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If a law had been given that could give life, the lawyer who tested Jesus would indeed be able to live by it. “This do and you will live,” Jesus says to the man.
If a law had been given that could give life, you and I would be living in an intricate religious system, working hard to live according to every last jot and tittle of the law, and we would need bureaucratic lawyers like the man who tests Jesus in today's Gospel lesson in order to help keep us on the straight and narrow.
If a law had been given that could give life, God had no need to sacrifice His Son on the cross. “Do this and live,” would be the only Word we need from God.
If a law had been given that could give life, righteousness would indeed be by the law.
We would be like the Moslems or like the Mormons or any other world religion. We would need to bow three times a day towards this direction, visit this shrine or temple here or there, say this many prayers, wash our hands in just such a way, never miss any service, always working to check off the next thing on God's great list until at last we reach the goal, until at last we've done enough.
How many think that Christianity is just such a system? How many of your neighbors are not here today because they not only would rather sleep in but because they mistakenly think that coming to Divine Service is a work they must do to earn God's favor? How many have no idea of the Divine Service being a place where God gives away His gifts in order to comfort, not condemn, the sinner? Since so many view Christianity as a series of obligations, they just say “no thanks” and hope that, since they are a “good person”, perhaps since they never commit a major crime, God will somehow let them in the pearly gates.
The lawyer in the Gospel viewed religion that way. He viewed God that way. God is a transcendent, almighty, judgmental God up in heaven. We must hope to do enough to please Him. Worse, he thought himself capable of doing enough to please God. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
He was asking the wrong question of Jesus, because he was starting with the wrong premise. Our sinful nature does that. We want to start off from the premise of what we can do to help ourselves, what we can do to make ourselves better. We are at the core and at heart good people. We have some inherent good within us. If there was just some cookbook of rules and regulations I could follow — if someone would tell me how to do it and equip me with the right tools — I could make it on my own all the way to heaven and, along the way, God would bless me with the perfect family, the perfect spouse, the perfect job, home, car, salary — you name it.
We were recently blessed to be able to pay to have our backyard fence replaced. We went from one that was falling apart to one that is absolutely gorgeous. I am sinfully proud of it. I have the best fence in my neighborhood, hands down. Even worse, the men who put it up made it look so easy. They worked with such efficiency and ease, and produced such high quality results that I even imagined myself, with the right instruction and tools, being able to accomplish what they did. It's the same fantasy that leads me to imagine I ought to be able to play a round of golf at or under par. I just know I must have some little bit of Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus inside me.
But a good look in the mirror and a splash of cold water and a smirk from my wife make me realize I ought to know better. I'm terrible with tools. I'm not the most coordinated person. I take forever to finish home projects I promise to accomplish. I do not practice the game of golf at all. I just go and play, blindly expecting to do well. Those are balloons that are easy to pop.
Jesus worked hard to deflate the lawyer's fantasy that he could justify himself before God, that he had the ability to follow God's law perfectly, that he had some good from within himself with which to please God. But Jesus is also working hard to burst the bubbles of those same attitudes residing in each of us. They are dangerous attitudes to have. They lead to self–idolatry. They lead to eternal destruction and eternal separation from God for holding faith in another god.
The lawyer knew God's law really well. Jesus even commends him: “You have answered orthodoxly…. This do, and you will live.”
But in giving the answer the lawyer gave, he had to know that he was falling short. His answer betrays Him — “Who is my neighbor?” He did not even bother with loving God with all the heart, soul, strength, and mind. He figured that his outward religious piety could prove that case. Of course, he is just outright being dishonest and disingenuous. He also did not believe Jesus to be the Son of God who could see into his heart and mind.
Where the lawyer wanted some slack was in the second table of the law. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is very difficult. So as long as we can get a narrow enough definition of who our neighbor is and is not, we might be able to fool other people on that count as well.
After all, if my neighbor is just my immediate family, my closest friends, the people in the homes to my immediate right and left — maybe then, our sinful mind tells us — this may be a manageable task.
Jesus does not give the straightforward answer. He answers with one of the most well known of His parables, even among the secular world. Everyone knows what it means to be a “Good Samaritan” — to stop and help rescue someone who is in peril, usually on the highway.
The thing about this parable is: no one knows each other. The robbers just attack and do their thing to the poor man on the road. They leave him for dead. The priest and the Levite do not know the man and steer clear. Not my blood, not my problem, for them. The Samaritan no one knows. He comes out of nowhere. He is the one who shows mercy where none had been shown previously.
Jesus spins the whole story a different direction. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Who is it that I have to love as much as I love myself? But Jesus asks, “Who of these three men do you think was a neighbor to the one who had been beaten by the robbers?” Not just, "Who is my neighbor?”, but “Who is being a neighbor to their fellow man?” Which person has their neighbor's interests at heart? The one who had done mercy upon the beaten–up man was the neighbor. The Samaritan. The alien. The outsider. The one who came out of nowhere, who should not have been on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. “You go and do likewise.”
The lawyer almost surely was deflated. We all ought to be. It's a herculean task. Everyone is our neighbor. Each person in God's creation is important to God. He created them and loves them; and they all have value and worth to Him. They are all, therefore, owed our love, our care, our concern and compassion, with no strings attached. Like the Samaritan showed to the beaten–up man.
Who among us is up to this task? If Jesus had left us with a story that gave us something we could accomplish, then we would be no better off than we were before the story. We would still think that we could accomplish something to help ourselves to please God, to earn our own salvation. Remember, that was the lawyer's initial question — “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
If a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.
But the Scripture — including Jesus' parable — imprisoned everything under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ — including the promise of Jesus' parable — might be given to those who believe.
There is promise in Jesus' parable. It is the promise of the Gospel. There is an alien, a foreigner, someone who doesn't belong on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He is the only true Good Samaritan — our Lord Jesus Christ. He came down from heaven to our sin–filled, beaten up world, and came and found us on the side of the road, beaten up as we are by sin, by guilty consciences, by regrets and mistakes and misfortunes and disasters great and small, all the attacks of Satan and his demons.
But the Samaritan comes to us, gave His life for ours, and has washed us in His resurrecting baptismal waters, healed our sin–filled wounds, and even today, applies to us the balm of His own body and blood, giving us the medicine of everlasting life. He picks us up and brings us into the safe inn of His Church, and gives us over to the blessing of being cared for by faithful pastors who are his innkeepers.
Saint Augustine said of this text: “God shows mercy to us because of His own goodness, while we show mercy to one another because of God's goodness. God has compassion on us so that we may enjoy Him completely, while we have compassion on another that we may completely enjoy him.” In Christ, our salvation is accomplished. We can now reflect the goodness and mercy and compassion of God to our neighbor, and so learn to love and appreciate and “enjoy” our neighbors. It is the priest and the Levite, who had no faith in God, that saw their neighbor as a burden and as a source of trouble and inconvenience. It is now however, each believer in Christ, one with Him, who become the arms and hands and feet of the body of Christ not for our salvation's sake — that's been earned and given as a gift by Christ — but for our neighbor's sake in their need.
May God our Father help us put our full faith and trust in His love, mercy, and compassion shown us in the saving death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ, as the only source of our eternal life. May we, therefore, learn to love our neighbor as God has loved us — putting away our excuses, cutting the strings we tie to our mercy and compassion — and joyfully learn, by God's grace, to be the blessing from God that our neighbor needs.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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