Take your Bible and turn to Luke 10:25-37. If you’re with us for the first time, we’re in a series called Famous Short Stories. We’re looking at the parables of Jesus. We won’t cover them all. We’re going to do a selection of them. And this morning we’re coming to one of the most famous, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. A message I’ve called like a good neighbor. And we’re going to take time just to read the text because I’ll be referring to it at speed as we expand it this morning. If you’ve ever watched the State of the Union address by the President, you’ll know there comes a moment in that address when the President turns and points to the balcony. And there he highlights a person or a family that he wants to identify as the model citizen or a national hero. Now that custom started with Ronald Reagan, and the first person that was ever identified in that manner was a man called Lenny Skutnik. And since that day, every year the reporters will ask The White House, “Who are the Skutniks this year?”
Now Lenny Skutnik was a federal worker walking down the street minding his own business, until the day that Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River. The flight had just taken off from Washington bound for Florida when it had developed ice on its wings, which didn’t allow it to climb, and it didn’t clear the 14th Washington Street Bridge and so crashed into the Potomac. And if you remember the story, so many of you have seen it where helicopters are over the wreckage, it’s in the middle of the winter, people are being plucked out of the river in the freezing waters, and it has taken so much time. The one particular woman holding on to the lifeline gets hoisted up a little bit and she’s just so cold, can’t hold on, and she falls back into the water. And people are encouraging her to try and climb onto some of the floating ice. And while that’s all going on, Lenny Skutnik breaks through the police barricade, jumps into the river, risks his life and pulls the lady to shore. She would’ve surely died except for that man’s intervention.
And so that particular year or the year to follow Ronald Reagan highlights this man and starts a tradition. He wants us to know as a nation that Lenny Skutnik was a hero. Do you know what Jesus would call him? A good Samaritan, or a good neighbor. Because Lenny Skutnik embodied the principles of being a good neighbor. He stopped to help someone, a stranger in need at the risk of his own life. He was moved by compassion to get involved at a cost to himself, and President Reagan celebrates that and rightly so. And he started a tradition to remind us as a nation to be good neighbors to one another, to show some sacrificial action toward those around us. That’s a good thing. That’s a God thing. We all need to work harder to make it a beautiful day in the neighborhood. So with that in mind, we’re going to come to this parable of the Lord Jesus in our series on the parables. It’s probably the second most famous parable next to the prodigal son.
This is a story that people who know their Bibles know, and it’s a story in the Bible of people who don’t know their Bible knows. Just even the language and the message of the good Samaritan has entered our vocabulary. Who hasn’t read or seen headlines, “Good Samaritan helps families stranded by the side of the road. Good Samaritan funds children’s hospital. Good Samaritan saves the child from a burning building.” So let’s come and look at this story. I hope we’re going to see it with some fresh eyes because while it’s familiar, familiarity can breed a contempt for the text. And sometimes we miss aspects of this story. And what I want us to see before we’re done today is that it’s more than a moral tale. It’s more than a push for boy scout philanthropy. Because while Jesus answers the question, who is my neighbor? You’ll notice that that question is preceded by an earlier question, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And you can lose sight of that question.
This story is crafted around that idea also. So it’s more than a moral tale. Implicit in this story is our need for the gospel because when we try to attain eternal life through good works, we’re going to fall short of God’s glory. And we’re going to need to remind ourselves, we’ll come back to this, that the true Samaritan is Jesus who metaphorically crossed the road to help us, who left the glories’ heaven to come down and find us by the side of the road in all our brokenness, in all the wounds that we have inflicted on our lives through our sin nature. So don’t lose sight of that. Yes, Jesus answers the question, “Who was my neighbor?” And we ought to emulate the good behavior of the good Samaritan, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this tale is more than a moral tale. Implicit in it, it’s to show us that you’ll never love your neighbor the way you ought to, and therefore you’ll never keep the law of God as a means of salvation. Therefore, you need the gospel from the greater Samaritan, Jesus Christ. Amen?
Okay, let’s jump in. If we were to put the tax in its context just quickly, I’d make an argument that this parable is part of a didactic section in Luke’s gospel. There’s not many miracles in this section. This is about what Jesus says, not what Jesus does. Now there’s four things as time allows us, we’ve got to keep moving, but we’re going to look out what I call the discussion, the diversion, the depiction, and the declaration. If you want an outline, there it is. First of all, the discussion, verse 25. “During Jesus’ discipling of his disciples, a Jewish lawyer, a scribe perhaps, abruptly, stands up and asks Jesus a question.” He’s a lawyer not in the sense of dealing with your car accident or your medical claim. He’s a religious lawyer who is schooled in the Old Testament, trained in law, theology and debate. You’ll notice that his motives are not clean. And a certain lawyer stood up and tested him. So his motives aren’t clean. He’s trying to embarrass Jesus. He’s trying to trap Jesus. When will men learn? It’s a foolish thing to test God on theology.
That was his mistake. Sadly, this man comes to Jesus curiously, not desperately. That’s the sad thing here. He’s kind of playing with the Lord Jesus. He’s not altogether sincere in his question, “What must I do to inherit it eternal life?” Although before I leave that, I love the fact that his question is the question of questions. I don’t know what you’re facing as men in terms of questions in your life, questions of health, questions of finance, questions of relationships and marriage, and children. All kinds of questions challenge us. And in the middle of all of those questions and are pursuing an answer to them, we tend to lose sight of the question of questions. What must I do to inherit eternal life? And that’s a profound question. This man wants to know the key to life with God forever. It’s a question you’ll find throughout the Gospels and in Luke 18:18-23, John 3:1-15, it’s the ultimate question.
One of the commentators I read said this, “We ought to commend the lawyer for raising the right issue. He is not so caught up in the pursuit of fame, fortune and fun, that he feels to ponder eternity. Life is more than the here and now.” Is that a challenge to anybody here this morning? You know you’re pursuing fame and fortune and fun and you’ve lost sight that you are more than a body that needs to be satisfied. You’re a soul that needs then to live in relationship with God. Are you asking yourself on a regular basis, how am I going to spend life with God forever because the God that created me will someday demand my soul back and I will have to give an account for how I lived? Guys, that’s the question of questions.
How did the evangelism explosion conversation begin? If you were to die today, would God accept you into his heaven? That was the hook because that’s the question of questions. Bob Jones of Bob Jones University theme says this, “Every successful person I have ever known came at some time in his life under the dominating power of some great idea that made him who he was.” Henry Ford and the automobile, he was obsessed by the thought of that. Steve Jobs and making computer technology personal and accessible. Something dominated these men to a degree that shaped their lives. And here’s what’s interesting for Bob Jones, he says that as an 11-year-old boy walking the dusty streets of Alabama, he was caught one day by a question that not only dominated his life then but has defined his life ever since. And it’s this, that he was going to live somewhere forever.
That’s a pretty profound thought for a 11-year-old. But even an 11-year-old gains the idea of their mortal, that death is part of the human experience. Unless everything ends in the grave, if the gospel is right, if the Christian faith is true, then we’re going to live somewhere forever in heaven with God or in hell without God forever. And that is a profound thought. It’s the question of all questions. Listen to what Bob Jones says. It dawned on me in a flash that I have to live somewhere forever. I said to myself, it doesn’t matter whether I want to live or not. I may prefer to die and sleep, but dreamless sleep in the silent dust. But I cannot do that. I have to live somewhere forever. I’ve got to live as long as God lives. I’ve got to live until God dies. I’ve got to live until the angels sing a funeral dirge over the grave of God, and that will never be, like it or not.
I’ve got to live forever. Therefore, since I’ve got to live forever, I’d better learn how to live. I think even though he is got a wrong motive. This guy’s onto the right question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? That’s the question of questions guys. Let that dominate your thoughts. Get an answer to that question in Jesus Christ before you solve the other questions because they’re kind of irrelevant in the light of the ultimate question. Now we’ve said he’s not a sincere seeker. He’s seeking to score points and he fancies his chances at eternal life. Given his religious resume, he keeps the feast as he keeps the Sabbath. He seeks to obey the law. He ties, he avoids defilement with the surrounding culture. So I think Jesus is on to that. And so Jesus turns the tables on the lawyer and pushes the question back to him.
Jesus refused to be drawn in to speculative argument. Jesus is always good at turning the question back on the questioner. The lawyer comes to examine Jesus. Jesus examines him. Verse 26, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” And the lawyer’s answer to Jesus question is spot on theologically. This is loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself. The two tablets of the law focused on God and focused on your neighbor. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Mark Hitchcock, my friend coached Stanley Toussaint of Dallas Theological Seminary who said this, “You can tell a lot about a man’s relationship with God on how he treats others.” That’s pretty good and it’s right. Or as G. Campbell Morgan said, he says, “I doubt the sincerity and the reality of a man’s faith in Jesus Christ if his cat is not the better for it.” So if you love God, it’s going to show up in loving your neighbor, and that’s the direction that needs to go.
And you need to love God first and his love will help you love others in the way that he loves us. You don’t work back to front, I’m going to love my neighbor and then God might start loving me. That’s where this guy’s coming from and Jesus is trying to reorient the traffic of his thoughts. But Jesus gives the lawyer two thumbs up, but then he takes his index finger and not to subtly pokes them right in the eye because Jesus goes on to say, “Okay,” verse 28, “you have answered rightly, do this and live.” See, Jesus wasn’t satisfied with head knowledge. Jesus is basically saying, “Okay, you know the law, that’s the right answer. But can you do it?” If this is going to be your path to salvation, let me see you do it, which is a tremendous challenge, right? Go ahead and do it and live. Do it continually, indefinitely, unswervingly in undeviating obedience. And remember that the God you’re seeking to love and the neighbor you’re seeking to help requires a perfect score for a perfect God. See, that’s the implication. Don’t miss that in the text, okay?
You got the law right, now let me see you do it. Go and do it and live. And that brings us to the diversion because at this point the lawyer begins to squirm. There’s something in Jesus’ answer that troubles him. I think he gets what Jesus is getting at. He’s put on the back foot, he’s now hanging on a hook of his own creation, keeping the law perfectly. So here’s what we read, verse 29, “But he wanting to justify himself said to Jesus, ‘Who is my neighbor?'” He thinks to himself, “Okay, my heart beats after God. I love God, but loving your neighbor, that’s a bit daunting. See, I can love God because God’s character is perfect and good, but people with all their personalities and peculiarities and their sin and their ugliness, well that’s another thing.” I think that’s what’s going on in his head right here. And he’s trying to justify himself. He’s trying to make excuses for himself. He’s trying to make keeping the law manageable. And so he thinks, “Okay, well then tell me who my neighbor is.”
And he’s thinking in the category of non-neighbor, the name of the game is accommodation. Because Israelites limited the idea of neighbor to those closest to them, family, friends, community, didn’t include the gentile, certainly wouldn’t include the Samaritan. So when he’s asking Jesus, “Who’s my neighbor?” He wants the of the answer that was common in the culture, and narrow it down to people I like and people are like me, and maybe I’ll get to keeping that part of the law and maybe I’ll attain eternal salvation. So that’s the second question, “Who’s my neighbor?” Look, there’s only one way to jump the bar in a high jump. Well, two ways. Either jump it or lower it. And it’s the same with the law. You’re either going to have to keep the law or you’re going to have to lower the bar to keep the law. And this guy’s lowering the bar. Who’s my neighbor? Let’s narrow that. Let’s make that manageable. Herzl Hobbes, an old southern Baptist expository says this, “Evidently the lawyer caught the point, we must give him credit for honesty.
Still he wanted to justify himself, so he sought to split hers. Who’s my neighbor?” According to Jewish custom, he had a point. For a while they agreed that one should love his neighbor. They excluded both Gentiles and Samaritans from this category. A neighbor was a nigh-dweller, but they made exceptions along racial lines. This attitude is reflected in the parable. So he was looking away out. You may not kind of get that first time, but that’s the point of this question. Okay, I’ve got the law right. Love God, love my neighbor. I love God because he’s perfect in his character. But loving people, that’s another thing. I can’t love everybody. So let’s narrow it down to people I can love. There’s an old story about W.C. Fields, the old Hollywood actor, maybe younger people have heard of him. My dad loved watching his movies and introduced me to him, but there’s a story.
He was kind of agnostic, not a very religious man, and he was once hospitalized, I believe, and a friend came into the hospital to find him on the bed reading a bible, which was a shocker, and they asked them, “Well, W.C., what are you doing?” To which he replied, “I’m looking for loopholes.” And that’s what this lawyer was doing. He was looking for loopholes. He was looking to make the law manageable because he knew if keeping the law perfectly is the way to attain salvation, I’m sunk. And Jesus is going to reinforce that with the story of the good Samaritan. He’s going to blow up this idea that the neighbor is someone near you, like you, and someone you can more easily love. Let’s get to the depiction, the depiction. So far we’ve had a question followed by a question, followed by an answer, followed by a question, followed by a non-answer.
We’re at the non-answer part. Jesus doesn’t answer his question, who is my neighbor? He tells a story. Jesus tells him a story to show how far short of loving God and loving others, he has come. This masterpiece is a mirror to show him up. Jesus employs a non-neighbor, a Samaritan, to show this man what it is to be a true neighbor. So let’s just look at the story, the depiction, the parable quickly. We’ll look at the four people involved. What about first one, a certain man, verse 30. “Then Jesus answered and said them a certain man.” This is a typical Jewish traveler traveling south from Jerusalem to Jericho. The road to Jericho was a serpentine road, it had narrow passages. It was 17 miles long and it dropped 3,400 feet from Jerusalem down to Jericho. I always read about going down to Jericho. That means it dropped 200 feet every mile.
It was notoriously dangerous. In fact, some called it the bloody way or the way of blood. It was ideal for thieves and bandits to ambush an unsuspecting traveler. And this man was ambushed, right? They stripped him of his clothes, they wounded him and they departed. What a sad, leaving him half dead. The implication seems to be he resisted. He put up a fight and he got beat down by a mob. We’ve seen depictions of this, haven’t we? In New York subways and all around our cities and it’s grievous. It’s grievous to watch that kind of scene where a mob just violently beats a man half to death. So that’s the first character, a certain man. The second character is a priest, verse 31. “Now by chance a certain priest came down that road and when he saw him, he passed on the other side.” How sad is that?
See, Jericho had within its city limits a community of priests and Levites. It was known as the city of a thousand Palms, a bit like Palm Springs and priests worked out of there in rotation, which usually meant that they served one full week in Jerusalem twice a year among other things. And it would seem that he’s done his week and he’s coming back down to Jerusalem. His rotation is over and he’s a spiritual icon, and yet he passes by on the other side. He doesn’t want to get involved. He professes love for God, but it didn’t show up in loving his neighbor because those two things go together like a horse and carriage. You love God, you love your neighbor because the God you love loves your neighbor. He loves the world. Sad, isn’t it? What’s the explanation? We’re not sure. The Spurgeon said, “I never knew a man refused to help the poor who failed to give at least one admirable excuse.” And this guy probably had some admirable excuses.
I’ll run down them quickly. Fear, if I hang around and fix this guy, I might get jumped by the thieves, not willing to take that risk. Defilement, he didn’t go close enough to realize that the man was not dead. He was half dead, but he assumed maybe he was dead and according to Jewish law, he couldn’t touch a dead body or he’d be defiled and have to go back to Jerusalem. That’s a complication, that’s an interruption. It’s not for me. Here’s another one, “I’m in a hurry. Want to get home.” Or another one, “I’ve done my part. I think there’s a guy coming behind me, I can see in the distance, maybe he doesn’t know it’s a Levi, but hey, there’s a guy coming by me. He’ll fix it, he’ll help him.” He maybe thinks about, as we’ve said, the inconvenience, the financial costs or maybe you know what, even for a priest, he may be thinking, “Oh, he probably deserve what he got. I don’t need to get involved.”
Isn’t that staggering? Think about all those excuses guys, we’ll come back to this before we’re done. Are they excuses that you and I make when God wants us to be the good Samaritan helping someone by the side of life’s road? In his book, When the Angels Were Silent, Max Lucado tells a kind of mind-boggling story of a man called Paul Lewis who had a bad fall at a work site. He punctured his lung, broke ribs, had internal bruising. He lay an emergency room in a San Antonio hospital in Texas, barely conscious. He probably thought things couldn’t go any worse, but they did because he looked up from his hospital bed and two doctors were getting into a heated argument as to who was going to put the tube into his crushed chest. It got so heated that they started shoving each other, and one threatened to bring security and arrest the other doctor.
The poor soul looked up and he said, “Please, somebody save my life.” The two doctors were arguing over a procedure, and while they were debating over a procedure, another physician assumed responsibility and saved Paul’s life. It’s kind of hard to believe that, isn’t it? But in some ways the priest is kind of like that. “It’s too complicated. It is too much inconvenience. I’m not going to get involved. You know what? There’s a procedure. I can’t touch dead bodies, so I’ll just leave them there.” That’s a law, triumphing love, ceremony triumphing charity. Then we’ve got a Levite verse 32. Levite was an assistant to a priest. They too lived in Jericho. They were from the tribe of Levi, not from Aaron’s family. He goes one step further, right? If you look at our tax, he at least goes over and looks. The priest doesn’t even look, just stared on the other side of the road.
This guy goes over and looks, give him some credit, but not for long because then he just says, “Okay, I don’t want to get involved.” Perhaps he rationalized like the priest. Didn’t stop because there was reasons not to stop. Hey, maybe we’ll add one more to that list. Maybe he had compassion fatigue. That’s a reality, isn’t it? There is so much suffering in the world, so much hurt. Sometimes you don’t know where to start. So just, “Hey, I can only do so much and somebody’s going to have to help this guy. I’m kind of done helping people. I’m a bit kind of wiped out about that.” I don’t know. But here’s the striking thing about the priest and the Levi. Don’t miss this guys as we move on. It wasn’t what they did so much as what they didn’t do that the tax condemns them.
The thieves committed the sin of commission. What did the thieves do? They actively hurt someone violently, lawlessly. That’s a sin. That’s the sin of commission when you do what you’re not meant to do. But hold on a minute, the priest and the Levi committed the sin of omission. You say, “Pastor, what’s the sin of omission?” That’s not doing what you ought to do? Do we tend to fall into this trap? I haven’t harmed anybody. Great. I haven’t beat anybody up recently. Great. I haven’t robbed anybody recently. Great, but who have you helped? Are there are people who have crossed your path and my path day by day and God has sent them our way to help them and we didn’t and we don’t. That’s a sin.
James tells us, doesn’t he, in James 4:17, “For him to know to do good and not to do it, that’s sin.” Like the story of the teacher who asked the little boy or the group of boys at Sunday school, he said, “Sins of commission are sins we actually do. Now, does anybody in the class know what sins of omission are?” And the little fellow says, “Are those the sins we want to do but we never got wrong to doing?” No, that’s not the sin of omission. The sin of omission is knowing what is right to do and not doing it. And that seems to be their sin, the sin of the priest and the Levite. And by the way, as we get to the Samaritan, I think the incorporation of the priest and the Levite in this story by Jesus is an implied condemnation of Judaism of that day.
I mean, here’s the religious establishment and their failing on all fronts. Here they are quoting the Shema. Here they are professing their love for the law, but they’re not loving their neighbor, that’s left to the Samaritan? The last person you would think because you know this as you read the Gospels, it was the religious folks that give Jesus the most trouble. It was the priest, not the prostitutes, and they would ultimately kill him out of envy. And Jesus is exposing him like he does without mercy in Matthew 23, “They had two bites at the apple and they failed.” The priest failed and the Levite failed. Brings us to a Samaritan, a certain man, a priest, a Levite. Finally, a Samaritan will make a few applications. Nobody was ready for this. This is the sting in the tail. Jesus introduces the hero, and the amazing thing is the guy in the balcony is a Samaritan.
You’ve got to understand the shock factor. In fact, many commentators anticipate, you know what? There’ll be enough Jews who are little put off by the religious clergy. They’re not bothered that Jesus kind of takes a swipe at the priest and the Levite. Here’s what they’re waiting for. They’re waiting for the hero to be just a good solid Jewish layman. They’d take that, but it’s not, it’s a Samaritan. Now we call this the parable of the good Samaritan. If that phrase had have been used in Jesus’ day, that would’ve been an oxymoron. That’s like saying a good terrorist, a good Nazi. That’s how that falls in the Jewish ear. That’s how shocking this is. The good guy is the bad guy. This explodes on their consciousness like a bomb going off. Because remember, they viewed their neighbor as those closest to them, those like them. The Samaritans were half-breeds.
They entered merry Gentiles, settled in the land after the asserting deportation of 722 BC. They had their own religious system. That’s John 4, isn’t it? They had their own temple, their own tentative. For the Jew, they were the scum of the earth. For the Jew, they were a manure pile in God’s creation. In fact, Samaritans were publicly cursed in the Jewish synagogues and a prayer was offered daily to God that the Samaritans might not be partakers of eternal life. The only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. So that’s where we’re at in the story. This guy did the opposite of the other two. Did you notice that? He came near and when he saw what he saw, he was moved emotionally to compassion, but his love was more than a feeling that morphed into action. He inconvenienced himself by taking time to take care of this man, put some oil and bandages on him and wine.
He put him on his donkey probably and took him to the nearest motel six, and he hits the bell and the proprietor comes out and he says, “You know what? This guy needs a room and here’s what you need for a night or two. I’m going to have to leave them, I think, but I’ll be back in a couple of days and if the bill extends beyond that, I’ll take care of it.” That’s where we’re at. True compassion. This deserves more treatment than I’m giving it. What is true compassion? Closeness, compassion, care, cost. Just look at all the elements that this man became a real person because he took time to get to know him and understand his situation. It’s easy to love people at a distance. It’s easy to love your neighbor as a category. It’s different when life puts a face on him and it’s the face you don’t like.
Closeness, compassion, he was moved. His heart was moved, his heart was heavy, his soul was engaged. A tear welled into the corner of his eye. This man was a man made in the image of God and now scarred by poverty and violence, and that moved him to action where he cared, and the care cost. Guys, that’s true compassion. The thieves said, “What’s yours is mine and I’m going to take it.” The priest and the Levi said, “What’s mine is mine. I’m going to keep it.” The Samaritan said, “What’s mine is yours. I’m going to give it.” That’s what true compassion is. Compassion comes at a cost within convenience. So you may have heard the story of the man who wasn’t doing too well physically, and so he went to his doctor and the doctor carefully examined him and said, “You know what? I’m going to have to share something you or with your wife.”
And he calls the wife in and the husband goes out and the guy says, “Your husband’s suffering from a very rare form of anemia, and without treatment over time here in the near future, he could get really sick and it would threaten his life. But the good news is there’s treatment. He’s going to need nutrition and a clean environment.” And he said, “I’d recommend to you as his wife that you get up early and cook him a good solid breakfast, maybe some oatmeal or maybe a couple of rashers of bacon and an egg. At lunchtime, give him a home-cooked meal and certainly at night give him something old-fashioned like some meat and potatoes. That really would be good. And you could always throw in some cakes, pies, and homemade bread. And beyond that, given his immunity issue, he’s going to need a clean environment. So you’re going to have to keep the house spec and span, do a bunch of hoovering and cleaning.” And if you’ll do that, I think he stands a good chance of surviving.
So she goes out into the examination room. The husband says, “Well, it’s bad, isn’t it?” And she says it is. He says, “What is it?” She says, “You’re going to die.” You knew that was coming, but it’s a kind of funny light story about something very heavy and real. But you know what? We’re happy for people to hurt, happy for people to die sometimes because we just don’t want to get involved. The cost is too much, the inconvenience of it all. Now, before we get to the last point quickly, having told the story, Jesus throws the debate back on the lawyer. That’s what Jesus did early in the story, and he’s doing it again, verse 36. So which of these three do you think was the neighbor to him who fell among the thieves? You pick the winner. And hey, given the story, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
But yet he couldn’t bring himself… Did you notice this? Given the animosity between Jew and Samaritan, he couldn’t bring himself to say, “You know what? The Samaritan is the hero.” Notice what he’s said in verse 37. Well, it’s him who showed mercy, couldn’t bring himself to say something good about his cultural and natural enemy. Who’s the hero in Jesus’ story? Who’s the true neighbor? Jesus’ definition of being a neighbor here isn’t as tight as the Jewish understanding. Being a neighbor is helping anyone, even a stranger within your reach presented to you by the providence of God. By the way, we must underscore who’s in genuine need. The story of the good Samaritan isn’t a call to underwrite laziness or to help people who can really help themselves. So we need to show some discernment by the way, in the expression of love and mercy. But that said, this guy’s the opposite. The question is no longer who is my neighbor. The question is who became a neighbor who showed themselves to be the true neighbor and he knows and he can’t bring himself to admit it.
That’s the Samaritan. Which brings us finally to the declaration, verse 37. “Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.'” The word is implicit is you go and do likewise. This is emphatic, “You in contrast to the priest and the Levite, you like the Samaritan should do the same.” Now as we close, remember there’s two questions being answered here. One is, “What must I do to attain eternal life?” And the other is, “Who is my neighbor?” Let me just reiterate this as we close. Regarding the first question, the story of the good Samaritan is not a way to life. It’s not the way to inherit eternal life. Remember, Jesus is exposing his idea, “You know what? Tell me what I got to do to inherit eternal life. Well, what’s the law?” It’s love God, love your neighbor. Okay, then go and do it and live. The guy gets a sense, “Hey, you mean perfectly I would be right, and continually that would be right, and undeviating that would be right.
I’m not up to that, but hey, maybe I can narrow this down, make it manageable. Jesus, tell me who my neighbor is.” And in this story Jesus shows him, “You’re not even close to loving your neighbor. You’ve fallen short of God’s glory.” Dale Ralph Davis in his company and Luke says, “The good Samaritan is bad news. The good Samaritan is bad news because the story exposes high, far short we fall of God’s law and God’s glory and God’s righteousness. You can’t attain eternal life by keeping the law.” This story does a demolition job on a man who seeks to justify himself by his good works. The prevailing Jewish ideas of loving your neighbor were impoverished, and he was being reminded that salvation’s not a reward, it’s a greatest gift. Not by works of righteousness, which we do, but by God’s mercy, he saves us. The mercy that the Samaritan showed to the man by the side of the road is the mercy God shows to us.
Jesus is the greater Samaritan who crossed the road for us, who came from heaven to earth and incarnated himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross so that the just demands of God could be met and the grace of God could be shown. Amen. So don’t try and justify yourself today. Turn to Jesus Christ and accept the gift of righteousness and justification by grace through faith alone in Christ. Regarding the second question, who is my neighbor? That is a way of life. So loving your neighbor is not a way to life, but once you have embraced the love of God in Christ and the love of God has been shared abroad in your heart, Romans 5:5, you now have an ability to truly continually love your neighbor, like Jesus. Because Jesus is living in you and he will live out through you. Love is of God and anyone that loves is born of God. And when we come to know God’s love, we’re able to love. Here’s a couple of challenges, takeaways.
This parable challenges our reserve. By reserve, I mean our unwillingness to risk involvement in people’s problems, our cold calculated detached rationalizing of why we don’t get involved in the hurts of the world. The hesitancy can come from concluding we have enough of our own problems. The hesitancy can be that we weigh the cost and the complication, and it’s just more than we can bargain for. The hesitancy could prove that to get involved in other people’s injuries will injurious to our body, our budget. It’s just easier to cross the road, stay on the safe side of life, but we can’t. The gospel doesn’t allow us to do that. Remember what Paul said of Epaphroditus, that he came and met my need at the risk of his own life. The Greek word there means to gamble. He gambled his own life to meet my need on your behalf. He displays the mind of Christ and I’m thankful for it. What are we willing to gamble, risk to help others? If you’re going to love, that’s just inherent.
JC Riling and his company and Luke warns about cheap charity, you like to get away with cheap charity, a donation here, advocacy there, sometimes that ends up just being cheap charity, it doesn’t cost you that much. In time, risk, complication. But remember what C.S. Lewis said, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in a casket or a coffin of selfishness.” But in that casket, safe, dark, and motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable and impenetrable and redeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. Challenges are reserved. Challenges are racism. This parable challenges you and me to lay aside cultural differences, racial biases, political proclivities, religious rivalries in their pursuit of helping someone in need who’s not like us.
See, sometimes when we see someone in dire straits, we fail to see them as a person meet in the image of God. We see the color of their skin, we start thinking about the neighborhood they’ve come from. We think about the political flag they wave rather than see them as made in the image of God, impoverished by poverty, hurt by violence, weakened by sickness, imprisoned by bondage and addiction. We tend to look down on certain people, don’t we? Come on, you have to admit that. We do. But the gospel tells us not to look down, but to be like the God who came down and kneeled down beside them and help. As the providence of God presents that need the gospel destroys barriers, doesn’t it? Jesus destroyed the wall between the Jew and the Gentile. We saw that in Ephesians 2:15-16 in our series. The church is a new society within society, a new humanity among humanity, loving in a costly manner, loving indiscriminately.
Just was reading a book I picked up at Shadow Mountain Community Church by Dr. Jeremiah. Hang in there for a couple of more minutes. Bishop John Green of Sydney Australia tells about working with a group of boys, some aboriginal blood and some English descent and hi, in this bus ride, these boys started kind of getting at each other and was disturbing the piece of the bus and the journey, and he had had enough of it. So he takes them all outside the bus by the side of the road. He says, “Right, stop it. From now on, everybody’s green, and I want you to admit you’re green when you get back on the bus.” So the bishop stood by the door of the bus and as each boy get on, they had to say, “I’m green.” And they all get back on the bus. And for a while, everything seemed to be going well until somebody shouted from the back of the bus, light green on this side and dark green on that side.
And it’s funny and it’s tragic because that’s exactly what we do. We keep going back to our biases and our proclivities to categorize people and we don’t love through the gospel, which involves loving your enemy, doesn’t it? Finally, this parable not only challenges our reserve and risk aversion, it challenges our racism and our prejudices. It challenges our rush. Part of the problem in the story is very simple. As we close for the fourth time, the priest and the Levite probably saw the wounded man simply as an interruption. Remember, they’re on rotation. Maybe as we’ve said, at least in the pre-set, “If I touch a dead body, man, I got to go home or I won’t be able to go home. I got to go back to Jerusalem and go through the whole rigmarole of getting cleansed from defilement of touching a dead body. I just don’t have the time. I’m in a rush. My wife and my children are waiting.” You get the point. Very simple, they were in a rush. They were not necessarily bad man. They were busy.
Listen to what Gary Inrig says, “We should not make the mistake of thinking they were bad men. No, not bad, but busy. For them, and too often for me, people in need are problems, interruptions, nuisances. They intrude awkwardly into my privacy. They deflect me from my duty. They distract me from my responsibility. They keep me from my pleasures. I agree that they need help. I hope that someone helps them, but not me, not nigh, not here.” I think that’s a challenge, isn’t it? We tend to rush by people. We’re inattentive. We’re man on purpose, and sometimes we rush so fast through life focused on our agenda that we simply see people as interruptions or we just miss it because we’re just moving so fast. In his book, How to Talk to People, Steve Brown tells the story of Rabbi Stephen, Samuel Wise, who was asked to speak at an anti-Nazi meeting in Brooklyn, and as a result, he accepted it. He received threats upon his life from neo-Nazis.
Some of the writers told him that they would kill him at the meeting if he attended. So when he got to the meeting, and the day finally came, he got to his podium and he said this, I love this, “I have been warned to stay away from this meeting under pain of being killed. If you’re going to shoot me, do it now because I hate being interrupted.” That’s something, isn’t it? “You’re going to shoot me, do it now, I got a speech to give. Don’t interrupt me.” We don’t like being interrupted. But Jesus allowed himself to be interrupted. Just reread your gospels and watch many times, Jesus in the middle of something, going somewhere, doing something and boom, some guy gets lowered through their roof. That’s the cases up in a tree, isn’t our Lord Jesus so attentive, so patient, so merciful, so loving. C.S. Lewis said, “The great thing if one can is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own or real life. The truth of course, is that the interruptions are precisely one’s real life, the life God is sending you day by day.”