Go Do

Sermon Transcript

About a month ago I was walking to church on a beautiful Sunday morning headed south on Broad Street around 8:45 am, just as I do almost every Sunday, to get here for our pre-service prayer meeting at 9:00 am. But as I approached Green Street, something different happened: I heard a loud thud, and then a woman screaming. I turned to see a woman lying on the ground on the west side of the street, with a car in front of her, a car I soon realized had struck her as it was turning from Green St on to Broad. Thankfully the car was not traveling at full speed, and the collision was not fatal, but it was certainly painful. So I did what I trust any of you would have done too, and what practically everyone else who saw the accident did on that day: I went over. I called 911 while another lady worked with the victim to get a hold of her mom, and while another bystander pulled his car in front of the victim to redirect traffic around her. Now, if that story had been on the news, what do you think the reporter would have called me and the others who stopped? Good Samaritans.

 

Perhaps because of that phrase, the passage on which we are focusing today has become one of the most famous in the Bible, or at least part of it has. What everyone knows about the Good Samaritan is that the Good Samaritan stopped and helped someone in need, and we should too. It’s become so ingrained in our collective consciousness that a month ago, when a woman got hit by a car on Broad Street, almost everyone who saw it stopped and tried to help. But what I doubt many today know about the Good Samaritan is why Jesus told the story in the first place, and what I doubt many today realize about the Good Samaritan is that it demands much more of us than what a few bystanders and I did for that pedestrian a month ago. Jesus told this story in response to a question, and the question wasn’t, “So what are good people like?” It was, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And the story demands much more of us than, “If you see someone get hit by a car, stop and call 911.” Instead, through it Jesus tells us that to inherit eternal life, you must live a life of love. In a sense, you already know this. But, it is much more demanding than you might think. So first we’ll talk about how you already know this, and then we’ll talk about how it’s more demanding than you might think.

 

You already know this (v. 25-28)

 

Our passage today begins with a lawyer. This is not a lawyer in the sense in which we think of lawyers today as someone who goes to court and defends or prosecutes a criminal. Instead, lawyers were Jews whose vocation it was to study the law of God, the scriptures. Elsewhere they are called the scribes, and Jesus had a pretty negative assessment of them (Luke 11:46-52). So here Luke alerts us to the impurity of this lawyer’s motives; he tells us that the lawyer stood up to put him to the test. Though he calls Jesus “teacher” when he addresses him, he’s not asking his question to learn. He’s asking his question in hope of catching Jesus in an error with respect to the law, and thus showing himself to be the true “teacher” in the room.

 

The question is, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Though the lawyer asked it from impure motives, it’s hard to imagine a more important question. And yet, very few people today ask this question. We ask, “What shall I do to make more money?” or “What shall I do to find a partner?” or “What shall I do to solve my mental health challenges?” none of which are necessarily bad questions, but all of which pale in comparison to the importance of this question: What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Imagine a diseased patient goes to the doctor and asks the doctor for a painkiller that will help him with his pain for the next 6 hours, but never shows any interest in whether there is a cure for his disease. Isn’t that what many do when they get bogged down with solving the problems of this life, and don’t ask whether eternal life is even possible, let alone what they should do to inherit it? And in asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, the lawyer also shows that he does not think inheriting eternal life is automatic, like any decent person would just naturally inherit it. As an expert in the law of God, he knew that something must be done if one is to inherit eternal life, and so he asks Jesus what.

 

But Jesus responds to his question with a question: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” In asking this question, Jesus directs us to the only place we can go for a reliable answer to the question, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”: Scripture. Jesus doesn’t ask, “What do you think?”, “What do the rabbis say?”, or “What does the priest say?” In fact, isn’t the reason that many today don’t bother with the question of eternal life because they don’t know who to even ask? Muslims say one thing, Buddhists another, Christians another. Who’s to say which is right? At least with questions like, “How can I get rich?” there seem to be people with answers–you go ask those who got rich. Who, though, would you ask about eternal life? Well, there is only one religion that even claims to have a teacher who proved that he’d inherited eternal life by rising from the dead and appearing to over 500 witnesses (1 Cor 15:3-6). And here, when that teacher was asked what someone must do to inherit eternal life, he pointed to the scriptures for the answer. “What is written?” he asks.

 

The law expert replies that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. The basic answer is love, love pointed in two directions: Toward God, and then toward your neighbor. Love is an affection whereby someone is dear to us, such that we desire their good. In answering in this way, the lawyer was summarizing the whole law God had given in the Scriptures, where we read of God saying, for example, in Leviticus 18:5 – “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them.” So what do the scriptures say about what we must do to inherit eternal life? We must keep his statutes and rules. And what do his statutes and rules require? Love God, love your neighbor. 

 

Beyond this 2-command summary of the law, the most famous summary of God’s law was the Ten Commandments. The first 4 tell us how we are to love God: Have no other gods before him, don’t worship him through pictures or sculptures, don’t take his name in vain, and set apart the Sabbath as a day devoted to worshiping him. The next six tell us how we are to love our neighbor: Honor your father and mother, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, and don’t even desire for yourself anything that belongs to your neighbor. Love God, love your neighbor: There you have it. In fact, Jesus also summarized the whole law in this way (e.g., Matt 22:37-40). So Jesus replied, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

 

The lawyer already knew the answer to his own question, and on some level at least, so do you. Of course, most of you in the room today are Christians, and so you are probably familiar with this summary of the law as loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself. But even if you are here today and you aren’t a Christian, don’t you sense that you ought to at least love your neighbor?

 

But one problem we have today compared to this lawyer is that most skip the first commandment, to love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. So most today, even if they aren’t sure eternal life exists, they assume that if it does exist, they’ll probably inherit it. And if you ask them why, you never hear them say, “I’ve done my best to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Instead, they say something like, “I’ve done my best to help others.” What that misses, though, is that there are two great commandments, not one. Pastor Tim Keller used to illustrate it this way: Imagine an orphan is abandoned and left for dead, but a woman finds him, adopts him, and provides for his every need. So the orphan grows up and goes off to college, where he lives a good life. He studies hard, gets good grades, he’s kind to his classmates, he volunteers at the local food pantry on the weekends, and as he gets into his career, he contributes to various charitable causes. But he never calls home. He never visits. From that day forward, he lives as though his mom doesn’t exist. Does anyone really think that’s ok? No; we all sense intuitively that he owes his mom a relationship. He ought to love her.

 

Yet who is the one who has really given us all the goods we enjoy, including life itself? Why is there something, rather than nothing? Deep down we all know that there is a first cause, a real God, who we owe love. Others have compared us to someone in a pool trying to sit on a beach ball. Try as we may to keep it down, it keeps popping back up. Try as we may to suppress the knowledge of God, no one can entirely shake the sense that he exists, and we ought to love him. Our problem isn’t that we don’t know what we must do to inherit eternal life. Our problem is that we haven’t done it.

 

So Jesus, after saying to this lawyer, “You have answered correctly,” adds, “Do this, and you will live.” We all know what we should do, but knowing isn’t enough. It’s only those who do love the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their strength and with all their mind, and love their neighbor as themselves, who will inherit eternal life. But that’s more demanding than you might think. So let’s talk about that next.

 

But it’s more demanding than you might think (v. 29-37)

 

You can tell the lawyer is starting to feel that this might be more demanding than he’d like to think, because look at what he does next in verse 29: But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” He assumes he’s got the stuff about loving the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength on lock; he doesn’t ask about that. But he’s not as sure about loving his neighbor as himself. I mentioned already that many today assume loving their neighbor is the part they have on lock, while forgetting almost entirely about loving God. The Jews of Jesus’ day had an opposite problem.

 

When it came to the first four commandments, they prided themselves on their supposed obedience. They didn’t worship other gods; in fact, they were unique in the ancient world and in the Roman Empire for being the people who only worshiped one god. They’d even take extra measures to prevent accidentally worshiping other gods; like where God’s law forbade bowing down to carved images, strict first-century Jews would avoid making or having carved images at all. Not only would they not offer sacrifices to idols, but they would forbid eating or purchasing any food that someone else may have offered to an idol. When it came to taking the name of Yahweh in vain, many of them would just avoid ever saying Yahweh at all. And the Gospels are littered with extra regulations they put in place to strictly keep the Sabbath, including ones they accuse Jesus of violating. Even before Jesus’ time, this was often the Lord’s critique of Israel: Yes you’ve got the burnt offerings on lock, but then you go and oppress your poor neighbors (e.g., Isaiah 1:10-17). Nonetheless, the lawyer assumes he’s got love for God on lock.

 

But then he gets to thinking about loving his neighbor as himself, and Luke tells us in verse 29 that he wanted to justify himself. To justify in the Bible means to declare righteous, so the lawyer here wants to be able to look at his own resume, and declare himself righteous. He figures the loving God part is all good, but as he thinks about loving his neighbor as himself, he begins to realize that if that includes every human, every image of God he encounters, he might have a hard time declaring himself righteous. And since that’s what he really wants, he realizes the only way he can do it is by lowering the standard of God’s law to one he’s already attained. If he can keep that circle of neighbors small enough, like maybe other lawyers and priests, maybe his own family, or maybe even just other Israelites, then maybe, just maybe, he can convince himself that he’s righteous enough to inherit eternal life.

 

You might assume that someone who’s really concerned to justify themselves would work really hard at obeying God. But that’s not how it works out in reality. In reality, those who are concerned to justify themselves work really hard to redefine God’s law in such a way that they can convince themselves they’re already obeying it. Pastor Harry Fujiwara compares it to dunking a basketball. When I was in eighth grade, I was sure I’d be able to dunk a basketball by tenth. To this day, I still can’t touch the rim. But if I lower the basket to eight feet, then I can dunk. And if my biggest concern is just being able to tell myself I can dunk, then instead of working hard to improve my vertical jump, I’m just going to lower that hoop to eight feet. I wonder if that’s happening in your heart with God’s law. Do you find yourself trying to redefine it in such a way as to assure yourself that you’re already doing it?

 

That’s what this man was trying to do, which led him to ask Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus is eventually going to respond with a question again, but first he tells a story about a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jericho was about 17 miles northwest of Jerusalem, and “going down” refers to the thousands of feet of elevation loss from Jerusalem to Jericho. Biblical scholar Darrel Bock writes that this road from Jerusalem to Jericho “was a rocky thoroughfare winding through the desert and surrounded by caves, which made good hideouts for robbers who laid in wait.” In Philadelphia we might imagine it like a story of someone walking down Kensington and Allegheny, also known as K&A, in the middle of the night. So this time the man gets robbed, and the robbers strip him, beat him, and depart, leaving him half dead. 

 

But then in a seemingly fortunate turn of events, who comes down the road? A priest, of all people, exactly who you’d think would stop to help…only when the priest saw him, he crossed to the other side. Luke doesn’t give us insight into the priest’s motives: Perhaps he was afraid of becoming ceremonially unclean by contact with what may have looked like a dead body already, perhaps he had an appointment to engage in some priestly activity that he thought he shouldn’t miss, or perhaps he feared for his own safety if he tried to help someone who’d just been beaten up himself. We don’t know why, but the priest didn’t stop to help the man.

 

Next up was a Levite (Levites were assistants to the priests), and he did the same thing as the priest. But then finally a Samaritan came, and keep in mind the connotations of a Samaritan to a Jewish law expert. We talked about this a few weeks back, but to Jews the Samaritans were ethnically and religiously impure. As the apostle John summarized in his Gospel, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). Furthermore, in the chapter just before this in Luke, Jesus tried to enter a village of the Samaritans, but they would not receive him (Luke 9:51-56). So the law expert would have expected the priest and the Levite to do the right thing; he definitely would not expect the Samaritan to. If you had gone to the law expert with the classic beginning to a bad joke, “A priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan walk into a bar; which is least likely to inherit eternal life?” he would have said “the Samaritan.” Yet in this story, it’s the Samaritan who doesn’t go to the other side of the road when he sees the man beaten, robbed, and half dead.

 

Instead, we read in verse 33 that the first thing the Samaritan did differently from the priest and Levite is that he “came to where” the victim was. He’s going to do a lot more after that, but don’t miss the profundity of this first step, a step the priest and Levite avoided taking: He moved toward the victim. When you aren’t sure what to do, that’s a first step you can take toward loving someone. When the Samaritan came to our victim and saw him, verse 33 tells us that he had compassion on him. Again, a simple thing, but revealing a heart of love, a heart that then moved him to action. First the Samaritan bound up his wounds, applied some of the medicine available at the time, then put him on his animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. In towns you would generally sleep in the guest room of someone’s house, but this inn here along the Jericho Road was more like what we’d think of as a hotel today. The Samaritan stayed with the man that night, and then the next day, he paid the innkeeper two denarii, which would be about two days wages for the average worker at the time, and which would buy the man about a two-week stay at the inn. Then he even adds that if the man accrues further expenses during that time, the innkeeper could charge it to the Samaritan’s account, and he’d pay it when he returns.

 

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself, according to Jesus? It means, as Jesus said earlier in Luke, to do for others whatever you wish they would do for you (Luke 6:31). If you were robbed, stripped, beaten, and left half dead on the side of the road, what do you wish someone else would do for you? You wish they’d stop, move toward you, bind up your wounds, put you on their animal, take you to the inn, and pay for your stay. That’s how demanding love is. The Samaritan gave up at least a day of his time, he gave up at least two days of his wages, and put himself in potential danger to help a man he’d never met before. He addressed the man’s wounds and got him a place to stay until the man could recover and get back on his feet.

 

So upon concluding the story, Jesus asked the law expert, “Which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” Notice that Jesus has subtly shifted the question. The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus then asked who from his story proved to be a neighbor to the man. The important question if you want to inherit eternal life is not, “Who is my neighbor?” but “How can I be a neighbor to others?” 

 

So in verse 37 the man answers, “The one who showed him mercy” and Jesus says, “You go, and do likewise.” In each section of the passage, the format is the same: The lawyer asks a question from an impure motive, Jesus responds with a question, the lawyer answers, and Jesus gives the conclusion. In verse 28 the conclusion is: “Do this, and you will live.” Now in verse 37 we see a similar conclusion: “You go, and do likewise.” Where in verse 28 Jesus affirmed that loving God and your neighbor is what you must do to inherit eternal life, in verse 37 he shows the Samaritan just how demanding that is. He says that loving God and your neighbor doesn’t just involve not being the one who strips, robs, and beats his neighbor. It involves also seeing the stripped, robbed, and beaten neighbor, moving toward him, having compassion on him, and giving of your time, energy, and money, to help him, even if the man is a total stranger to you. If you want eternal life, lawyer, don’t rely on your Jewish heritage, don’t rely on your expertise in the law, don’t even rely on your Sabbath-keeping, your strict observance of food laws, or the way you avoid using the name of Yahweh. Instead, go and love like this Samaritan, and you will live.

 

And then, the story ends. We don’t know how the lawyer responded, and we’ll see Luke end stories like this throughout his Gospel because the point is not so much how the lawyer responded; the point is, how will you respond? One response might be to say, “Ok, you know what? You’re right. I need to do a better job of loving my neighbor. From this day forward, I will,” but if that’s your response, you’ve missed Jesus’ point. Remember that the law expert wanted to justify himself; in response, was Jesus really just saying, “Well hey look, if you want to justify yourself, let me help you”? No; the comment that the lawyer desired to justify himself is a critique of the lawyer. So what’s Jesus really doing here?

 

We get a clue from a story later in Luke’s Gospel. In Luke 18 Jesus tells a story of a pharisee, who were cut from the same cloth as the lawyers, and a tax collector, who were notorious sinners. He tells us there that the Pharisee trusted in himself, that he was righteous, much like the lawyer in our story is trying to justify himself, while the tax collector prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” His conclusion to the story? The tax collector is the one who went away justified, rather than the Pharisee (Luke 18:14).  

 

So you see, Jesus is telling the story of the Good Samaritan in such a way as to lead the lawyer to say not, “Oh good; I’ll go do that,” but instead to say, “Oh no; I haven’t done that.” His righteousness didn’t even exceed that of a Samaritan, let alone measure up to the standard he himself knew, to love the Lord his God with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength and with all his mind, and to love his neighbor as himself. The proper response to the story of the Good Samaritan is not, “Oh good; I’ll go do that” or “Oh good; I already do that.” The proper response is first, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And the good news is that it is those who come to God with that heart posture who go away justified. It is those who Jesus says he came to call (Luke 5:32). It is those who Jesus says he came to seek and save (Luke 19:10). 

 

And in the way he has sought and saved them, Jesus showed himself to be the true and greater Samaritan. The Bible tells us that we were not just half dead, but fully dead, in our trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1-3), having fallen in Adam, and having been under the power of the one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). But Jesus moved toward us while we were not only strangers, but enemies, and had compassion on us. He came to earth, became man, and at great cost to himself, provided for our every need. The price he paid was not only two day’s wages; the price he paid was his very own life, which he offered up on our behalf on the cross to pay for all the ways we have not loved God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, or loved our neighbor as ourselves. By his love for God, and by his love for neighbor, God declared him righteous and rewarded him with eternal life when he raised him from the dead. Now he promises that whoever turns from their efforts to justify themselves and trusts in Christ for their salvation will be justified because of Jesus’ love for God, and Jesus’ love for neighbor.

 

If we had to love God and our neighbor like this Samaritan in order to be saved, who of us could justify ourselves, who of us could trust in ourselves that we are righteous? None of us. If you think you can, it can only be because you don’t really understand just how demanding a life of love really is. With man it is impossible, but with God salvation is possible, and promised, to all who trust in Jesus Christ for it. And now here’s the irony, here’s the wisdom of God revealed in the gospel: When you stop trying to justify yourself, when you stop trying to convince yourself that you’re already righteous in yourself, then you can actually start becoming more righteous; then you can actually go and do like the Samaritan.

 

Think back to my dunking aspirations. If it’s important for me to think of myself as someone who can dunk a basketball today, my only option is to lower the hoop to eight feet, and of course, as long as I’m doing that, I’m not going to be working to develop the leg muscles or skills necessary to dunk on a ten foot hoop. But if I could actually become ok with admitting that as of today, I can’t dunk a basketball, and if I had a promise of strength that would enable me to dunk a basketball, then I could actually get to work learning how to dunk on a 10-foot hoop. That is something like what is offered to us in the gospel. In the gospel we’re offered Jesus Christ himself, the righteous one, whose righteousness covers us and enables us to admit that as of today, we aren’t righteous. We haven’t loved our neighbor like the Samaritan did. But since Jesus has, and he is ours, God has already declared us righteous, and now God says that by the Spirit of Jesus living in us, we can actually make progress, and start loving our neighbor like the Samaritan did. We can now go, do likewise, and inherit eternal life.

 

And so, brother and sisters, go and do likewise. To inherit eternal life, you must live a life of love. The apostle John tells us that “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). If you profess to love God who you cannot see, how can you not love your neighbor who you can see? Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that you will inherit eternal life if love like this isn’t present and increasing in your life in some measure. Faith without works is dead (James 2:17). If you profess to believe that Jesus found you dead on the road, and gave his own life to supply your greatest need, how can you not give of your time, energy, and money to help whoever the Lord brings into your path, whatever their background, and whatever their differences from you? Did you notice that Luke doesn’t tell us much about the victim, except that he was a man? He doesn’t tell us about the life he’d lived prior to that, he doesn’t tell us his ethnicity, his class, his views on politics, or his religion. Why not? Because all that mattered was that he was a man, a human made in the image of God, and if we love God who we cannot see, we owe all such people we can see love, a love of the same intensity and intentionality with which we love ourselves. Do this, and you will live.