“Do it and you will live”

Luke 10:25-37

This morning, I am returning to the lectionary Gospel reading after a little time away. Sometimes, the lectionary can take us to places in the Gospels that we have never been before. This morning it takes us to a very familiar place: the parable of the good Samaritan. Here’s the challenge: though you may have heard this parable many times before, though you may feel like you already know what it means, our job is to hear it as if we are hearing it for the first time. Why? We need fresh ears because we’ve changed and the world has changed since we last listened. We need fresh ears because what spoke to us before in this parable may not be what speaks to us now.

Let’s set the stage… According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is approached by a scholar in religion or a priest, depending on who is doing the translating. The person is an expert in the religious laws. He knows all the rules. Because he knows the rules inside and out, he’s pretty sure that he’s kept the rules. However, just to be safe, he takes advantage of his encounter with Jesus to make sure that he’s covered all the bases. He asks Jesus a question: “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”

Now, even just going this far into the text, we probably aren’t fully hearing the impact of this question. Underlying the religious expert or priest’s question is an assumption, namely, that the point of this life is to get what we want—the big prize—eternal life. What he’s asking Jesus, essentially, is, “How can I make sure that God will give me what I deserve? How can I make sure that God owes me?” Maybe he was expecting Jesus to point out some forgotten law. Maybe what he was hoping for was for Jesus to pronounce him “fit as a fiddle” and already on the pathway to eternal life.

Instead, Jesus does something that he often did: he answers a question by asking another question: “What’s written in God’s law? How do you interpret it?” Jesus basically looks the man in the eye and says, “You’re the expert! What do you think?” It turns out that the man does, in fact, know his Torah. He gives a great answer: “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as you do yourself.” Jesus must be smiling at this point, one of those smiles that could mean so many different things: “Good answer! Do it and you’ll live."

Let’s pause… we all know the difference between knowing something in theory and practicing it, right? I can know the right thing to do and fail when I try to do it. I can know the right thing to do and deliberately and intentionally choose to do something else when it’s time to actually make a decision. We can reason our way to a great insight and then be carried down the rabbit hole of some other choice by self-interest or temptation or some dark impulse. There are a lot of really smart, truly insightful people who turn out to be complete messes as human beings. There are also really wonderful human beings who 99 percent of the time come through in the clutch and do their best to live what’s best until they have a bad moment or a bad day. Being an expert has never saved anyone from being a broken human being.

So, consider our expert again. He knows the right answer. What matters most is “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as you do yourself.” We are supposed to love God for all we’re worth and love our neighbors and ourselves the same way. We aren’t supposed to love God in theory. We’re supposed to go all in. We aren’t supposed to half-way love our neighbors or ourselves either. We are supposed to pour ourselves into being loving people—which is really different than being an expert in the law.

Jesus says, “Good answer! Do it and you will live.” Understand, he doesn’t say, “Do this and you will inherit eternal life.” That was the expert’s concern but it is not Jesus’ concern. His concern is that it is possible to live a long life and never really live at all. In other words, if you’re a loving person you won’t spend your life worrying about eternal life. You will already be in God’s kingdom in this lifetime because that’s what being a loving person does: it makes us really alive. It connects us to the very purpose for which God gave us the gift of life.

I’m pretty sure the expert doesn’t hear this. Instead, he goes hunting for a loophole: “And just how would you define “neighbor?” If you are old enough to remember, can you hear that question and not hear Bill Clinton saying, “That depends on what you mean by the word, ‘is.’” Bill Clinton didn’t invent splitting hairs though, did he? It’s such a human thing to do. When we are feeling defensive, when we are not quite sure that we like where things seem to be going, we start to parse things out: I may have flirted but I didn’t cross the line; I may have fudged the truth but I didn’t lie; I may have failed to help that person but I didn’t do anything to hurt them. You can hear the squealing of our tires as we back away from the truth we don’t want to face: “I’m so sorry if anyone misinterpreted my remarks and their feelings were hurt” or something equally insincere.

So, one thing Jesus loved to do when someone asked him a question was to ask a question back. The other thing he loved to do when someone asked him a question was to tell a story. Almost always, these stories—or parables—were completely subversive in nature. They would start out in a way that was familiar to the listeners, that invited them to settle in and get comfortable and prepare to hear what they want to hear. Then, Jesus would pull the rug out from under his listeners and jar them into an unexpected insight. So, when the question is, “What do you mean by “neighbor” and Jesus starts to tell a story, anyone who knew Jesus would have been thinking, “Uh oh…here we go!”

So, Jesus tells a story about something that happens on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. This was a famously dangerous stretch of road where everyone knew that the robbers were just waiting to grab innocent travelers. In this sense, the whole parable is interesting because all of the people in the parable are traveling this road alone. Any savvy person in that day knew that the way to travel that road was in a group because, even back then, there was safety in numbers. I think his listeners would have been jarred by this fact: “What were these people thinking?”

Along that terrible road comes a lonely traveler. Jesus doesn’t tell us who he was. He just tells us what happened to him: he is robbed and stripped and beaten to within an inch of his life and left half-dead on the side of the road. In one of the worst places around, just about the worst thing that could happen to someone happens to this anonymous man. And what any listener would have to decide is do you want to blame him or do you want to help him?

Jesus clearly wants us to hope he’s helped. That’s why he tells us, “Luckily, a priest was on the way down the same road…” Or…and this is the point that we can miss…Jesus’ words are dripping with sarcasm. Maybe the poor man’s bad luck was continuing because a priest was the last person who was going to offer help.

There were two main views of the law in the Jewish world of Jesus’ day. Those like the priests and the Sadducees were committed to the law as it was written in the Torah. They were not open to the moral teaching of the prophets and the rest of the oral tradition in the same way. Faith was personal and private. As a result, their focus was more on the law as a way to maintain purity than a way to preserve life. Interestingly, the main group that was open to the prophets and the oral teaching were the Pharisees, the religious leaders with whom Jesus had the most problems. Perhaps it was because the Pharisees were, to their credit, open to making a connection between what we believe and how we live, that it was all the more disappointing to Jesus when they failed to actually live what they believed.

In any event, down the road comes a priest which is not such great news for the man. Why? The priest is going to see that half-dead and bleeding man as a threat to his purity. If your job in life is to not be tainted then why risk being “soiled” by contact? The worst case scenario wasn’t that a fellow human being might go uncared for. The worst case scenario was that an otherwise pure human being might be made impure. The priest passes by.

The bad day continues in what must have drawn a laugh from Jesus’ audience when the next man down the road is a Levite. Why is that funny? Well, the Levites were the tribe from which all the priest’s came. Here’s another guy who is convinced that there is not enough Purell in the world to get him to touch the guy in the ditch. The Levite flees.

That’s when the reversal happens. Everyone knows that the man has to be helped. Everyone would have expected the third person down the road to be…a Pharisee! Why? Because they were the opposite of the priests. They were the ones who weren’t worried about being tainted. However, the person who appears is a Samaritan. The Samaritans were Jews who were despised by the rest of the Jewish community to the point of folks arguing that they weren’t Jews at all. Ironically, though, they shared the same view of the law as the priests and the Levites. They were purity guys.

Here comes the one guy we all hate. Here comes yet another guy who is going to pass our fallen traveler by. And yet, it is the Samaritan whose heart overrules his head, who cares more for the victim than he cares about his own purity, who doesn’t just care a little but cares lavishly. This dreadful Samaritan is the very embodiment of God’s mercy and loving kindness. The Samaritan is not only your neighbor—even though you hate him—in fact, he’s a better neighbor than you. Why? Because when care and compassion come into conflict with the law, love wins. This man is a good neighbor precisely because he is a bad Samaritan. He rolls up his sleeves and he cares.

Nicki Snoblin