECTING from Jesus, but the answer he received was much more radical. Instead of giving a straight answer Jesus basically says...that reminds me of a story..... and he tells this parable of the good Samaritan that redefines WHO a neighbor is, WHEN they deserve our help, and HOW MUCH help they deserve.
The WHO
Notice in the parable the main characters that are introduced. We have a nameless man who was stripped and beaten and is lying in the road. Then we have a Priest and Levite, both Israelites, who pass by without helping. And then we have a Samaritan who stops and helps. And Jesus is making a very clear point here in the choosing of characters, because there are only two nationalities represented, Jewish and a Samaritan, and both were bitter enemies at the time.
The Samaritans lived in the north of Israel and their country separated Jewish lands to the north and south. The Samaritans believed that they were the true descendants of Abraham because they were never exiled into Babylon like the Jewish people were under Nebucanezzer, and they believed that because of that they were the real chosen people; that they were the ones that were truly favored by God. And you can imagine that this did not sit well with the nation of Israel. So Jewish people would call the Samaritans half-breeds and heretics and would curse them in their prayers at temple and in synagogue and pray that God would wipe them off the face of the earth. And the Samaritans would do the same.
They rarely interacted with each other and when they did there would be frequent clashes. Records from the day show that Jewish people believed that they could become unclean if a Samaritan even touched them and Samaritans reacted with hostility or even violence if they caught a Jewish person on their lands.
Yet in the midst of this Jesus makes a Samaritan the hero of this story, a Samaritan who reached through GIANT religious and social barriers to help an enemy. Jesus could have made a noble Jew the hero in the story, but he uses their deepest hatreds and pains to make a point about WHO our real neighbors are.
It is easy for us to hang out with those who are like us and who we like. And it is natural for us to serve people who we can relate to and have been through the same situations
and struggles we have, but the warning from Jesus is clear: don’t limit who you would define as your neighbor. Because your neighbor is anyone in need, and especially those around you who are in need.
So your neighbor could be anyone, someone at church, someone by the bus stop on the corner, someone at the boulevard shelter down the street, a colleague, someone you pass by on the subway, or see sleeping in an alleyway. THOSE ARE OUR TRUE NEIGHBORS, and we are called to meet their needs with such concreteness and sacrificial love that it will astonish people. That is one of the reasons I love what we are doing at the Boulevard Shelter because it is astonishing to people. People are blessed greatly and others can’t understand why we care. And that is what Jesus wants us to do with our neighbor.
So this is really a challenge to us in every area of our lives. I know some of you may disagree with this, but this understanding of your neighbor is called to challenge your politics, and your understanding of racism, or sexism, or poverty or immigration or so many other issues. And I know those are complex issues, but at the very minimum this is called to challenge your ASSUMPTIONS about who God loves and who we are called to love. So if you hear someone on the media or even around the water cooler talking about how that person or group of people is not our neighbor and is not worth our care and love, our response is to say at least to ourselves: “that is NOT the gospel. And that is not a gospel vision of how we are to love our neighbor.”
b. The WHEN
So that is Jesus’s concern about WHO are neighbor is and at this point I am sure we can almost hear the law expert saying: BUT WAIT, there have to be some limits on this! It IS right to help if someone has been hit by a car or if a natural disaster strikes, but what about THOSE people....you know, THOSE people who actually brought it on themselves. You know, THOSE people who really don’t deserve to be helped because it’s their fault they are in their predicament. I am sure that you have heard before: “you shouldn’t give money to those people. They will just take your money and spend it on drugs.” Or “we don’t want those people near our homes and work places.” Yet we see here that just as Jesus draws no line about WHO is defined as our neighbor, Jesus also draws no line about WHEN they deserve our help.
And we see this illustrated in our parable. We know from the historical context that each person who passed dying man in the parable would have had a good reason not to stop, and an even better reason to believe that the person dying on the road DESERVED TO BE THERE. The Priest and the Levite were both part of the Jewish elite. They served God in the temple and they would have been obsessed with following the law. So touching a dying man would have made them unclean. And there was also a sense of fatalism at the time, so if you were in trouble or bad things happened to you, that was a sign that God was punishing you. They believed Bad things happen to bad people. So they would have looked down at the dying man and thought: “he is getting what he deserves” and they would have passed by justified.
And the Samaritan had the same reason to pass by. He could have said: “the hated Jews deserve what they get,” but instead he does something extremely
uncharacteristic and unexpected.... he reaches down. He stops and helps someone who does not deserve it.
Here Jesus teaches us that every time we stop caring for someone on the basis of whether they deserve it or not we limit the gospel and we limit God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. Whether they be the hated enemy or the lazy fool, we are called to give the same radical, extravagant, and reckless love that we would give those we love the most.
c. The HOW MUCH.
So we are called to see our neighbor as WHOever is around us in need, and we are to
love them WHENever they need it, whether they deserve it our not. And to illustrate the
HOW MUCH Jesus deliberately puts this parable on a road that everyone in those days
would have known: the 27 kilometer road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This stretch of
road was virtually uninhabited and was filled with huge limestone rocks, gullies, and
caves on both sides of the road. It was a perfect environment for robberies and other
crimes to occur, so much so that this road became known as ‘the path of blood’
because so many people got hurt or killed there.
So when the Priest and Levite passed by the dying man, they weren’t just being calloused, they were being SMART! If are walking down a deserted street and you see someone who has just been freshly robbed and beaten and is not dead yet, what does that mean? The robbers are still nearby! So the Priest and Levite did what we all would have done.....gotten out of there as fast as we could!
So when the Samaritan stops he is actually risking more than his possessions, HE IS RISKING HIS LIFE. Every second he spent in that area he was exposing himself to harm and risking the possibility that he could end up exactly in the same place that this nameless Jewish person ended up. Yet in our passage we see that this Samaritan gets off of his horse and takes his time in that dangerous place bandaging this man’s wounds. He even gets out some oil and wine and blesses the man in the middle of the war zone! Then he puts the man on his donkey and took him to an inn.
What characterizes the Samaritan is not so much his courage in facing the danger before him though, but the PRICE he was willing to pay to complete his act of compassion. It was incredibly costly for him to help the man in the road, and it wasn’t just the danger, it was time and money as well. It says that he took care of him all night and then the next day paid out of his own pocket for the man to be sheltered and taken care of. He would have had no hope of ever getting that money back but he gave it freely. So Jesus is saying that neighbors give until part of the burden falls on them selves. Until they begin to feel some of the burden the person they are helping feels.
At times all of us say..... ”I can’t afford to give to the needs around me’ or ‘I just don’t have the time or resources to serve” but really what we are saying is: I can’t afford to give without it burdening me, without it costing me something, without it hurting my standard of living or my comfort. And Jesus says: YES, THAT IS IT! We are to care
so much for our neighbors that some of the discomfort and weightiness of their burden falls on you. You are to be neighborly until you bear some of their difficulty because you carrying part of their burden.
GRACE-Going back to the first question
This is what it means to be a neighbor for Jesus, and it leads us to the inevitable questions: “how can we live like this?” This is how we SHOULD live, but why don’t more of us do it? The way described by Jesus is great and if we had more people living like this in our church, or neighborhood or world, we would be all be extremely blessed and so many problems would cease, but the problem is, nobody is like this. Even the best of us are not like this all the time. So how do we get people to be like this? How can we be like this ourselves?
And the answer for Jesus really comes in WHO we see the person dying the in the middle of the road as being. If the person dying in the road is just another random, nameless person, then we will be drawn to some generosity but in the end we will pass by like the Priest and Levite. But if we see OURSELVES as the person lying in the middle of the road, naked and beaten, bleeding to death and broken, with our only hope as being the radical, undeserved grace of someone who has no obligation to help us, then everything begins to change.
Jesus here doesn’t merely tell us to stop being racist or classist or to love those who are different than you and start caring for people’s needs, but HE INVITES US INTO THE STORY and he asks us: what if you had an experience of radical grace? What if you were saved by the grace of someone who loved you though you deserved nothing but rejection? What would change in you?
Only if that happened you would begin to look at everything differently, to re-evaluate your beliefs and opinions of others, to look differently at those you used to hate, those you used to despise, those you used to disassociate with and you would say: I AM NO DIFFERENT: I was saved by someone who didn’t owe me anything, someone who was an enemy, someone I had rejected. You would get rid of the pride and the self- centeredness that makes us laugh at and look down upon anyone who isn’t like us and begin to look at others through the lens of GRACE.
So Jesus is saying here that we will never BE a neighbor until someone has been a neighbor to YOU. You can only give this kind of love and care to someone if you know what it feels like to be given it. That is why Jesus in the end of the parable asks: who was the real neighbor, and the law expert finally gets it: the one who showed mercy. And Jesus says: “go and do likewise.” WE CAN”T GIVE MERCY UNTIL WE HAVE BEEN SHOWN MERCY. We can’t understand GRACE until someone has shown it to us.
FULL CIRCLE
And this is where the passage comes full circle. Remember the first question in the passage: what must I do to inherit eternal life? Through this parable Jesus gives the answer: RECEIVE THE TRUE GOSPEL, receive the undeserved GRACE and MERCY of someone who has gone on the road before you, someone who comes upon us
beaten and bleeding, and broken with our own self-righteousness and sin, and out of no obligation or debt he bandages our wounds, he blesses us, he takes us with him and gives us new life.
Here Jesus is revealing the gospel and the heart of GOD. That HE is the TRUE good Samaritan who knew when he came to earth that he wouldn’t just risk his life to save us, but it would COST His life, but he did it freely, This kind of love can never be demanded. It can never be earned. It can only be given freely. And this is what Jesus offers us.
If we want to be good neighbors we firstly have to HAVE A GOOD NEIGHBOR.... And Christ longs to be your good neighbor, to show you just how costly grace is and how life changing his love can be.
If you don’t know Christ today I encourage you to ask Jesus to come into your life and let him show you just how costly and wonderful his grace and mercy is. And if you already follow Christ I encourage you to let his grace challenge your ASSUMPTIONS about other people and to challenge your GOSPEL, so that you can always come back to the TRUE GOOD NEIGHBOR, JESUS CHRIST, and then take the step of faith to be a TRUE NEIGHBOR TO OTHERS.
AMEN!
Faith and Fear (Acts 27:13-38)
Your Sins are Forgiven (Mark 2:1-12)
Receiving Mercy (Luke 1:46-56)
Waiting in Expectation (Psalm 130:5-8, Luke 1:5-7, 11-16, 25-31, 43-47)
Waiting in Anticipation (Luke 1:30-45)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Lowered Standards (Nehemiah 13:6-9, 15, 23-25, 30-31))
Sermons on Nehemiah: Sins of Omission and Commission (Nehemiah 13:1-5)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Joyful Worship
Sermons on Nehemiah: Faithful Tithing (Nehemiah 10:32-39)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Sabbath Rest (Exodus 20:8-11, Nehemiah 10:28-30)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Counter-cultural Covenant (Nehemiah 10:28-30, Matthew 5:13-16))
Sermons on Nehemiah: Covenant Renewal (Nehemiah 9:38, 10:28-31,39)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Confessing Sin (Nehemiah 9:1-6,32-37)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Responding to Scripture (Nehemiah 8:9-18)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Listening to the Word (Nehemiah 8:1-8)
Community, Renewal, and the Gospel (2 Corinthians 4:1-6)
Sermons on Nehemiah: What is Your Wall? (Nehemiah 7:1-7, 1 Peter 5:8)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Perseverance in the Midst of Opposition Pt.2 (Nehemiah 6:10-19)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Perseverance in the Midst of Opposition (Nehemiah 6:1-9, James 1:2-4)
Sermons on Nehemiah: Blind Eyes and Blind Faith
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