Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2010

Text: St. Luke 10:23-27

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“Who Is My Neighbor?”

“But he, wanting to justify himself, answered and said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

A man stands at the edge of the crowd listening to the Master with a mixed response of anger and inner rebuke, much like the response we have sometimes to Jesus’ words. It’s obvious from his bearing and his official robes that the man is a religious lawyer, a scribe of the Mosaic Law. Everything about him communicates the assurance of a life governed by the statutes of God down to the minutest detail.

At the center of his forehead is a meticulously positioned phylactery. You all know what a phylactery is. If you’ve paid attention to the news coming out of the Holy Land, and you’ve watched how events in the Gaza Strip region have unfolded over the past few years, you might have seen some of the orthodox Jews, as they were being displaced from their homes, wearing little black, calf-skin boxes bound to their foreheads with leather thongs. It’s an ancient custom going all the way back to the time of Moses himself. In Deuteronomy 6, the summary of the Law is followed by this admonition: “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes” (vv. 6-8). You see, it was a sign of your orthodoxy if you took the passage literally. Hence the practice of wearing the phylactery.

Inside the little black box, minutely inscribed on tiny peaces of parchment, were placed the most sacred passages of Scripture, such as Deuteronomy 6:4, 5, the Sh’ma: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” That along with Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The two commandments were repeated together as a capsulated summary of God’s Law.

So we’re sure that these passages of Scripture were there inside the phylactery box on the lawyer’s forehead. But the real question is: did the commandments get down from between his eyes into his heart? For remember, that’s what the law of God really requires: “These words which I command you today shall be in your heart.”

We can have the commandments of God before our eyes and in our ears all day long. We can cherish the fact that we still have the Ten Commandments written in our Prayer books, and that we say them on a regular basis. The question is: Do we do them? Has the Law of God been written in our hearts?

You see the issue wasn’t that the man did not know the Law. He knew the Law. So when he asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and Jesus answered, “You tell me. What is written in the Law?”, the lawyer didn’t have to think very hard; he had a little box between his eyes that gave him the answers; “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” “That was easy! Give me another.” It’s no surprise at all the lawyer knows up here [pointing to the forehead] what the answer is to how one inherits eternal life. It’s Jesus’ answer that’s the real surprise. It’s Jesus’ answer that tells us that we’ve got to have more than a mere intellectual assent and outward reverence for the commandments of God; they’ve got to be so much a part of who we are, down to the deepest part of our being, that there’s no room for anything else, if we ever hope to be saved by them.

That makes Jesus’ answer a strange one to our Protestant ears. He doesn’t say, “No, your dead wrong. There’s nothing you can do to earn eternal life. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone. Read the book of Romans.” He doesn’t say that, does he? He says, “You’re right! This do, and you will live. If you can get yourself to love God with all you heart, mind, soul, and strength, and you neighbor just as much as you love yourself, then you will most certainly gain eternal life by your own law-keeping. So go ahead and do this, and you will live.”

There’s a disconcerting silence. You can almost hear the sound of the wheels turning in the lawyers mind. “Wait a minute. That’s what he was supposed to say. So why, all of a sudden, do I feel like he’s got the drop on me? Why do I suddenly feel like I’m being accused of something? I love God… most of the time. And I’ve never done anything to my neighbors. I love each and every one of them.”

So feeling like he’s suddenly been backed into a corner, the lawyer asks a second question, a self-justifying question: “Okay, Jesus. So who is my neighbor?” If Jesus gave the right answer to his first question, even if it was a bit unsettling, maybe he’d also give the right answer to this question. If the lawyer could just get Jesus to define neighbor as narrowly as the rest of the Jewish establishment, he’d prove himself out to be as a good law keeper as the best in his society, and therefore worthy of his little slice of the heavenly pie.

The lawyer wanted a definition. What he got was an identification – not an identification of his neighbor, but an identification of who he really was deep down inside.

Jesus tells the parable. A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. The thieves worked him over pretty well. He was beaten, bloodied, and stripped even of his garments, and left for dead on the side of the road.

The man lay there helpless for what seemed like an eternity, when a priest walked by. Surely a priest, a man of God would stop to help. But he crossed to the other side of the road, and continued on his way. You see, he couldn’t be sure whether the man was dead or not, and if he touched a dead body he’d be unclean and unable to perform his duties in the Temple. So the priest chose sacrifice over mercy.

A second man, a Levite came to the place where the man lay. But he too quickly crossed to the other side of the road and passed by without even stooping down to see whether he was alive or dead. Neither could the Levite perform his temple service if he were made unclean. So the Levite chose service over ministry.

Now the lawyer was probably feeling pretty sympathetic at this point - sympathetic toward the priest and the Levite, that is. “Well, think of the difficulty of the choice they had to make,” he could rationalize. The law commanded that a man come to the aid of his fellow Israelite in time of crisis. But at the same time God demanded that his worshippers be holy and undefiled. Surely God would be well-pleased that they chose to honor Him first, rather than disqualify themselves from His service. Surely someone else with less responsibility would come along and help”. Perhaps that’s how the lawyer could still justify himself, even if perhaps he’d had a similar experience and passed by.

But then Jesus said something truly unexpected. The lawyer might have expected the next character (since there were typically three in this style of teaching) to be a Jewish layman – the lawyer’s man with less responsibility for religious service. And no doubt he was ready for the punch line: that this third Jewish man would help his brother in need. But Jesus’ throws a wrench into the lawyer’s fine-tuned little legal system.

The third man down the way is an enemy of the Jews, a Samaritan—a person who’s been describes as one of those “objectionable, unmentionable, heretical, untouchable, and generally impossible people with whom Jews had no dealings,” a person who might have been expected to laugh at the plight of the Jewish man on the side of the road, but never to lift a finger to help him. And this man turns out to be the hero of the story.

The Samaritan comes to where the man lays, and he has compassion for the man. Literally his “heart goes out to him.” It’s the same word used of the father when he goes out to meet his prodigal son, and of the king toward his servant who owes him an unpayable debt. In other words, the Samaritan—this man who is an outcast from God’s people, an enemy, worse than an old dog—shows the love of God, becomes and instrument of God’s mercy, to a man whom nobody would have defined as his neighbor. He kneels down in the dirt and gently cleans and binds up the wounds of the stranger. He bears him on his donkey, pays enough money to the inn-keeper for a whole month’s convalescence, and leaves with the promise of paying back any additional expense on his return.

“Now which of these three men do you think proved himself to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the thieves?” The truth was unavoidable. The lawyer was caught in his own trap. He thought he could keep pace with the best of the Jews, but now he’s forced to admit that a Samaritan proved himself a better law-keeper than even his little group of professionals. And so Jesus gives him the ultimate slap in the face: “Go and do thou likewise.”

Who is your neighbor? You know that’s really not a very good question. The question really should be: Are you a neighbor?

We love to identify ourselves with the Good Samaritan in the parable. We like to think that in extraordinary circumstances like he was faced with, we’d do the same. But the parable isn’t about extraordinary circumstances, is it? It’s about being a neighbor, rather than picking your neighbors. My neighbor is defined by who I am, not by some qualification in other people. And if that’s the case, if we’re able to see ourselves in the clear light of Christ’s words, we’ll have to admit that none of us can justify ourselves on the ground of our neighborliness.

As a matter of fact, that is the whole point of the parable, isn’t it? That we can’t justify ourselves. We don’t love our neighbors even half as much as we love ourselves; we don’t love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. If we’re honest the people we ought to identify with are the priest and the Levite, the religious people, the passers-by, people who like to forget that “pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world”— from the world, not from our fellow men.

But I’m not sure we’re even that good some of the times. I’m not sure whether sometimes the better comparison would be between us and the robbers. We’re so quick to beat each other up. We so casually wound and strip our brothers and sisters of their reputations through gossip and slander, and leave them half-dead for the world to finish off. Good Samaritans? Sometimes we’re the bandits!

And so what do we do? How shall we inherit eternal life? Jesus said, “This do, and you will live.” But we’re helpless when it comes to our ability to keep the Law.

But you see, that’s just it, isn’t it? The character in the parable Jesus is driving us to identify with isn’t the Good Samaritan, nor is it the Priest or the Levite, or even one of the bandits. No. It’s the guy on the side of the road, beaten and bloodied and lying there helpless and half dead. That’s what life does to us sometimes: it beats us up and leaves us for dead. Even worse, our own sins keep us down and batter and bruise our consciences before God. The Law of God is no help. Like the priest and the Levite it only identifies the problem. It only points out your weakness and your corruption. But it leaves you in the same exact spiritual condition it found you. It brings no mercy or forgiveness or healing. Therefore as the Scripture says, “No one will be justified before God by observing the Law.”

But someone else is coming down the road to where you lie in your helplessness – someone who is not ashamed to stoop down and touch you in your corruption. You see, Jesus is the Good Samaritan. He comes to us in whatever state, in whatever condition we might be in, and is Neighbor to us. He binds up our wounds and anoints us with the soothing balm of His mercy. He bears us upon Himself and brings us to the inn, to the Church, where we might be recovered. He pays for our healing with his own blood, and recompenses with His death whatever other spiritual expenses we might incur.

You see, Jesus doesn’t just tell us to be the neighbor. He was the neighbor; He was the Neighbor in its fullest sense. Even though, as the Scripture says, we were by nature His very enemies, Christ emptied Himself of His glory and made Himself a servant that he might reconcile us to God

And so now, because we have had a neighbor, we must be a neighbor. “Go and do thou likewise,” Jesus said. As we have received mercy, we must be merciful. As we have been ministered to, we must minister to one another. As we have been forgiven, we must forgive.

Don’t ask the question which people are and which people aren’t your neighbors. You be the neighbor, as Christ was neighbor to you. That is the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan. +