Throughout my ministry, people have come to me with situations that need resolution in the third person. These people have said to me, “Pastor, I sure wish my friend could have been here today to hear that sermon. He really needed that one.” Often it’s a wife, or a husband. “I wish my husband had been here, he needs that. I wish my wife could have heard that.” “Pastor, I have a friend who is struggling with believing in God. What would you say to him?” “Pastor, I know someone who is close to having an affair with her neighbor. What should I say?” I’ve noticed through the years that some questions can be too close to us; we have to ask them for someone else, someone being our own selves.
Then there are lawyers. Lawyer stories will be with us forever. I’m sure Jesus had a few good ones he told. I personally never tell lawyer stories … Like the one about the difference between a dead possum and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road?
The skid marks in front of the possum. My apologies to all the attorneys or families of attorneys.
Jesus had His way and His day with lawyers. Some say our Lord was a lawyer, that he was trained in the legal arts. There is no doubt that He knew the Scriptures better than any one of His day. He could quote them with ease, allude to them with deft precision, summon them from His memory to silence His opponents. If he was not a lawyer, Jesus knew the law. He knew it from beginning to end and was able to quote it and bring it to His mind to express truth.
One day a lawyer asked Him the question of questions: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus immediately employed the Socratic question and turned the question back to the questioner. He said, “You tell Me, what does the law say?” And the lawyer quoted bedrock Scripture from Deut. 6:4-5. It is the Confession of Faith for the Hebrew people. “Hear, O Israel? The Lord is our God, the Lord is One! And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” But the lawyer kept quoting. He dropped the wonderful little conjunction “and,” and skipped over a couple of books to Leviticus 19:18, and he quoted just a line from that verse, “And, your neighbor as yourself.” He didn’t have to do that. Jesus looked at him and He said, “You have answered correctly. You have passed the bar once again.” Then He said, “Do this and you will live.” And here is the cryptic genius in our Lord’s response. “Do this” (singular).
Now there are two parts to the lawyer’s answer. “You love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus didn’t say what “this” was. He said, “Do this, and you will live,” so the lawyer then took the reference for “this” to mean the neighbor part. Do “this” and you will live.
Dr. Luke says, “But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” Jesus proceeds to tell one of his most famous and most remembered parables, the parable of The Good Samaritan, and in that culture they are neither neighbors nor good to the Jews. READ Luke 10:30-36 The lawyer couldn’t bring his Jewish lips to speak the word “Samaritan.” So he said, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Jesus said, “Go and do the same.”
This is a very haunting story but a story for the lawyer and for all of us that come too close for comfort because in that day Samaritans were the despised next door folk.
They were a nation of half-breeds. It was a nation created when people were returning from exile expelled the non-pure Jews. The Samaritans became their own little group. The two groups formed a mutual hate society. The Jews hated the Samaritans and the Samaritans hated the Jews. It was the worst kind of hatred. So, when Jesus tells the story and the hero in the story is the Samaritan, it defies all propriety, and the lawyer can’t bring himself to deal with his own lack of being a neighbor because he sees his own fault and guilt, his sin and shortcomings. He is in the story and yet he is not in the story.
What happens when the Gospel gets too close for us, when the Bible gets too close to us? O, we want the Gospel; we want the preacher to preach the Gospel. We want good news. We may want good news more for the approval of God … as long it rests neatly in our own comfort zone. Give me the Gospel that I can comfortably hear in a comfortable room around comfortable people who are just like me, who are deserving just like I am, so that at the end of the hour I can get up and get on about my so-called life. We want the Bible but only certain parts of it. We want the Bible that we “like,” that we are comfortable with, but please don’t give us “all” the Bible. We want God to meet our needs on our terms, to answer our questions, to satisfy our desires. We become so self-absorbed in our own little agenda and we’ve got plenty of Bible to run to to satisfy our itch. There are all kinds of Bible here that we would rather not read and we surely would wish it were not in the Bible.
I’m going to give you a few examples today, and I’m sure that I will anger a few people. These are just some examples and you will just have to deal with it as I have had to deal with it. How many of us in our society, in this city, in our culture rally to the cry to keep the death penalty in place? We say we need murderers to be executed because the Bible says so. Okay, I’m with you there, but let’s keep reading. Listen to Exodus 21 in talking about the death penalty: “He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 21:12). Amen, right on!
But listen to what else it says in the same section just a few verses down. READ 21:15-16. And then this one says, and most of us would not have made it out of adolescence, we would not have survived our teenage years, “And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Now sometime in your teenage years you cursed your mother or your father. You didn’t mean to; you just said, “They are idiots; they don’t know what they are talking about.” This reminds me of Mark Twain. He said, “My father is so ignorant that at fourteen I realized how stupid my father was, and when I was twenty-one it was amazing how much education my father had obtained.”
So, if we want to quote the Bible there is plenty of Bible to quote. But, let’s be consistent. Are we going to start calling for capital cases in the courts of this land for people who curse their parents? Let’s listen to more Bible. Look at Amos 5:12 in the call for economic justice. This is a disturbing section for all of us who live in the affluent United States of America. This begins with the preacher. I am convicted when I read this. “For I know your transgressions are many and your sins are great, You who distress the righteous and accept bribes, And turn aside the poor in the gate” (and that literally translated means the place where the court was held).
Do you know how many multimillionaires there are on death row?
Some people say we have the best justice system in America that money can buy, and for some that is true. Therefore the prudent man keeps quiet in such times when the times are evil. READ Amos 5:14-15 Folks, that’s the Bible.
What about the resources of the earth? You say, “All those theories are not proven, and we’re not sure all this bad stuff they say is going to happen … is really going to happen. We will be dead before it happens and someone else will have to deal with it.” What do you do with Psalm 24? “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains. The world, and those who dwell in it” (24:1). How do we exploit the earth, and isn’t the care of the earth a Christian’s responsibility?
Then what do you do with Deut. 15:1? I look out and see bankers in church today.
You will never find this verse on the wall of a banker. “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission of debts.” Talk about an adjustable rate mortgage.
This would be wonderful! At the end of every seven years you must cancel all debts.
It’s right there in the Bible. Jesus said, “If you have two coats, give up one.” I’ve got a closet full. “If somebody asked you to go one mile, go two.” We have trouble walking the first mile. “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn the other also.” Let’s don’t even go there.
Sometimes the Bible gets too close for comfort. You see, in the story of the Good Samaritan, it was a despised and hated individual. He was a nameless hated person who took compassion on the man who was in the gutter. The story tells us that our neighbor is anyone who is in need. But in that time it was anyone but a Samaritan, anyone but somebody in a ditch, anyone but someone who is undeserving, unlike myself. Anyone … you fill in the blank.
Jesus, with the precision of a surgeon takes the scalpel of His Word, and He cuts ever so close to the marrow of our own sensitivities and prejudices. He flays open our preconceived pet little theologies and He says, “All right, you want to be a Gospel man, a Gospel woman; you want to be a full Christian? Then live with integrity the fullness of the Gospel that has more to say about how we treat the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the person who has mistreated you, than it does about walking an aisle and being saved.” I’m all for that and I preach it every week and invite you to make decisions for Christ, but the test of our faith is not in the altar of the Church. It is in the streets of our city; it is in our relationships with one another. That is where the test of our faith is.
Our young people went to camp one week and then went to work the next week, putting feet to their faith.
You know, in all the years I have been a pastor, I’ve never had a young person come to me and ask, “Pastor, tell me, what is our responsibility to the less fortunate in our world and what’s my responsibility there?” What is my responsibility to the people who do not have a voice, and what does Christ call me to do and to be? It is part of the Gospel.
I wonder this morning if in the parable of the Good Samaritan all of us have not been robbed of the whole Bible story, if all of us have not been left in a ditch some place and priest and preacher and Levite have come by and yet not told us the whole story. But someone outside our experience, some outside voice, some less than acceptable undeserving voice comes along and says, “But what about this?” And that outside person dares to move us out of our comfortable ditch, our ditch of ignorance, our ditch of self complacency, our ditch of comfort theologically, and says, “There is more gospel yet for you to live and to believe.”
Yes, the gospel can show up at the most uncomfortable moments offering good news.
God comes close today, not so we can point a finger at others and point out all of their sin; no, God comes close to open a window on our own sins.”
It’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
It’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.
People say to me, “Preacher, that was some sermon. I looked over the church and “he/she” needed that sermon.” What about me – what about you?
• What must I do to inherit eternal life?
• What does the Bible say?
It says, “You are to love God with all of your being, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Sometimes it gets too close, doesn’t it? But, Jesus said, “Go thou and do likewise.”
