Luke 10:25-37 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost Sunday, July 10, 2022 “Focus on Your Neighbor”
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” That quote, which apparently has been attributed incorrectly to the Christian writer C.S. Lewis, is a fascinating quote. It makes an important point, one about which C.S. Lewis actually did write. Lewis said about a humble man, “He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” And just a bit later, Lewis explained, “If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.” In our Gospel for today, we hear about a man who seems to fit that definition. He is a very conceited man indeed. He talks to Jesus about the law, and he rightly summarizes what the law says by talking about love. And this conceited man felt confident that he could love exactly as the law demanded. He could love God and he could love his neighbor. But he wanted to make sure, so he asked a question of Jesus that spurred a story, a parable. The man asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And the story Jesus told ended up saying to this man, “If you think you are loving, it means you are not loving after all.” That man’s focus was all wrong. Love does not focus on the individual who is loving. It focuses on the neighbor, the person who needs to be loved. So as we take a few minutes to reflect on his exchange between the expert in the law and Jesus, we’re going to take to heart the lesson about love that Jesus teaches: focus on your neighbor. The man in this account, the expert in the law, was out to test Jesus. We find a number of examples of attempts like this in the Gospel record of Jesus’ life. As always, Jesus passes the test. The test is this: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And the real answer to that question is, “You can’t do anything. You’ve already failed.” That is what Jesus tries to teach this man. That is what the law shows us. But the expert doesn’t understand that yet. When Jesus asks him what the law says, he also answers correctly. The law requires people to love God with their whole being and to love their neighbors. The expert basically quotes two passages, one from Deuteronomy (6:5) and one from Leviticus (19:18). Jesus agrees wholeheartedly that this is an accurate representation of what God demands in his law. But the problem is that the expert truly believes he has done this. Jesus tells him that if he has done that, meaning that if he has loved God wholeheartedly and loved his neighbor as he loves himself—and has always done these things and always keeps doing these things—that man can have eternal life. But the man really doesn’t want to leave it quite as broad as it is at that point. He asks his question, “And who is my neighbor?” It may seem like a reasonable question, but the expert asks it for a specific reason and a poor reason. He’s not trying to do his best at actually serving and loving his neighbor. He wants to justify himself. He wants to hear that he needs to love his parents and perhaps other relatives. He wants to hear that he should love upstanding religious leaders. He wants to hear that he should love his close friends. And he might be able to make a convincing case that he has done those things. But he certainly has not loved everyone. He clearly is not spending his life and his time and his effort focused on others. You can hear it in every bit of this exchange. This man thinks a lot about himself. His focus is firmly on him. That’s not a surprise to Jesus, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to us. That’s how we’re born, and that is how our sinful nature always wants us to operate. That is the temptation we fall into again and again. We focus on ourselves and then try to suggest that we have been loving others. It does take some soul-searching to realize and to admit this. You can probably all point to examples of how you have loved someone else. Maybe you even have a story that sounds incredibly similar to the one Jesus tells, only updated a bit for the 2020s. No doubt at some point you have focused on someone else, focused on your neighbor, and helped that person. But that’s not enough. That won’t do it. That won’t earn eternal life. That’s because all of those moments have been separated by other moments, moments when you did what was selfish or self-serving. Those were moments when the focus was squarely on you and your preferences and your comfort and your interests. That man could not justify himself by his focus on a neighbor, and neither can you. You can’t do it fully and you can’t do it enough. You’ve heard Jesus’ story. You have seen what he demands and how he answers the question about who is a neighbor. A neighbor is not the person who is most kind and loving to you so it is easy to love them back. The neighbor is a person who has no connection to you other than being a person you meet.
The person met in the story is a man who fell into the hands of robbers. He was beaten and nearly killed. Then he was left lying on the side of the road. Fellow countrymen and supposedly pious people came by. A priest. A Levite. If anyone should have known God’s law and should have known how to show love, it was these men. But one after the other, they took the long way around and passed the man by, sliding as far to the other side of the path as they possibly could. But then someone else came. Not a fellow countryman, but a Samaritan. On so many occasions, a Jew wouldn’t even interact with a Samaritan. We would expect the Samaritans to return the favor. Jews who were traveling would generally take the longer route around Samaria just so that they could avoid the Samaritans. If the man on the side of the road was able at that point to see who was coming, he probably felt even worse than he already had. He got a fleeting excitement that perhaps someone was coming who wouldn’t walk around him, and then he saw that it was a Samaritan. All those hopes must have been dashed. But he would have been mistaken. Because that man was the one who would become known to society in general as the Good Samaritan. He saw the man and helped him. He went out of his way, digging out money from his wallet and spending time that he hadn’t planned. He took care of the man himself and then when he couldn’t, he made sure that someone else did. As Jesus explained, this was the man who was a neighbor to the hurt man. Do you suppose the expert in the law had ever done something like that? Do you suppose he had gone so far out of his way, not for a family member or a close friend, but for a stranger and a cast-off? Perhaps there was a time, though I doubt it. For certain, if there was a time, it was a rare part of that man’s life. And the fact is that it is far too rare in any of our lives. There’s only one example of a person who perfectly loved his neighbors like that Samaritan, and that is Jesus. His focus was never on his own personal gain or his own personal benefit. He came into this world focused on the purpose of serving and loving and saving, and he never wavered from that purpose. He was as outcast and despised as anyone, but he didn’t seek revenge or retaliation. He focused on you and on me. And not to take the comparison to the parable too far, but we were battered and beaten by our sin and left helpless and hopeless until he came. He took our sins and with himself had them nailed to the cross. And with the same focus he rose from the dead. And that’s what empowers us to focus on our neighbors. We can’t do it to earn eternal life. But we can do it for just this reason: that our neighbors have needs. They have been battered and beaten. Maybe at times that is literal, but at other times, they have been battered by sadness or sickness or financial struggles or loneliness. And you can go find them and help them. And that absolutely means the people who are as different from you as the Samaritan was from the beaten man. Your political opposites. The people who seem weird or “off” to you. The people who don’t look like the polite society you are used to. The people who anger you and get on your nerves. Jesus served you, and now you can serve them. It probably takes some time. It probably takes some effort. It probably at times takes some financial investment. It is not always easy or convenient. It is not always rewarding or rewarded. But love doesn’t focus on my own comfort or interest. It focuses on my neighbor. And that’s precisely where Jesus wants my focus to be. When many people talk about love today, they mean how they feel. They love someone because of what that person offers to them. That’s different than the focused love that Jesus teaches us. Here’s another CS Lewis quote: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” Jesus says it a little differently. He says about showing mercy like the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise.” We don’t do it to earn eternal life. We do it because our neighbor has needs. We do as Jesus has done for us. We focus on our neighbor.
The Text: Luke 10:25–37 (EHV) 25Just
life?”
then, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal
26“What
is written in the law?” he asked him. “What do you read there?”
27He
replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and, love your neighbor as yourself.” 28He
said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”
29But
he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30Jesus
replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among robbers who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31It just so happened that a priest was going down that way. But when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32In the same way, a Levite also happened to go there, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 33A Samaritan, as he traveled, came to where the man was. When he saw him, he felt sorry for the man. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He put him on his own animal, took him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day, when he left, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. Whatever extra you spend, I will repay you when I return.’ 36Which of these three do you think acted like a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?” 37“The
one who showed mercy to him,” he replied.
Then Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”