Today’s question from the Word of God is: Who is your neighbor? I would have to guess that this Scripture is the second most known story that Jesus ever told ... the story of the Good Samaritan.
READ vv. 25-29
A Good Question And An Unexpected Answer
That’s a good question. People ask questions for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, people ask questions because they actually want to learn something, but many times, people ask questions to see if the one whom they’re asking has the right answer. Many times, people ask questions to show how brilliant and witty they are as they discuss the question that’s being asked. Sometimes, people ask a question just to try to make someone look bad ... they’ll ask a question that doesn’t have just one answer or an easy answer.
The Bible says, "On one occasion..." That’s kind of like starting with "Once upon a time..." Luke is saying, "I’m not telling you where or when, but this happened." There was an occasion when a man who was educated, intelligent, and religious came to Jesus and asked Him a question for the purpose of testing Him.
The question he asked was one he thought would put Jesus to the test and make himself look good.
I think this guy was mentally salivating over the idea of his repartee. He’d gone over it all in his mind. He had his ducks all lined up: "I’m going to say this ... he’s going to say that. Then I’ll say this. Or if he says that. Then I’ll say this." The question was "...what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
That’s an interesting question. What do you do to inherit anything? You wait, don’t you? You don’t work to inherit something. I guess what he was really asking was: "How do I know that I’m in line to inherit the kingdom of God? How do I know that I’m in the family?"
As he thought about this question, he speculated, "Now if He answers in terms of works, then I’ve got all my arguments about grace. If He answers in terms of grace, then I’ve got all my arguments about works." So he asked, "...what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus said to him, "You’re the expert of the Bible, you’re the doctor of biblical jurisprudence ... you tell Me what it says."
I can’t tell you how disappointing that was to this man.
That was a crushing reply. He was planning to have a discourse to show how bright, witty, wonderful, and smart he was. He was going to make this last all morning.
Jesus answered his question in such a way that every six-year-old kid in that kingdom could have answered. "What does the Scripture say? What does it say you do to inherit eternal life?"
So this man just blurted it out. There was nothing else that he could do. He said, "’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’"
Then Jesus said, "That’s a good answer. Do that and you’ll live."
But this guy was witty. He had his mind about him, so he quickly let those wheels turn. He thought, "I can still get some argument out of this."
So he looked at his companions and smiled and winked. Then he looked at Jesus and said, "And who is my neighbor?"
Another Good Question And A Good Story
Who is your neighbor? Where are you going to draw the those boundaries?
Where are you going to say, "This is the kind of person I will help, and this is the kind I won’t. This is the kind I like, and this is the kind I don’t.
Who is my neighbor?"
That’s a good question, and I suppose this guy expected Jesus to talk about the four Greek words for love. Jesus did something that was very unique. He told a story. He simply answered by telling a story.
READ vv 30-37
Our Lord took this question out of the classroom and put it into life. He took it out of the discussion ... out of the philosophical setting ... and put it into a different world ... a world of hurt, pain, wrong, crime, flashing lights, emergency rooms, and blood. I think it is in that world that we have to ask ourselves, "Who is my neighbor?" That answer is in our hearts and worked out in our world.
Who Is Your Neighbor?
There are four kinds of people in this story, and you’ll find all four of them in the world around us. There are those who do bad. They are the crooks. They are the people whose motto is: "What is yours is mine. I’ll take it from you."
A pastor was visiting with a young man on death row several years ago. This young man was only twenty-four-years old and was about to be electrocuted for killing several people. He told this pastor that his dad, who was a gangster, raised him, saying, "Son, you have the right to anything you’re strong enough to take or anything you’re smart enough to take." So he lived like that until he took some lives. There are people in this world like that. They are people who hurt people, and those people are hard to forgive.
It’s hard for God to forgive sins. We mentioned a few weeks ago that it is hard for God to forgive sins because sin hurts people and God loves people.
So that brings us to the second kind of people in this parable. That would be the man who was the victim. He was walking down a road and attacked. He was stripped of his clothes and everything he had. He was beaten and left half dead in a ditch. This world is full of victims, and I’m sure that their plight cries out to God for neighbors. On almost any news broadcast on almost any evening, you’ll hear about children who have been abandoned, or even worse murdered.
Children who have been abused. Women attacked, raped and murdered. Children leaving home and ending up in porno rings or houses of prostitution. You can hear about women being killed in crack houses right here in the metroplex.
You may say, "But, preacher, those were prostitutes and drug addicts." Listen, God loves prostitutes and drug addicts as much as He loves you and me.
There is a victim in our story, and there are victims in our world around us.
Then there are those you would expect to do good and don’t. Isn’t that true? There are people in the world you would expect to be a neighbor, but they aren’t. They don’t do what you think they would. I’m sure when that man was lying in the ditch, if you were to ask him, "Who is your neighbor?" he would have said, "My neighbor is anybody who will help me get out of this."
So when he saw those religious folks walking down the road, he said, "Help is coming! Here are the people who get up every morning and quote the Scripture: ’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’"
You would expect them to be the ones to help, but they didn’t. Now these were fictional characters. You understand that Jesus is telling a story, and He has made these people up. So because that’s true, then maybe we can think about the motives for this fictional priest and Levite in this story. The Bible says we can’t judge people, but maybe since these were fictional people, we can talk about why they responded as they did.
The priests were people who were born to the tribe of Aaron. They inherited this job, and it was their job to administer the sacrifices for sin and lead people to worship. There’s an interesting thing about those priests. They were not allowed to touch a dead person. If they touched someone who was dead, they had to go through a ritual of purification to be made clean again. That was part of their religion. It’s in the Levitical law.
So perhaps this guy thought, "What if this fellow is already dead. He looks dead. If I touch him and he’s dead, then I’ve got to pay all this money, take all this time, and go to Jerusalem to go through the rite of purification. My friends may see me and wonder what I did wrong to have to be purified. They’ll think all kinds of things because people have this wonderful ability to add three and three and get fourteen. So I’m not going to get in that ditch. That guy doesn’t even look like he goes to church. I don’t know what he’s like. And besides that, those robbers may still be down there. They may jump on me if I get down there. I’ve got some of the temple treasury money in my pocket, and the Lord wouldn’t want me losing that money, I’m sure." So he didn’t do it. He went by on the other side.
Then the Levite came. Now the Levite is another kind of religious leader. He’s also born to his job. He was a descendant of Levi. That’s right ... he had Levi genes. His job was to do the more practical things. He made a lot of speeches and helped with the temple. He kind of operated it in a business-like way. A Levite was a very important person, and this Levite was probably on his way somewhere to make a speech about brotherly love and didn’t have time to stop.
He thought to himself, "Man, this is a great illustration. See that guy in that ditch? I can probably get up a program entitled ’Save The Ditch People’ and get people to give to that." He was one of those people that could really love mankind but didn’t care much about people. He loved people collectively but not individually, so he went on his way. For whatever reason, there are a lot of people who should be neighbors but aren’t.
Then there comes the unlikely development in this story of a man you wouldn’t think would be a neighbor, but he was. He was somebody who did good when you wouldn’t expect him to. That happens every now and then.
I heard about a prayer meeting where the pastor stood and said, "I want you to tell me some prayer testimonies tonight. They must be recent ... within the last two weeks, not something that happened forty years ago. And I don’t want it to be general. I want this to be specific. Tell us what really happened."
So a lady stood up. She was a single parent with a teenage son. She said, "Just the other day in the kitchen, I was preparing to bake a pie. I was about to put it in the oven when the phone rang. The nurse at school said, ’Your son has a fever. Would you please come pick him up and take him home?’ I decided I would have plenty of time to get back before the pie burned."
She put the pie in the oven and went on to the school. When she got there, the nurse said, "His fever is really high. He’s gotten a lot worse since I called you. You need to take him to the doctor." Flustered, the mother got him in the car. She took him to the doctor and waited at the clinic. The doctor said, "He needs to be put to bed immediately, and he needs this medicine quickly. Go put him to bed and then go to the drugstore. That’s important."
She drove him home, put him to bed, rushed to the mall where the drugstore was, and got the medicine. She came out and started to get in the car, and the door was locked. She couldn’t find the keys in her purse. Sure enough, dangling from the ignition were her keys. She had locked the keys in the car. She went back into the mall and called her son. He finally answered the phone in a very weak voice. She said, "Son, I’ve locked the keys in the car. What should I do?"
He said, "Get a wire coat hanger."
So she started looking for a wire coat hanger, and that’s hard to find in a mall. You can find a lot of wooden and plastic hangers, but it’s very hard to find a wire coat hanger in a mall. She finally found one and started rushing out the door when she realized, "I don’t know what to do with this."
She just started crying, standing there in the middle of the sidewalk. Then she prayed, saying, "Dear Lord, my son is sick. I’ve got some medicine I need to give him. I have a pie in the oven. My keys are locked in the car. Would You please send someone to help me?"
At that moment, a guy drove up in an old car. He was "hygienically impaired."
He looked like he was down on his luck. As he walked up, she stuck that wire coat hanger in his face and said, "Young man, do you know how to get in a locked car with a coat hanger?" He looked at her and said, "Where’s your car?"
They went to the car, and she shared, "I’d never seen anything like it. It was artistry. He bent that coat hanger certain ways, put it down in that slot, and in seconds, the door was open. I thought, ’God has sent me this young man,’
and I hugged him. I said, "You’re such a fine, young man. You must be a Christian." He said, "No, ma’am. I’m not a Christian. I’m not a fine, young man, either. I just got out of prison yesterday." She hugged him again and said, "Praise God! He sent me a professional!"
Unexpected Help From Unlikely People
Sometimes, help comes from unexpected places and unexpected people. Jesus put a real zinger in this story about the victimized Judean when He said, "But a certain Samaritan came by." That brought a hush.
You know about the relationship between Judea and Samaria. Back in the time when Solomon died, Rehoboam did a very foolish thing. He broke off the ten northern tribes, and they started a new tribe called Israel or Ephraim, later called Samaria after its capital city. In 722 B.C., those people were overrun by the Assyrians. The Assyrians took all the leaders of Samaria and dispersed them all over the Assyrian Empire. They then brought in all Assyrians to take those leadership places and run the country. There began to be intermarriage, and the Judeans would have nothing to do with them. They called them half-breeds. The considered them another race. They wouldn’t let them help build the temple back in Jerusalem.
When Jesus was talking to the woman at the well, she said, "Where do we worship?
You say Your people worship in Jerusalem. My people say on Mount Gerizim."
On Mount Gerizim, they had built a temple, and the people of Judea were so incensed that these people were worshipping Jehovah God there that they went over there, attacked that temple, and destroyed it. So you see, there was great hatred between the Samaritans and the Jewish people. It was very real.
So when Jesus said a Samaritan gave the help, that was a hard thing to handle.
When Christ asked this young Jewish lawyer, "Who do you think was the neighbor in the story?" He wasn’t about to say the word Samaritan.
In John 8, Jesus had called the Jews liars and sons of the devil. They, in turn, wanted to call Him the worst name they could think of. So in verse 48, they called Him a Samaritan and demon-possessed.
The Jewish lawyer wouldn’t say Samaritan. Instead, he said, "The man who helped him was his neighbor." Jesus said, "Go and do likewise."
The one who needs you to be a neighbor may be someone you don’t like. He may be someone who is not loved by anybody. He’s probably someone who will never pay you back. This Samaritan could be quite certain that had he been in the ditch and the victim had been well and walking by, he probably wouldn’t have even given a thought or consideration to helping the Samaritan. You need to be a neighbor to people when it’s unrewarding in many ways.
If you really want to ask God, "Lord, what do I do to inherit eternal life?"
(and you ask it not because you’re testing Him, but you really want to know)
He’ll say, "’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’" Then if you have the courage to ask, "And who is my neighbor?" He will say, "Your neighbor is anyone you see whose needs I’ve given you the ability to meet."
Living your life as a child of God has to do with loving God and loving neighbors in the name of God.
