St. Columba’s Episcopal Church July 10, 2022 – The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost Luke 10:25-37 The Rev. Dr. Susan Kraus

The famous Parable of the Good Samaritan begins with a lawyer – a man who is an expert in the Torah or Jewish religious teaching – testing Jesus. Luke is telling us that this is not a conversation initiated in good faith by a student asking questions of a teacher so that he can learn from him. The lawyer is testing Jesus, seeking to find fault with Jesus’ response. The lawyer asks Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him a question in return, “What is written in the law?” The lawyer knows the answer, as any Jew would: the Two Great Commandments found in the Hebrew Bible. Love God and your neighbor as yourself. But Jesus shows that the question of eternal life is about more than knowing the right answer. He tells the lawyer, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” We may recall that Jesus made a similar point to his disciples on the night before he died. He washed the disciples’ feet as an example and a lesson that they should also serve one anotherwhen he was gone. Jesus said, “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (John 13:17).

Luke goes on to tell us that the lawyer wanted to “justify himself” to Jesus. This is our second hint that, as we might say today, the lawyer is “all about me.” His initial question for Rabbi Jesus was “what must I do to inherit eternal life” for myself? In other words, how can I make sure to get the best gift God can give me? The lawyer knows that the right answer is about three loves – for God, for neighbor, and for self – but his heart appears to be fixed on love of self. We might wonder how the conversation would have gone if the lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, how do I learn to love God with all my heart and soul and strength and mind and my neighbor as myself? And how do I learn to put my love in action?” These would be the kinds of questions a disciple might ask of Jesus if he or she truly wanted to grow in love.

The lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” He already knows the answer to this question as well as he knew the answer to his first question. In his Jewish religious tradition it was made clear that everyone must be treated as a neighbor. The stranger. The resident alien. One who dwells nearby, a fellow citizen. And even the enemy, an evil person.

So, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man, who was most likely a Jew, was the victim of a violent crime, robbed, beaten, and left to die. Two Jewish men – a priest and a Levite – saw this man and “passed by on the other side” without helping him. But a Samaritan saw him and was “moved with pity.” The Samaritan tended to the man’s wounds, put him on his animal, brought him to an inn, took care of him and paid the expenses for his care.

At the end of the parable Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a lesson about mercy in action. The Samaritan traveler was “moved with pity” for the injured crime victim and made sure he was taken care of, at his own expense. This is the behavior Jesus tells people to emulate, the behavior of one neighbor to another neighbor. We are not to be like the religious people in the parable – the priest and the Levite – who “pass by on the other side” without assisting the man in need.

There is an important point we mustn’t miss in this parable. Samaritans and Jews were enemies. They disagreed significantly about religious beliefs and about worship. In this parable, though, the Samaritan regarded the Jew not as an enemy, but as a neighbor. Seeing