Deuteronomy 30.9-14; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37
“The word of the Lord is very near to you,” Moses says in today’s first reading. “It is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” Moses is saying that living a life of faith is not meant to be complicated. God is not so far away that you need to send someone on a distant errand to bring holiness back to you; there’s no need for a biblical version of Amazon to deliver something from halfway around the world: God has already come to you. No distant pilgrimage or epic quest is required to find God because God has already found you. “The word of the Lord is very near to you” to lead and guide you in the life that God desires.
This simple, clear truth could also serve as a summary of today’s gospel reading— Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. There, the ending is equally clear, “Go and do likewise.” This is the life God desires: choosing God means choosing people; turning toward God means turning outward toward others in love.
Can it really be that basic? That’s the question asked by the scholar of Jewish law in today’s gospel. (Our translation calls him a lawyer though he’s not from the world of civil or criminal law, but from the world of biblical scholarship.) This scholar knows the clear answer about the life God desires. He quotes the source. “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 your neighbor as yourself.” Choosing God does mean choosing people; turning toward God means turning outward toward others in love. But you also get the sense he thinks that it can’t be quite that straightforward.
The idea of ‘neighbor’ is, for example, a little vague. Who are these neighbors; where are they? The blocks around the neighborhood school; the town where I live; can I limit the love I offer to the people who will love me back? So the scholar, looking for a loophole, asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor.” Perhaps some clear boundaries would help: family first, then the people next door, then community, then country, and only after that, the world beyond (and only if we have any energy left)? If you have ever found yourself asking questions about limits and boundaries of the neighborhood, and the people you are meant to love, today you are in good company. A scholar of Jewish law asks that question, too. “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answers that simple question, and each if our questions behind it, in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Only Jesus’ answer doesn’t quite match the scholar’s question. You may have noticed. For the biblical scholar, neighbor is a noun—a person; someone to care for; ‘who.’ For Jesus, neighbor is more like a verb—an action; a way of life; ‘what.’ One doesn’t have a neighbor; one does neighborly things. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” But Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
The answer to that question is simple, clear: the Samaritan. We’ve named hospitals, nursing homes, and relief agencies ‘Good Samaritan’ because of this parable; we use the phrase to describe people who offer help above and beyond expectation. Yet did you notice that when Jesus asks the question about who acted like a neighbor and did neighborly things, the lawyer doesn’t give the simple answer. He doesn’t say the word ‘Samaritan.’ Jesus does; the scholar can’t. All he says is, “The one who showed mercy.”
If that response sounds reluctant, there is a reason. Samaria and Judea were two countries that bordered one another: Samaria to the north, Judea to the south. But at this point in the biblical narrative, the relationship between the two nations was fraught, summed up by something the Gospel of John says. “Jews do not associate with Samaritans.” The gospel doesn’t say this is a good thing, just merely observes. “Jews do not associate with Samaritans.”
Now the reason for that animosity is beyond our scope this morning. Yet it is enough to say that neither a Judean nor a Samaritan would naturally have thought of the other as part of their neighborhood; each was beyond the boundaries and limits of people whose well-being they we were meant to seek; each, from the other’s point of view, underserving. It’s so bad that there are writings from between the time of the Old and New Testaments that describe Samaritans as hardly even human. Can you grasp the notion that someone might look at people from another country and see them as less than human? Jesus won’t.
So instead of answering the scholar’s question about who my neighbor is that therefore deserves to be loved, Jesus shows us a person who acts as a neighbor through self-giving love to someone undeserving. Then, to open our eyes to true neighborliness, our Lord uses that person as the example of the life God calls us to. A Samaritan, the ultimate outsider, is the living and real presence of life inside God.
Tim Keller in his book, ‘Generous Justice,’ says “By depicting a Samaritan as helping [a person in need], Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all—regardless of race, politics, class, and religion—is your neighbor. Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.” Someone we might look down on or separate ourselves from anyone we might consider outside the neighborhood of our care and affection, is the one who embodies the life God desires in Jesus’ parable; the ultimate outsider becomes a living and real presence of life inside God.
That means that when Jesus saying, “Go and do likewise,” his words have two layers, two meanings: Jesus shows the importance of extending the love of God in practical ways to anyone in need; and he shows how the love of God is at work through people that we have put on the other side of the boundary that divides ‘us vs them’ because they are our neighbors, too, and we are meant to love our neighbor.
In Colossians, today’s second reading, St Paul writes with great warmth to a congregation of people who are doing what the Samaritan does—displaying the love of God in their care for each other. Paul praises them for their “love in the Spirit” and for lives that bear fruit in “every good work.” Two chapters later in that same letter, Paul describes how this love works itself out in practice. Christians have been renewed in the image of God across all human divisions. “In that renewal,” he says, “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all!”
There was no natural affection between the groups of people that Paul describes. Yet love in God does not follow the boundaries we set. Christ is all in all. Christianity does not reinforce our natural loyalties. Christ is all in all. Paul describes in his letter what Jesus shows in his parable. Like the expert in biblical law looking for a loophole and asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” it is natural for us for us to prioritize love based on boundaries like proximity, blood and nation, or of friendship and natural affection. It is natural, but not holy. Where and when the gospel is alive and well, it bears fruit across all human divisions. Christ is all in all. In Jesus, we do not merely have a neighbor, we do neighborly deeds in self-giving love for anyone in need.
Now the courage, strength, and desire it takes to do the work that God has given us to do is not so much something that we inspire and awaken in ourselves; this is not a case of ‘Could you please just try a little harder to be nice.’ Something more is at work. The Holy Spirit is at work. Grace is at work. Our neighborly deeds of self-giving love are more like an echoing response to a word already spoken. Because before we offer neighborly love, we have already received it from the Son of God who comes to us in love.
One of the ways Christians have read and heard today’s parable is as a story of Jesus himself. The Samaritan, the ultimate and despised outsider, is a living and real presence of life inside God and shows us Jesus, the living and real presence of God in the flesh. Like the Samaritan extending love to a stranger and enemy beyond the boundaries of blood and nation, while we were strangers and enemies to God, says the New Testament, Christ died for us in self-giving love. Like the Samaritan who poured oil and wine in the wounds of the half-dead traveler and took the cost of the care on himself, Jesus saved and rescued us at great cost to himself, embodying one of the psalms that says of God, “He heals the broken-hearted and binds up all their wounds.”
The love of God does not follow the boundaries we set but is poured out unmeasured and unbounded for all people and for you. Our response, then, is to mirror God’s love-in-action seen and given in Jesus. “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another,” says the letter of 1st John, not asking “Who is my neighbor?” but taking up Jesus’ way of life and do neighborly deeds in love.
Choosing God means choosing people; turning toward God in love means turning out toward others in deeds of love; life in God means offering life to others. Simple, clear. “The word of the Lord is very near to you. It is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” Receiving overflowing neighbor-love in Jesus, we live as the neighbor Jesus calls us to be. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Go and do likewise.
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