July 14, 2019 “Excuses” – Luke 10:25-37

Luke 10:25-37
“Excuses”
July 14, 2019 – Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

A ball rolled out in the residential street lined with cars. Right behind it and in front of my scoutmaster’s car, came a little boy 2 or 3 years old. My scoutmaster stepped on the brakes. We watched the toddler grab the ball, then stand at the side of the street watching us. There was no adult or even older child in sight anywhere. We were late to some important scout event and my scoutmaster said, “If we weren’t in such a hurry, we’d stop and do a good deed and get that little guy safely back to his house.” Then we drove on.

That was our excuse that afternoon in Santa Monica. Other than Jesus, people in our Gospel reading today had good excuses too. The lawyer, in verse 25, had come to test Jesus, to check His theology by asking a hard question. In Matthew and Mark a lawyer tests Jesus by asking which is the greatest commandment, but here in Luke the question has a veneer of sincerity and personal concern, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus answered the man’s question with His own question, “What is written in the law?” Verse 27 demonstrates the man’s own acuity and knowledge of Scripture. It mirrors what Jesus said Himself about the greatest commandment in the other Gospels, quoting and putting together Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

As Jesus told him, the lawyer was right. He had pinpointed the heart of God’s law and what brings one into a life-giving eternal relationship with Him, loving God and loving one’s neighbor. So in verse 28 Jesus gave the man the old Nike slogan as an answer, “Just do it.” “Do this,” says Jesus, “and you will live.”

That lawyer knew he was in trouble. He wanted an out. He wanted to find some legal loophole in the “neighbor” clause which would justify him. He wanted to beat Jesus at His own game of questions by asking one which would let him off the hook for love, at least to some folks. So in verse 29, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Ask any good evangelical Christian the lawyer’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” or in our language, “What must I do to be saved?” I doubt the answer will be “love.” We’re much more likely to say, “believe,” like Paul told the Philippian jailer when he asked how to be saved. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” As the song says, what’s love got to do with it? Salvation is a matter of belief, of faith.

That command to love bothered the lawyer. It ought to bother us too. Jesus asked for more than we usually bargain for as Christians. It’s supposed to be pretty simple: Believe in Jesus, ask God to forgive your sins, and you’re on your way to heaven. But Jesus plainly says here that the way to heaven is more than belief. We have to love. Talking about faith alone and by itself may be our evangelical brand of excuse for not doing that.

Like the lawyer, you and I may not worry about our love for God. The lawyer knew he offered sacrifices, said daily prayers, kept kosher, and did not work on the Sabbath. His love for God was evident. We would probably say that we trust God completely, that we are sorry for our sins, that we are thankful for Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and resurrection from the dead. By placing our faith in Him, we too display our love for God.

The pinch comes for us in the same place it did for the lawyer. Thomas Aquinas, who is not known for his humor, makes this dry observation, “There is nothing unlovable about God. The same cannot be said for one’s neighbor.” Loving God seems doable. Loving all the turkeys we rub shoulders with every day seems a bit much. Love the guy who tailgated me all the way home or the grocery clerk who put the cantaloupe on top of my bread or the kid who broke into my locker or the pharmacist who mixed up my prescription? Love those people? That’s more than I can handle. If that’s the way to heaven, then I’m in trouble.

When he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer may have had in mind the common understanding then that “neighbors” are limited to people of your own race and country. He may have hoped Jesus would draw a tighter boundary. “Neighbors” to love are just relatives and friends. The lawyer probably wanted to rule out difficult and strange people, cruel Romans, immoral Greeks, sacrilegious Samaritans, even all those Jews who don’t keep the law. Narrow things down a little, and neighbor love will be doable. If he doesn’t have to love everyone, then he has an excuse.

Remember, our evangelical excuse is even more narrow. According to our theology, we don’t have to love anyone, except maybe God. We just have to believe and we’re saved. Maybe love will show up somewhere. But according to evangelical orthodoxy, failing to love our neighbors won’t cancel our reserved seat on the train to heaven.

What Jesus has to say about all this in a little eight-verse story was designed to punch a big hole in the lawyer’s excuse for his own lack of love. I think it also lets a little air out of our evangelical salvation excuses for failing to love. If we don’t get uncomfortable reading the Parable of the Good Samaritan, then we haven’t heard it right.

Jesus’ story is about a man in distress along a road. Two people pass by without helping, but one, a foreigner, a hated Samaritan, stops and offers aid. The priest and the Levite probably had a good excuse. Notice that Jesus set his story on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. If the priest and the Levite were headed the other way, going up to Jerusalem, they would be on their way to religious duties at the temple. Priests were explicitly told in the Law, in Leviticus 21, not to defile themselves by touching a dead person. If this robbed and beaten man was unconscious, there would be no way to know if he were dead. The priest especially, but even the Levite would be disqualified for temple work for days of cleansing after touching a corpse. So they passed by because of their responsibilities. That was their excuse.

Before we get too upset about legalistic religion or uptight spiritual authorities with no compassion, let me tell you a story which shows many of us might do exactly the same as the priest and Levite, the same way my scoutmaster did. A famous social psychology study was done at Princeton Seminary in 1973 by John Barley and Daniel Batson. Students were asked to prepare a talk on vocational ministry. Half of them were also asked to read the parable of the Good Samaritan and incorporate it in their talk. After students had worked on preparing the talk for a while, they were told that the room they were in was needed for another purpose. So they should go across campus to another room to finish. Some of each group was also told they were running late and to hurry, some more urgently than others.

As each student walked across campus he or she would pass by an actor “sitting in a doorway, head down, eyes closed, not moving.” The actor would cough as the students passed. It was made to look as if the person needed help. Some students stopped to ask if he were O.K. or even stayed to make sure. You might think having just read the parable of the Good Samaritan would be a significant variable, but no. About the same percentage of those who had just read the parable stopped as those who had not read it. What actually made a huge difference was hurry. 63% of those who had not been told to hurry stopped to help, while only 10% of those who were told urgently to hurry stopped.

There are lots of interesting ironies and questions to ponder regarding the Barley and Batson study, not least of which is how seemingly unrelated external factors affect our willingness to help those around us. Other studies have shown that just eating a piece of candy can make you more likely to volunteer or be helpful. It looks like being a good Samaritan depends on all sorts of factors.

Jesus too tried to show us is that obeying the second greatest commandment is not something we may take for granted. Just like those seminary students at Princeton, a Christian background or Scripture knowledge won’t necessarily make you the sort of person God desires. Which brings us to the key point in Jesus’ story, the Samaritan.

I talked about Samaritans two weeks ago. There was a running social, racial and religious feud between Jews and Samaritans. Just a little ways back in chapter 9 of Luke, Jesus’ disciples were rejected in a Samaritan town. Yet now Jesus makes one of those hated half-breeds the hero of His story. Why?

We often get this mixed up and backward. Somehow we get the notion that the Samaritan is there in the parable to teach us to be helpful and kind, a “good neighbor” to everyone, including people we might dislike or have other issues with. That backwards take on the Good Samaritan came through in our call to worship this morning. Love everyone, no matter their place in our society or own circle of family and friendship.

Yet remember this basic fact. The despised Samaritan was not the one beaten up and waiting for aid by the side of the road. The Samaritan was the one who stopped and helped, the one who did what God desired, the one who did not let his own business take priority over loving his neighbor.

The parable of the Good Samaritan challenges all who accept an easy religion that demands nothing but good intentions and fuzzy-headed belief. Jesus swept away the pretensions of priests and Levites and all the rest of us who comfortably pass by people in need with our excuses for doing nothing. But Jesus also wanted to reassure those who actually do want to keep these Great Commandments, who really would like to love God and love our neighbor. He wants us to know it’s possible. It’s possible to be saved.

Some of you may remember those caveman Geico ads. A bearded, thick-browed character is on the analyst’s couch, struggling with the emotional damage caused by Geico’s slogan about their auto insurance, “So easy a caveman can do it.” That’s exactly what Jesus is saying here. “Salvation? Love of God and neighbor? It’s so easy a Samaritan can do it.” And if a Samaritan can do it, then so can, so should, you and I.

It’s the same theme in our Old Testament text. As Moses prepared for his death, he spoke to the people of Israel reminding them of all God commanded, the call to turn to the Lord and love him with all their heart and soul. And in Deuteronomy 30:11, Moses said, “Surely this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.” What God wants is not too difficult. That’s what Moses said. It’s what Jesus said. An Israelite can do it. A Samaritan can do it. A Mexican can do it. A Muslim can do it. A child can. Or a woman. Or an addict. Or a gay person. Or a homeless person.

Loving God and loving your neighbor may sometimes be difficult, but it’s not too difficult to do. Even a Samaritan, or whatever hated, distrusted, unloved person you can think of, can learn to love God and show love to others.

So that means there is hope for you and me. As many of us struggle with all our middle-class angst and self-doubt and fears about how we will live when it’s time to retire—and I definitely include myself in that description—there is hope for us. We can look at people like Samaritans, become a little more like them, and find salvation in Jesus Christ.

I’ve seen it as we’ve hosted an Egan Warming Site and until recently the Family Shelter. The needy people we encounter may feel like Samaritans to us. They may express faith, but seldom go to church very regularly. They may be working, but for whatever reasons can’t make or hold onto what you or I call a decent living. Some of them sit outside our doors and smoke away a sizeable chunk of what money they have. Their kids are sometimes dirty and often misbehaved.

Yet over the years, I’ve seen a curious kind of love going on among our guests. If a guest has just two cigarettes, he will still give one away to another guest who has none. Her own children will be driving her nuts, but a mother may still cheerfully accept a request to watch another child for an hour or two so another mom can take a break. A couple with barely enough gas to drive across town in an old beater of a car will still go out of their way to drop another guest off at work the next morning.

Jesus asked you and me to learn from folks like our shelter guests, to see the Samaritans around us, and as weird as it seems, to be like them. At the moments they show love to their neighbors, they are close to what God wants. Mark’s Gospel leaves this parable out of Jesus’ conversation with the teacher of the law, but we hear the lawyer affirming Jesus’ statement of the Great Commandments. And Jesus concludes by saying to him in Mark 12:34, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

It’s not too far from us. It’s not out of reach. So easy a Samaritan can do it. So easy, thank God, that you and I can do it. “Blessed are the poor,” said Jesus. That may not be us. He also said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” which I know is me. Blessed are you and I when we realize how poor and wretched we are, yet how close to us is the rich love of God.

Augustine solved the conundrums of this parable by allegorizing it. Jesus, he said, is the only one truly good enough to be the Good Samaritan. The man robbed and left on the side of the road is us, human beings lost in sin. The priest and Levite represent the Law which could not save anyone. The Samaritan is Jesus, come to rescue us. His donkey is the faith by which we trust in Him. The oil and wine represent the Holy Spirit and Communion. The inn to which the man was carried is the Church. The money paid for his keeping is Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Every detail in the story is a symbol for how Jesus saves us. Even the Samaritan’s promise to return is Christ’s own promise to return some day.

Allegorical interpretation can be problematic, but that one basic idea is helpful here. If we accept that the Good Samaritan must ultimately be Jesus, it can help us do as Jesus told the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.” If we are honest, we acknowledge that only Jesus could do perfectly what He asked the lawyer to do. Only Jesus stops to help everyone in need, never passing by anyone with some excuse.

Jesus knew the lawyer would struggle with this. He knew too that you and I would struggle to love our neighbors. But He also knew that if we took Him seriously, if we tried to be Good Samaritans ourselves, then it would move us closer and closer to Him. Only by knowing Him could we possibly know what it really means to love.

The theology is complex, but it begins to make sense. Yes, all you have to do to be saved is believe in Jesus. But we believe in a Savior who came to the world as the one true Good Samaritan. He found us lost, poor and half-dead and loved us anyway. To believe in such a Savior means to join Him, to understand that sort of love, and finally to be like that.

To believe in Jesus you have to want to love your neighbor, because He does. And to love your neighbor you have to believe in Jesus. It’s not two different ways to be saved. It’s the same single path to eternal life through Jesus Christ. May the Good Samaritan, the Great Samaritan, find us by life’s road, dress our wounds, and carry us back to the place where He dwells. May He provide all we need, paying for it with His own blood. Then in the promise of His return, may we learn to be like Him, finding our way into eternal life as we share His love with our neighbors. Let us be Samaritans. Jesus was. Jesus is.

Amen.