Biblical Text: Luke 10v25-37

A man stands up and asks Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What does it say in the law?” Comes the reply.

“Love the Lord with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind…and your neighbour as yourself,” says the man.

“Good answer,” says Jesus, “go and do this.”

A moments pause perhaps…the man wants to be sure he’s in the right. “And who is my neighbour?”

Let me tell you a story…

And so Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is robbed and left for dead, and along comes a priest. Surely he’ll help? But he walks on by. Next comes a Levite, a well respected member of the Temple. The result is the same. But wait, one more person is coming; a Samaritan. Jesus’s hearers may have expected the next person to be a regular Israelite. They mutter their disgust, but they probably sense the result. The Samaritan acts with mercy and compassion, with love. He helps the man, and ensures he is well taken care of.

“Which of these three was a neighbour?” Asks Jesus.

The man cannot even bring himself to say “Samaritan.“ “The one who showed him mercy,” he replies.

Jesus responds for a second time, “go and do this.”

We may have heard this parable many times. If you go to Israel, there’s even a restaurant on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho named after it. It’s a staple of many a Sunday School curriculum, and with good reason. It challenges some of our most deeply held beliefs about who we really should love, and how. If there’s one thing we’d like our kids to grow up learning, this should be it. But the parable is good for us to hear too. Jesus was not addressing kids at this moment, and we need to hear it just as much as any Junior Church. So let’s take a brief look at what this parable points to…and perhaps we can be challenged too.

The first point to note is that the lawyer answers well, at first. He wants to test Jesus, but when Jesus asks him to provide some reflection, he does. Deuteronomy 6v5 and Leviticus 19v18 are the verses here. They would have been familiar to those assembled there, and Jesus probably wasn’t the first to highlight them. They are a neat summary of Hebrew ethics. The law and the prophets are important, no doubt, but they can only expand on what it means to love God and love neighbour. This is the crux of the matter. In theory, at least, the lawyer has done well.

But…the lawyer, Luke tells us, wishes to justify himself. So he questions who his neighbour is. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer says this is where it all goes wrong. The question itself is the problem. He already knows the answer, and he asks to avoid having to obey. He asks the question so he can evade Jesus’s call. Jesus has told him, “do this, and you will live.” But he doesn’t want to do anything…he’d rather continue discussing, debating, working out the intricacies of who he must, and mustn’t, love.

Søren Kierkegaard, when he was wrestling with our tendency to evade God’s commands said this: “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.”

And the answer of the parable is not a comfortable one, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been a shock. Love your neighbour is from Leviticus 19…and towards the end of that chapter we also read, “love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus has already made the neighbour and the foreigner equally deserving of help. If the third helper had been a regular Israelite, then the common man would be the one in the right. But no, the Samaritan is the one who acts with pity, compassion, and love. The Samaritans, who were clearly disliked, even hated by most Jews. The Samaritan gets it right. It’s the foreigner that exhibits love.

But now the hearers are in a tough position. Who are they in this parable? Do they identify with the Samaritan? Or with the victim? Neither seems ideal. But to identify with the victim helps them to see something vital to Jesus’s message. We are all neighbours. We are called to love all those whom we can. To extend the mercy and grace we have already received from God to those who need it. To treat others as we would want to be treated. Are Jesus’s hearers willing to let their enemy teach them what love of neighbour means? We cannot define who our neighbour is, we can only be a neighbour.

Perhaps most importantly though, this parable points to something we can easily forget since the reformation’s positive emphasis on grace. We are called by grace into a covenant relationship with God. We are saved by grace through faith. But what is the faith we are called to? Is it merely right belief? Is it simply affirming the Creed? Love of God and love neighbour is not less than faith, it is faith. The word of God, says Bonhoeffer, can only be the word of God for us if we act on it. In a well known passage at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus concludes his ethical teaching not by pointing to doctrine, but to action. You can believe all the right things, but if you wish to have a house built of solid rock, you must put Jesus’s words into practice. The Samaritan does not simply understand who his neighbour is, but he acts.

Next to this passage in Bonhoeffer’s Bible, he had written a verse in the margin. Micah 6.8. “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

May we too recognise that God has already told us what is good, and may we go and do likewise. Amen