Grace,
mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Luke
10:23-37)
Which one of
these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among
the robbers? He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him,
“You go, and do likewise.”
Prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our
hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Two weeks ago in our Gospel reading, Jesus told a parable of the
Pharisee and the tax collector. This parable told us about one men who exalted
himself into the place of God, and made himself the judge, in such a way that
he treated the tax collector who was praying in the temple with contempt. He
even thanked God that he was not like that tax collector.
Jesus says: I tell you, [it was the tax collector who]
went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who
exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be
exalted.
Notice this parable and this reading is about justification, being
justified. That means, this man was declared forgiven by God, he was sent back
to his home with life and salvation in his pocket. And Jesus is both true man
and true God – he is able to speak God’s judgment upon these two men and tell
us which one was forgiven and which one was not. And what a comfort it is that
Jesus promises forgiveness to all those people who have nothing—the poor tax
collector is just like other people, he is probably an extortioner, his might
be an adulterer, he might have been unjust. He probably didn’t fast twice a
week like the Pharisee and probably didn’t give a tenth of all that he got. And
despite all this, he still has a Saviour who is happy to be with him. He still
has a Jesus who died for him and made atonement for him and rose again from the
dead for him. He still has faithful high priest, Jesus Christ, who scoops him
up like a rusty old can of a junk heap and exalts him, elevates him to the
position of one of God’s children, a son of God, together with him, so that
this man can pray together with Jesus to his Father in heaven. There such a
stern, strict warning in this reading for all the proud and arrogant people in
the world, but such wonderful comfort for poor tax collectors!
+++
Our Gospel reading today is the Parable
of the Good Samaritan. And this parable, like the parable of the Pharisee and
the tax collector, has to do with being justified. This parable has to do with
God in his throne-room pronouncing judgment on sinners, it has to do with
entering into eternal life.
And so a lawyer wants to test Jesus. He
says: Teacher, what shall I do to
inherit eternal life?
In answering this question, Jesus gives
him a little test like a Sunday School teacher. He says: What is written in the law? How do you read
it? In other words: Which passage in the
bible do you think is most relevant to this question? How were you taught in
Sunday School? How did you learn it in the catechism?
So the man replies: You shall 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 neighbour as yourself. Jesus
replies: You have answered correctly; do
this, and you will live.
The lawyer is an expert in God’s law.
Sometimes lawyers have the problem that they think that everything can be
solved by legislation. But also a good lawyer is also someone who knows how to
use the law properly and get out of it. If someone has to go to court, and the
court case is a tricky one, or if it looks like the jury or the judge would
give a hard sentence, the person might like to have a “good lawyer” in order to
get them off the hook! They need a lawyer who is a good slippery fish who can
get around all the corners of the law, and use the law to their advantage. They
say things like: “Even though you’re innocent, you should plead guilty, because
the judge thinks your guilty anyway, and you’re much more likely to get a
lighter sentence if you just plead guilty.” There’s enough TV shows about
courtrooms for us to understand the sort of thing I’m talking about.
But this lawyer is an expert in God’s
law. And as a good lawyer, when he is on trial before God in his courtroom,
he wants to get out of the law. He wants a lighter sentence. He wants an ace of
spades up his sleeve that he can pull out in front of God and get himself off
the hook.
Jesus says to the man: You have answered correctly; do this [love
God and your neighbour] and you will live.
But the man’s not satisfied. He knows
that he hasn’t loved God with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his
strength, and with all his mind. He hasn’t loved his neighbour as himself. God
has not been enthroned in his heart at all times. He forgets to pray when he is
trouble. He has made no effort in loving God. He has dedicated his mind to
loving other things than God. And he hasn’t been a good neighbour to people.
So what does this lawyer do? We read: But he, desiring to justify himself, said to
Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?”
He thinks he’s got it all worked out!
He’s got the perfect question to get him off the hook. But do you hear the
words: desiring to justify himself. That means, he wants to turn God’s perfect law into his own law. He
wants to dumb down God’s perfect, strict law of complete total obedience and
love, and he wants to make his own version of it. He says, “Obviously God
doesn’t really mean what he says. Surely there must be some caveat, some
disclaimer, some way out!”
No – there’s no way out. So instead of
letting God judge him and instead of putting himself under God’s righteous
judgment of pronouncing him guilty, he actually demonstrates that he doesn’t
love God at all. He would much rather kill God off and throw him off his
throne, and set himself up there instead. He desires to justify himself. He
wants to make himself his own God. He can’t distinguish between God’s heart and
his heart. He thinks that everything that comes out of his own over-educated,
lawyer’s heart is the same as that which comes out of God’s heart.
But why does he want to wriggle out from
under God’s law? The same reason as the rest of us: He doesn’t want God to find
him guilty.
This man wants to love God, but outside
of real human life. He only wants to love God in such a way that he doesn’t
have to love the people God himself created. But if he doesn’t love them, then
he hates not just them, his neighbours, but he testifies to the fact that he
hates that loving hand that formed and created his neighbours.
If this man wants to be justified, he is
going to need a Saviour. And so Jesus tells him the parable of the Good
Samaritan.
This lawyer is stuck in a corner by the
perfect, strict law of God. There is no way that he can enter heaven because of
the way he has lived and kept the law. He knows it. He needs a neighbour to come
and save him. He needs Jesus to die for him and rise from the dead for him.
The lawyer is just like a man going down
from Jerusalem to Jericho, who fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat
him and departed, leaving him half dead. This lawyer, just like us, has vicious
accusers: Satan and all the demons. They come to beat us with God’s law and
leave us half dead. If we want to be saved by our own works, our consciences,
together with the devil, will beat us. They will strip us and rob us of all our
dignity, all our purity. They will beat us and pound us with accusation, and
then they will depart and leave us half dead. They will abandon us and leave us
desperate.
Every person born into this world who
wants to be saved by God’s law is like this man on the road, stripped, beaten
and abandoned.
This man needs a friend. He needs a
Jesus. Not a priest or a Levite who is too afraid to touch him in all his
filth, but a real friend, a Saviour. We need a Jesus who will bend down to meet
us in the mud and the blood, and have compassion on us. We need Jesus to come
and bind up our wounds and pour on soothing oil and wine. We need Jesus to come
and put him on his own animal and bring us to a safe place where he can take
care of us. We need him to pay for our welfare, and to charge everything to his
account.
Maybe that road was a dangerous road
between Jerusalem and Jericho, and the man was a bit stupid to have walked down
that road by himself. It doesn’t matter! It’s Jesus who is our Good Samaritan.
He looks after us, he pays for us, he binds up our wounds, and he has
compassion on us. When we are brought into God’s courtroom, when we stand under
God’s law and his judgment, on the last day as we do every day in our hearts,
we will be completely helpless, stripped, beaten and abandoned. We need a
Saviour. We need a Jesus.
This is why St Paul says in Ephesians
and similarly in other places: By grace you
have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift
of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
We still have one more question we need
to ask. What about good works? What use is the law? What about loving God and
our neighbour?
Well, St Paul says in the same place in
Ephesians: For we are
God’s worksmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Firstly, we have no idea what God’s love
looks like, if it weren’t taught to us. And we can’t even fathom how much Jesus
loves us, how often he has had to rescue us from the roadside, how much wine
and oil he has had to use, how much money he has had to pay the innkeeper for
our night. He knows just how much help we need, and he knows so deeply how much
we need him. If only we knew how much we needed him, instead of trying to
justify ourselves.
So our good works in this life are
always a “work-in-progress”. There is always an inbox on our table with things
that need doing, but in this life we will never be able to front up to God and
say that we’ve done everything that was required of us.
Jesus has given himself to us as an
example, and he tells us, “Go and do likewise.” For us it is only baby steps,
and even our best work is not seen by us. Most of the time, we don’t know how
much we are really appreciated. People are thankless sinners—they don’t thank
us for everything good we do, and so most often we don’t know. But also, our
best work is not even seen by us or other people, but is simply seen by our
Father who is in secret, who so often even keeps our good works secret even
from us.
And there’s a sense from our Gospel
reading, that if someone were to thank us for our help, we would simply say, “I
only did what any Good Samaritan would do.”
But just before we finish, one last
point: We often forget who Jesus is talking to. He is talking to Jews, Jewish
lawyers even – and Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. But here Jesus
compares himself to a Samaritan, and tells a group of Jews to go and do likewise, just like a Samaritan.
A Samaritan is a foreigner and also a
heretic. A Jewish priest and a Levite—the people who should be following God’s
law—walk past the man on the other side of the road. And now here Jesus takes
out a knife and he cuts right to the heart of all their racism and prejudice.
Maybe you are racist towards certain
people. Maybe you think that certain people from that country are like that. Or
maybe you think people from different religions are like that. And so you
justify yourself, and say I don’t have to associate myself with people from
Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, or even from other states
and towns and cities in Australia. You justify yourself and say: I don’t have
to associate myself with atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Mormons,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, or whoever presses your buttons.
Because what you have to understand is
that Jesus is so compassionate to people in their bodily needs, that if all the
people from his church who read his word and partake of his sacraments walk by
on the other side of the road, Jesus will even use atheists, Muslims, and
Mormons to do that sort of work instead. He lets his sun shine on the just and
the unjust.
How much more should we be merciful to
people not just in the bodily needs and but also in their spiritual needs?
And so when you do help someone, and
they thank you, then say, “I’m only doing what any good Samaritan would do.”
“I’m only doing what any good person from whatever religion and whatever
country would have done.” The gospel goes out to all nations, and all people
are called to receive salvation from Jesus, our Good Samaritan. And Jesus died
for the sins of the whole world. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin
of the world. Jesus is the one who shows us mercy, and may all praise and glory
and honour be given to him!
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, pour the comfort of
your word and Holy Spirit into all of our wounds and over everything in us that
is sinful, and give us everything that we need from day to day. Give us hearts
full of compassion to serve each needy person in body and soul that we come
across in our life. Amen.
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