Luke 10:25-37 "The Neighbor" Scott Hoezee

Sometimes metaphors take on a life of their own. As we noted two weeks ago when opening this series, viewing the parables as metaphors works pretty well for defining what kind of teaching a parable is. We noted that metaphor is a form of speech you employ when you want to explain a difficult idea by way of a more familiar idea. So you might have a hard time finding the right words to describe why it is that a certain person is important to you, so instead of giving a literal description you might reach for some metaphors. "He's a rock! She is such a gem to me! He is my sounding board. She's my anchor."

Over time, though, some metaphors break loose from their original moorings, floating free long enough that the day may come when, although people still invoke the metaphor, they don't know what it originally referred to. In the four metaphors I just mentioned, you know what a rock, a gem, and an anchor are. But even though you may have said it before yourself, do you really know what a "sounding board" is?

As I have mentioned before, in his memoir Wordstruck Robert MacNeil notes that a good deal of our metaphoric speech harks back to a maritime era when people had regular contact with ocean-going ships. But we forget this now. Still, whenever we say someone is "pooped" or "is three sheets to the wind" or has "keeled over," we are using maritime imagery. If we say we are going to "lower the boom" or give someone "a wide berth," when we say "down the hatch" or talk about "being armed to the teeth," if we complain that someone is not "pulling his own weight" or that we are "at loggerheads" with someone, those are all seafaring phrases. But the metaphors have taken on a life of their own to the point that we may be surprised to discover they originally had something to do with ships.

By now you see where I am going: the parable of the Good Samaritan was originally Jesus' metaphoric way by which to make an important theological point. But in the two millennia since then, the image and phrase of "the Good Samaritan" has taken on a life of its own. This phrase gets used countless times every day by millions of people most of whom would have a hard time explaining its original meaning in Luke 10.

When I punched it into Google last week, the search of the WorldWideWeb came back with 281,000 occrrences of "Good Samaritan" on the Internet. Obviously I did not take the time to look at all of those but one thing I did notice in just scanning the list is that you had to go way, way, way down the list to find "Good Samaritan" used in Bible studies or sermons. Before you find biblical explanations of this parable, you must first get through thousands of hospitals named something like "Good Samaritan Medical Center," hundreds of "Good Samaritan" service awards, dozens of "Good Samaritan" charitable trust funds, and scores of newspapers that include articles about how this or that "Good Samaritan" stopped to rescue someone from a burning car or some other such dire situation.

If the whole point of Jesus' parable had been no more than promoting public civility and a generic spirit of helpfulness, then these secular uses of the phrase would tell the whole story. The problem, even for Christians who should know better, is that very often the popular meaning of "Good Samaritan" obscures its deeper meaning. Our chief item of business this evening, therefore, is to uncover and recover what Jesus originally meant.

The first clue to that is the event that gave rise to this parable in the first place. It was the question of a lawyer. More than that, it was a question about how to get saved, about what a person must do to become worthy of eternal life. But even more narrowly defined than just that, the thing that finally prompted Jesus to tell this story was the fact that in inquiring "Who is my neighbor?" the lawyer was trying to "justify himself." That is the key! It is also an irony worth savoring for a moment.

The parable of the Good Samaritan has been translated on the popular level as being a story designed to inspire people to lend a helping hand to strangers in need. Oddly and ironically enough, however, Jesus told this story to a man who was looking for loopholes so that he could refuse to help strangers in need. A Good Samaritan, we tend to think, is someone who is eager to help those in need. But the man whose question led to this parable was not at all eager to help others. Understanding how and why this man felt the way he did should go a long way toward helping us see the main truth being taught in Luke 10.

The man who approached Jesus that day was "a lawyer." But that did not mean that he was like some character on The Practice or Law & Order--someone who argued cases before a judge and jury. More likely he was a lawyer in the religious sense of being an expert in the Law of God. In other words, this man was not F. Lee Bailey or Johnnie Cochrane in an Armani suit but was more like a highly specialized rabbi in flowing clergy robes. Since God's law was his business, he tended to bring the law into most every conversation he had.

So now that he comes face to face with Jesus, who was reputed to be unusually wise and perceptive, it is no surprise that this man immediately asks a legal question. "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Even though Jesus came here to proclaim the good news of grace, Jesus doesn't reframe the question but plays along, keeping everything very legal. "What does God's Law say?" Jesus asks first. And then, almost as though to flatter this man, Jesus adds, "How do you read it?" Have you ever asked a question of someone you had the feeling was smarter than you only to have this person say, "Well, tell me what you think?" It makes you feel pretty good, doesn't it? You don't feel like you're being talked down to but are being elevated, made into an equal conversation partner with this other really intelligent person.

But in asking this lawyer what the Law of God says, Jesus was giving the man a lot of leeway. There were thousands of laws, statutes, and commands at this man's disposal. Fully to answer the question "What does God's Law say" could have taken the whole rest of the day! But instead this lawyer gives the summary of the Law, which is the exact same answer Jesus gave on another occasion when someone asked Jesus, "What is the greatest commandment?" In other words, this lawyer not only gave a good answer, he gave Jesus' own answer. At bottom God's law is all about love: love for God, love for neighbor.

So in verse 28 Jesus says, "You have answered well! You've got it, my friend! Do that and you will live." Do that. There's that word again: to do, to perform a deed, to create something through your own actions. This still doesn't sound like being saved by grace alone apart from works. Why didn't Jesus just tell this lawyer flat out that salvation is not about what we do? Because I think Jesus knew what he was doing by allowing this legalistic atmosphere to continue, and the wisdom of Jesus' choice reveals itself immediately. After nodding approvingly at this lawyer and saying, "Do this and you will live," I picture Jesus as starting to walk away. So the lawyer immediately pipes up to hold Jesus there a little longer. "OK, rabbi, but who is my neighbor?"

This question was not borne of idle curiosity. Remember: this man was seeking to justify himself. He had surveyed the landscape of his past and had located any number of times when he had refused to help someone in need. Right at that very moment, if Jesus had pressed the man, Jesus could have uncovered all manner of racism, bias, and prejudice in the man's heart. But this man wasn't hoping that he would have to repent of his past nor was he trying to be cured of his ongoing prejudice. What he needed was a definition of "neighbor" that would disqualify the people he had ignored (and that he still intended to ignore) from being targets of the love God's law demanded. He wanted an excuse to stay the way he was. Alas, we all bear this unhappy tendency deep within us.

Last Tuesday at a conference, an African-American colleague of mine said something that was both sad and distressing. She and her recently deceased husband worked their whole lives to make multi-ethnic churches a reality. They worked hard to bring blacks and whites together in worship and in ministry. But after decades of this kind of work, she now says she has lost her hope that it will happen. They say that Sunday mornings when churches gather for worship all across this land, it is the most segregated time of the week. According to my friend, it seems likely to stay that way. It broke her heart to say it. It broke my heart to hear it. But neither I nor any of my other twenty colleagues could honestly say she was wrong or come up with any counter-evidence that might produce hope. We all of us have a hard time working through or getting rid of our prejudices.

Who is my neighbor? This is the question you ask when looking for loopholes and escape hatches. Because for the Jews in Jesus' day, as for many of us yet today, the word "neighbor" had come to mean anyone who is basically a lot like us. The Greek word in Luke 10 is plesion, which literally means "the close one." But over time the sense of this "closeness" stopped meaning anybody who was physically close to you--like, say, the person you might find yourself sitting next to on an airplane--and had swung around to mean the person who was the closest to you in terms of being like you in skin color, background, economic status, religious faith.

Jesus tells a story that explodes that idea. In verse 30 when Jesus began telling this parable, he uses as generic a phrase as possible to introduce his first character. In Greek Jesus says anthropos tis, a certain man. Somebody. Some guy was walking from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus doesn't say what he looked like, what his ethnicity was, or anything else about him. This man could be anybody, and he is. He is anybody. He is Everyman. He is everybody. The lawyer wanted a restricted definition of "neighbor," and so Jesus turns right around to give him a story that was about as broad-ranging and generic as possible.

He does get a bit more specific, however, when getting to the story's hero: it is a Samaritan, and I suspect that we do not tonight need to review the degree to which this ethnic group was despised by the Jews back then. But notice something interesting: if in this story it had been the Samaritan who ended up in the ditch with his face smashed in, that alone might have made a dramatic point because it would have been precisely this kind of greasy Samaritan that this lawyer would not have included in the category of "neighbor." But Jesus pulls a double-surprise here: it is the Samaritan who does the neighborly act for the stranger on the roadside. The despised character of the story does not become the object of pity but the giver of it, which creates a double-whammy!

You know, if you do something nice for a person who comes from a class of people with whom you don't otherwise associate, you can pat yourself on the back for doing this noble act of charity. Nevermind that maybe your bottom-line attitude toward this group has not changed but at least you did your part and so you feel good about yourself. But what happens if you become the recipient of charity from a person who belongs to that particular group of people? Well, you might be startled, shamed, perhaps even embarrassed. But you might also find yourself re-thinking your attitudes in ways that do not happen when you are in the superior position of providing charity to such folks rather than taking it from them. In this parable, therefore, I think we are supposed to see ourselves not so much as the Good Samaritan but as the man in the ditch.

As you lie there, you helplessly watch while two clergy pass by. But probably both the priest and the Levite were fulfilling the letter of the law. Let's presume each was on his way to the temple to perform ministry. The ancient law said that they if they got their hands bloody, much less if they touched a dead body (and this hapless victim in the ditch surely looked dead), they would be ritually defiled for seven days and would not be able to do their religious duties. Do you see where Jesus is going with this: if you are hung up on the law, then the odds are good you will always find excuses not to love your neighbor. What's more, your excuses will always sound about as holy as a quote from the catechism.

In other words, Jesus is saying not only that when it comes right down to it, everyone in the whole world is your neighbor. He is saying that, too. But if parables are narrative time bombs designed to explode people into new awareness, then in this case one of the pieces of shrapnel is designed to tear into the idea that the law will ever save anybody. Jesus is exposing the futility of the law as a way to inherit eternal life. After all, the Samaritan who finally reached out did so not as a result of law but of grace. The finer points of the law left the man half-dead in the ditch. It leaves us all there. Grace is what lifts the man out. Grace it what lifts all of us out. If God had not been gracious with us, we'd all still be dead.

As we said at the outset tonight, the "Good Samaritan" has taken on a life of its own. And 99 times out of 100 when we hear these words, the focus is on how somebody somewhere did a good deed. Being a Good Samaritan is hailed as the right thing to do and it often earns someone a public service award, some media recognition, those fifteen minutes of fame. And let's notice that in this parable Jesus is telling us that we, too, are to act as neighbors to all whom we meet, no matter where we meet them, no matter under what circumstances we meet them, no matter how different they are from us.

But as Christians, we notice also the grace notes being sounded here over against this picky lawyer who was more interested in justifying himself legalistically than in being a gracious giver of love. This parable tells us that when we start with the law, we will never arrive at grace. But when we start with grace, we may well find that the law of love gets fulfilled simply and solely because of the kind of people we became after the grace of God lifted us up out of the ditch where our sin and the devil had left us to die.

Later in the New Testament, reflecting on his own conversion to faith in Jesus as Lord, the apostle Paul will say that the law brings death. That surely would have been the case for the man in the ditch in Luke 10. The law would have killed him, would have left him for dead no less than the thugs who mugged him in the first place. But grace saved him. Like a Samaritan stranger who shows up from out of nowhere, so grace always comes from out of a clear blue sky as a sheerly unexpected, undeserved gift.

We need that grace because if we are honest, we confess that on our own we tend to be pretty unloving a lot of the time. So how wonderful it is that, as it turns out, the only way to love God and neighbor is through the very same grace that also forgives our countless failures of love. But the more you get forgiven for being unloving, the more loving you want to be in return. So our question is not the lawyer's question of "What must I do to be saved?" Our question is "What did Jesus do to save us?" If you can get a good answer to that question, you won't need to hear Jesus say, "Go and do likewise." Grace will so fill you with love that you will want to go and do as Jesus did. You won't have to. You will want to. Amen.