“The Good Samaritan”
Sermon, Trinity 13, Luke 10:23-37, August 14, 2014
Here we go again. Another in the seemingly never-ending string of scribes, Pharisees, high priests, rulers, and now a “lawyer” trying to catch Jesus up in some slip of the tongue, only to made to look a fool. Some people say that there is no humor in the Bible. I beg to differ. Even God laughs. In Psalm 2 it says about the rulers of the earth plotting against the Lord and His anointed, “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.” (Psalm 2:4 ESV). Incidents like the one in today’s Gospel reading, where a man, confident in his ability to outsmart Jesus, has his head handed him, reminds me of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where the coyote cleverly comes up with ideas to catch the roadrunner, only to be smashed every time. It’s pretty funny when it happens again and again. The scribes and Pharisees trying to trap Jesus are like that coyote. They should know better, but they don’t. By the time we get to Passion week, where Jesus trips up the Pharisees and priests with their stupid questions about whom to pay taxes to, where His authority came from, which of a woman’s seven husbands she will be married to in the resurrection, and other equally dumb questions, it starts to look like a three stooges comedy skit, except for the deadly intent of the questioners. The disciples ask seemingly dense questions,too. For instance, when Jesus tells the disciples in the boat to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, they think He must have brought some food on board that they don’t know about. I can almost see Jesus rolling His eyes in such a moment. But all we know is that He patiently explained to the disciples what He meant, and left His challengers, the Pharisees and the lawyers, either astonished at the fact that this bumpkin from a the backwater town of Nazareth had outwitted them again, furious at Him for making a public fool of them, or, as in the case of the lawyer in today’s story, enlightened, and perhaps changed in heart toward Jesus.
In today’s Gospel text, Jesus has just heard the reports of the seventy that He had sent out to preach the Gospel. They come back overjoyed at the successes they had in driving out demons and healing people in Jesus’ name. Jesus affirms their joy by telling them that they are blessed to see what the prophets and the kings had not seen but hoped for, the reign of God breaking into the world in His anointed Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. A lawyer, one who knew the Scriptures intimately, one who was called upon to make legal decisions based on God’s Law, hears this and challenges Jesus. Why? Did he resent that these men were blessed simply by seeing and believing, and not doing? So he asks Jesus what one must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus, as was His habit, answered with another question. “What does the Law say? How do you read it?” That is, how do you read God’s law aloud in the synagogue and temple? The lawyer recites from the Shema, Deuteronomy 6, which every Jewish child knew by heart: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). Then the lawyer adds the commandment from Leviticus 19, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Very good, says Jesus, do this and you will live. Actually the Greek verb here has the sense of, “Keep on doing this and you will live.” In other words, do this perfectly your whole life and you will live.”
The lawyer had asked a very simple question, one that he should know already. In order not to look like he was ignorant himself, the lawyer, attempting to justify himself for asking just such an elementary question, gets to the real matter at hand. Jesus had been associating with Gentiles and sinners, unclean lepers, and other undesirables. Surely God didn’t expect him to consider them his neighbors and love them, did He? So the lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Again Jesus avoids answering a question meant to trap HIm directly, rather He tells Him the story of the Good Samaritan.
Like the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple, this story has a surprise ending. For in encountering a man half dead alongside the road, neither the Priest or the Levite, but the man from Samaria, turns out to be the one who shows compassion and care. The lawyer looked up to the Priests. He loved them as fellow countrymen who loved the Law as he did. He love the Levites, who worked at the physically demanding work in the Temple with its daily sacrifices and worship. But a Samaritan? A man from northern Israel whose ancestors had been so evil, so idolatrous, that God finally had enough of their unfaithfulness and allowed the Assyrians to conquer and disperse them throughout their empire, replacing them with unbelieving pagans from among their conquered subjects; a man from those people who didn’t worship at Jerusalem, who disliked the Jews as much as the Jews disliked them? How could a Samaritan be the hero of the story? But when Jesus asked the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36) the lawyer had to admit, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Notice how Jesus has changed the focus of the question. Instead of “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus asks the lawyer, “Who proved to be a neighbor?”. Jesus turned the question around from discerning who among many people one should love, to how one can become a neighbor to everyone. Jesus was opening the lawyers eyes. And when they were opened, (and I imagine they were wide open in surprise by now), they saw Jesus for the first time, so to speak. Jesus says, “You go, and do likewise.” You go and show mercy. Jesus did not crush the lawyer’s impudence then and there, but instructed him patiently, just as He did not dismiss the disciples when they repeatedly misunderstood Him and His teaching; or when they chided Jesus, as Peter had; or when they fell away on Good Friday. Jesus patiently and mercifully taught them the same lessons over and over again because humans are slow learners when it comes to God. That’s why Luther said he studied the catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, The Creed, and the Ten Commandments every day and didn’t expect to understand them fully in this life. That day Jesus told His disciples how blessed they were to see what the prophets and the faithful kings like David and Solomon and Josiah and Hezekiah longed to see. The lawyer was blessed to see Jesus that day, too. And Jesus continues to teach and bless and open our eyes daily, through the reading and hearing of His Word, and in prayer to Him and His Father and His Holy Spirit.
When I was on vicarage I went on a prayer walk with Rev. Terry Tiemann and Rev. Michael Ada in our neighborhood in Olathe. This kind of prayer walking is not the going from door to door and evangelizing and praying with those whom one meets that you might be familiar with, but going to places where people in the community gather and observing and praying for those one sees, with silent, or quietly spoken prayer among ourselves, and, if opportunity arises, praying with those one meets. We three went to a local Wal-Mart, where our family shopped frequently. As I had never done this before, I followed closely the example of Rev. Tiemann. As we walked through the store we would see a shopper, a woman with small children in the shoe section, for instance, and we would pray for her and for all mothers of children, that God would keep them in His care and let them know of His love. We would see a store employee stocking shelves and we would pray for him and his family that God would provide for their needs of food and shelter. We would walk by the pharmacy section and pray for those who were sick and for those who provided the care for them, the physicians and pharmacists and scientists who developed the medicines. We gave thanks for God’s provision for his creation and the bounty that we enjoy in our land. We saw people from different ethnic backgrounds, Hispanic, African-American, Indian, Asian, and different religious beliefs. At the end of the hour we returned to the church and discussed our reactions.
The thing that struck me was that I had seen people for the first time that had been there before but invisible to me in my distraction. When I had shopped at Wal-Mart before, I looked at the people in the store as mere obstacles in the aisles to maneuver around, or I would see them in the checkout lines and try to figure out which line would be the quickest by how many people were in line, how much they had in their cart, or whether they looked like they might take more time checking out. I hadn’t really thought about what their lives as human beings might be, as fathers and mothers and strangers in town, or that they might be barely barely hanging on, beaten up by life, like the man by the side of the road in the Gospel story. My eyes were opened up to the people that lived in my neighborhood, an affluent neighborhood of Johnson County, but with pockets of poverty that I had never thought about. And this through praying for them in Jesus’ name, and looking at them with Jesus’ eyes.
This is what the story of the Good Samaritan is about. Jesus has mercifully opened our eyes to see Him and believe Him. He has mercifully given us His Word and His Holy Spirit in Baptism. He has not left us to die in our sins by the roadside, beaten up by our enemies, the devil, the world, and our own sinful natures. He has had compassion on us, bound up the wounds cause by our sins, clothed us in His righteousness, and brought us to safety in His kingdom, awaiting His return. For Jesus is not just a good neighbor to the Israelites, but to the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, past, present and future. His Father so loved the whole world that He sent His Son to die for it, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). So we who have eternal life through Him are to be neighbors to those we encounter on the road of life. A good way to open your eyes to your neighbor is to say quick prayers for those you see during the day, while waiting for a light to change, waiting in the checkout line, while on lunch break at work. You’ll be amazed at what this does to your thinking. You’ll start to see your community in a different light. “These are my neighbors!” They aren’t speed bumps on the road to somewhere, but fellow human beings that Christ died for.
This opening of our eyes in prayer leads to an opening of our hearts and a greater opening of our lives to serving others, in sharing the forgiveness, the peace, the joy that we have received from our constant neighbor and brother, Jesus Christ our Lord, who died for our sins, rose for our justification, and who has gone ahead to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house. God has commanded you to love our neighbor. This is law, but this is also a sign to you of the love of Christ dwelling in you, when see yourself showing mercy to your neighbor, for only by His light are you able to see your neighbor as yourselves, children of God needing His constant mercy.
When Jesus told the lawyer, “You go and do likewise.” the story ends in the Scripture text. Scripture doesn’t tell us what the lawyer’s reaction was-- whether he repented of his unbelief and followed Jesus or whether he stayed locked in his works righteousness-- but you who see Christ in His Word and Sacrament know that Jesus has also called you to do likewise. However he has not left you to do this alone. He has given you His Holy Spirit in Baptism, the Holy Spirit who works in you to show mercy as you have received it, to show gratitude for His mercy to you through your thanks and prayers, and your tithes and offerings. Jesus is the one making you into good neighbors. He is here with you. He said before He ascended into heaven, “ I will be with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20). He will open your eyes as you walk the road of life, allowing you to see your neighbor and empowering you to show your neighbor mercy, as you have received mercy. Blessed are your eyes, which see what you see, for I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it! (Luke 10:24). Amen.
