This week as I was preparing for this message I did as I often do after I first spend time with the text itself and looked at some other sermons on this passage just to get a feel for how others handle this parable. And in the process I ran across what seemed to me to be a pretty good sermon on the passage. That message was titled “Whatever it Takes to Serve God” and it focused on the actions of the man we usually call the “Good Samaritan” and used him as an example of how those of us who are followers of Jesus are to minister to the needs of others.
It was a well crafted sermon, which made appropriate use of humor and used great alliteration to describe the 5 requirements for serving others:
1. Consciousness
2. Compassion
3. Contact
4. Care
5. Cost
But based on the rest of my study this week, I couldn’t help but feel that the pastor had developed a very good message that had somehow missed the main point of the passage. But as I looked at that sermon in some more detail it started to look more familiar. And when I went to look and see who had produced that sermon, I discovered why – it was a sermon I had preached about 8 years ago.
The parable that we’ll look at this morning – which we all know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan – is without a doubt the most familiar of all the parables. Out of that parable we’ve coined the term “Good Samaritan” to describe a person who treats others with compassion and cares for their needs. We have developed “Good Samaritan” laws to protect those who attempt to give aid, but unintentionally harm someone in giving that care. And there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of “Good Samaritan” hospitals around the world.
And it’s pretty apparent from all of those things, and from my previous sermon on this parable, that the message that is most often taken from this parable is that we are to be like the “good Samaritan” in the way we treat others.
While I hope that is a legitimate take away from this parable since that’s how I approached the parable eight years ago, another careful look at this parable now leads me to believe that Jesus’ main purpose in telling this parable was something completely different.
Before we get to the parable itself, let me just say that this whole situation just reminds me that my walk with Jesus is a process and that as I get to know Him and His Word better, I think God allows me to see things in His Word that just weren’t apparent to me previously. It’s a great reminder of why we need to continually spend time in the Bible if we’re going to grow in our relationship with God.
Go ahead and turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 10. Although the parable itself doesn’t begin until verse 30, I’m going to begin reading in verse 25 since we need to put this parable in its proper context. Please follow along as I read.
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
(Luke 10:25-37, ESV)
As I read this parable that arises out of Jesus’ encounter with a Jewish lawyer, I’m reminded of the time that a surgeon, an engineer and a lawyer were asked which of their professions was the oldest. The surgeon said it was his because in Genesis Chapter 2 God took a rib from Adam to create Eve. The engineer said it was his because in Genesis Chapter 1 God made the world out of chaos. The lawyer replied: “Who do you think caused the chaos?”
Well there is no doubt that the Jewish lawyer in this account is trying to cause some chaos. That is without a doubt the purpose of the question that he asks at the beginning of this account. And that question is the key to understanding what Jesus is trying to accomplish with this parable. What is the question he asks? [Wait for answers]. That’s right – it is:
“Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
I would suggest to you that this entire account, including the parable that Jesus tells, describes how Jesus, more artfully and skillfully than any lawyer, leads this Jewish lawyer to answer his own question. And this is another one of those instances where we can’t really discover how Jesus does that by following a logical outline with a few blanks for you to fill in. So while I’ve given you some space on your sermon outline to make whatever notes you would like, there will just be one time near the end of the message where you’ll have some blanks to fill in.
The question that this lawyer asks reveals a lot about his convoluted thinking and his spiritual condition. His words contain an obvious contradiction right off the bat. Nobody ever receives an inheritance by doing something. If someone dies and leaves me an inheritance, I don’t have to do something to receive it – I receive it because I had a relationship with that person and he or she chose to leave it to me. So the way he words his question reveals his erroneous thinking about how a person receives eternal life. Like so many often well meaning and decent people in the world, he thinks of eternal life as something to be earned by something man can do rather than a gift freely given as a result of God’s grace.
Jesus obviously discerned that this lawyer was trying to put Him to the test and I just love how Jesus masterfully turns the tables and springs a trap for the lawyer in which he gets ensnared before he even knows it. Rather than just answering the question, Jesus responds with a question of His own:
“What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”
There is some good evidence in the text that this lawyer didn’t have a real high opinion of Jesus in the first place. After all, he was a trained expert in the Jewish law and this uneducated man from Galilee who stood before him certainly couldn’t even begin to match his academic credentials. So when Jesus asks that question, the lawyer has to be thinking to himself, “This guy claims to be the Messiah and he can’t come up with a more difficult question than that. This is going to be easy.” So the lawyer, with a sense of pride and arrogance about his knowledge of the law answers:
“You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”
And as Jesus reveals in his response to the lawyer, this is a correct response – at least for a man who thought that he could be saved by keeping the law. If it was possible for this lawyer, or for anyone else, to earn eternal life, then both the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationships with other people had to be characterized by love. And obviously the lawyer thought he had done a pretty good job of doing just that.
But then Jesus adds these words to the end of his response:
“…do this, and you will live.”
Since this lawyer is an expert in the Jesus law, Jesus quotes, or at least paraphrases, here from the law:
You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord.
(Leviticus 18:5, ESV)
It is absolutely crucial that we understand Jesus is not teaching that anyone can be saved by his or her works. He is actually doing just the opposite by pointing out that it is impossible for this lawyer, or for anyone else to be saved by the system the lawyer is attempting to defend – a system that requires consistently keeping God’s law perfectly.
This is the pivot point of this entire encounter, because with those words, Jesus is giving this man a chance to acknowledge that he is incapable of doing that. The standard that God has established for those like this lawyer who think they can earn their own salvation is that they must do it perfectly. They must love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, strength and mind all the time and they must love their neighbor as themselves all the time. And no man, with the exception of Jesus, has ever been able to do that.
This is the point at which this man could have humbled himself and admitted to Jesus that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t live up to that standard. He could have said something like this: “You know Jesus, as hard as I try I know I can’t keep God’s law like that all the time. So how can I possibly receive eternal life then?” And had he been humble enough to do that, I am confident that Jesus would have taken the time to sit down with him and explain that from creation, being righteous before God had always been a matter of faith, not a matter of man’s own efforts.
But this lawyer is blinded by his own arrogance and pride. He isn’t willing to admit that he is incapable of doing what he had just identified as God’s requirements for earning eternal life. So he decides to “double down” on this idea that he can somehow earn eternal life. In verse 29, we see that the lawyer is still trying to justify himself. He is still trying to establish that his knowledge of the law made him righteous and was adequate to make him right with God. So he asks another question:
“And who is my neighbor?”
It’s really interesting that the lawyer skips right to the horizontal aspect of the law – how he is to love his neighbor. He completely skips over what he has already acknowledged is the first requirement in the law for obtaining eternal life – loving God. We can’t really tell from the parable if he did that because he was arrogant enough to think that he was doing that perfectly in his life, or what seems more likely to me, that he knew there was no chance he could do that so he just skipped ahead to the second requirement where he figured he at least had a fighting chance.
There is little doubt in my mind that this lawyer figured that his fellow Israelite, Jesus, was going to side with him here and agree that when God commanded His people to love their neighbors He was referring only to their fellow Israelites. And this lawyer assumed that Jesus was going to complement him for loving his fellow Israelites.
But instead, Jesus, knowing this man’s heart, responds with the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. In looking at this parable we need to guard against the tendency to focus so much on some of the obscure details that we miss the main point Jesus is making here. In my study this week I was struck by the number of commentators who tried to determine the motives of the priest and the Levite who ignored the injured man, but frankly that is an exercise in futility because Jesus doesn’t give that information. And if that was important to the proper understanding of the parable I’m pretty sure Jesus would have made it clear to the lawyer and to us.
We also need to make sure we don’t attempt to allegorize this parable by assigning meaning to each detail. One church father, Augustine went to great lengths to do that, claiming that the thieves represented Satan and his angels, the priest and the Levite represented the ministry of the Old Testament, the inn represented the church and even that the innkeeper represented Paul. It’s pretty easy to see how such an approach can quickly obscure the clear teaching of the parable.
The parable itself is very simple and I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with it so I’m not going to take much time to focus on the details. Given the context, Jesus’ purpose in telling this parable to the lawyer seems clear. He is confronting the lawyer with the truth that he hasn’t even done a good job loving his neighbor, alone loving God. And therefore, if he is going to depend on his own works to earn eternal life, he’s in big trouble.
By portraying the hated Samaritan, rather than the priest or the Levite, as the one who was willing to stop and give aid to this injured traveler, Jesus certainly confronted the lawyer’s own racial bigotry. That lawyer, like many Israelites would have not considered that Samaritan to be his neighbor, nor would a Samaritan have considered a Jew to be his neighbor.
The animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans went all the way back to the Assyrian conquest of the northern ten tribes of Israel in 622BC. The king of Assyria sent non-Israelites to settle the area formerly occupied by the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Those foreigners intermarried with the Israelites who still remained in the land and eventually developed a religion that was a mixture of Judaism and the idol worship of these foreigners. So the Samaritans were generally considered to be “half-breeds” and were despised by the Jews.
The Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, and claimed that was the place Moses had designated as the place where the people were to worship God. Eventually the Samaritans accepted the first five books of the Old Testament authored by Moses, but they rejected the writings and prophets as well as all Jewish tradition. Over time Samaria had become a place of refuge for all the outlaws of Judea, which increased the animosity between the two nations.
So the idea that a hated Samaritan would thus be the one who rendered aid to the injured traveler was unthinkable for this Jewish lawyer. At the end of the parable, Jesus uses the same technique that he had used earlier and asks the lawyer a question:
“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”
In answering the question, the lawyer is still so full of hatred toward the Samaritans that he can’t even bring himself to utter the word “Samaritan” as he answers Jesus:
“The one who showed him mercy.”
The lawyer has just answered his own question once again. His neighbor is not just another fellow Jew – it is anyone who shows mercy to another. And I’m pretty sure that by this point, the lawyer now realizes that certainly describes neither his attitude nor his actions.
Before we go any further and look at Jesus’ last words to the lawyer, let’s pause for a minute and summarize what we’ve learned so far.
1. The main purpose of the parable is to answer the lawyer’s original question:
“Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
2. The lawyer approaches Jesus thinking he has adequately obeyed the law to the extent that he has “earned” eternal life.
3. Jesus’ goal in this encounter is to help the lawyer see that he is incapable of “earning” eternal life.
Would you all agree with me on those things?
If all of those things are true, as we’ve just agreed, then it seems to me that the main theme of this parable can be expressed like this:
Eternal life isn’t a matter of
"What I must do for God",
but rather
"What has God has done for me"
I think it’s pretty clear from the lawyer’s response that he failed to get that. Jesus had certainly given him the opportunity to recognize and acknowledge the insufficiency of his own righteousness and to respond to God with humility and repentance, but he had failed to do so. But I believe that Jesus gives him one more chance to do that with his final words to the lawyer:
“You go, and do likewise.”
Given the entire context of this passage, I don’t think Jesus is telling the lawyer, as we often conclude, to go and be a “nice person”. And certainly it would be a stretch to construe Jesus’ words as a command to all believers about how we are to treat other people since it is obvious that this lawyer, at least at this point in time, was quite far from becoming a follower of Jesus.
Notice that I’m not saying that, as followers of Jesus, we shouldn’t care for people like the Samaritan in this parable ministered to the injured man. I’m not saying that the applications that I drew from this parable about how to serve others 8 years ago are inappropriate or wrong or that we can’t learn from the example of the Samaritan. I’m merely saying that wasn’t Jesus’ primary purpose in telling this parable.
If Jesus had been asked, “How should we treat our neighbors?” and had responded with this parable, perhaps “Be like the Good Samaritan” would be an acceptable interpretation. But remember the original question Jesus was asked, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He was asked a question about the lawyer’s relationship to God rather than one about how he was to treat others. “Go and do likewise” is, therefore, not a command to be nice. Just like when Jesus had earlier told the lawyer to “do this, and you will live”, Jesus was pointing out to the lawyer that he was incapable of consistently and perfectly treating others like that and that therefore his righteousness could never earn eternal life. He is affirming what we have identified as the main them of the parable:
Eternal life isn’t a matter of
"What I must do for God",
but rather
"What has God has done for me"
So if that’s the main them of the parable, how should we respond this morning? How can we apply this parable to our lives?
Let me suggest that if we are to associate ourselves with any of the characters in the parable, it should not be the Samaritan, but rather the man who was robbed and beaten and left on the road to die. While, as I pointed out earlier, we need to be careful not to just turn this parable into an allegory, the fact is that all of us are a lot more like that man than we are like the Samaritan. We are a broken people, beaten up by life, robbed of our hope and joy. And we are completely helpless to do anything about that ourselves. We need someone else to come along and lift us out of the ditch and bandage our wounds.
And Jesus is there to meet our needs. Unlike the priest and the Levite, He doesn’t avoid us. He has compassion on us and he comes and, at a great cost to Himself, He heals our wounds by being wounded Himself. He loves us with a “no strings attached” love and brings us to the Father by paying the price to cover whatever is needed to heal us from the guilt of our sin.
Once again, I’m certainly not suggesting that this parable is an allegory, but if the Good Samaritan is a picture of anyone, he is clearly not a picture of any of us. Only Jesus is “good” in the way that the Samaritan is “good” in this parable.
Far from telling a parable to help us become like The Good Samaritan, Jesus tells this story to show us how far from being like The Good Samaritan we actually are! His parable destroys the idea that any of us can ever love God and love our neighbor perfectly enough to inherit eternal life.
At least the lawyer got one thing right – eternal life is indeed an inheritance. We don’t have to do something to receive it. We merely have to have a personal relationship with the one who is providing it. And the only way we can enter into a relationship with God and receive that inheritance is through faith in His Son, Jesus, and what he did for us on the cross to make us righteous in God’s sight.
Every one of us here this morning needs to respond to the truth of this parable in one of two ways.
First, let me address those of you who have already placed your faith in Jesus alone as the basis for your relationship with God. If that is the case, then this parable ought to force you to your knees with overflowing gratefulness for what Jesus has done for you. This parable ought to be a reminder that when being good was not good enough, Jesus came to your rescue and made it possible for you to inherit eternal life.
Second, perhaps there are some of you here this morning who are a lot like the lawyer in the parable. You look at your life and think that you’ve done a pretty good job of loving God and loving your neighbor. And therefore you’ve never humbled yourself and admitted to God that you are incapable of earning eternal life through your own efforts. You’ve never repented of your sin and asked God to forgive you for that sin and placed your faith in Jesus alone as the way to a relationship with God. If that describes your life, then I’m confident that God is trying to speak to you, Spirit to spirit, through this parable this morning. And if that’s the case, please don’t go away like the lawyer did and miss out on the inheritance that God desires to give to you.
As we pray in just a moment, I’m going to give all of you an opportunity to respond to God in a tangible way, just by raising your hand to indicate what God is laying upon your heart this morning.
Eternal life isn’t a matter of
"What I must do for God",
but rather
"What has God has done for me"
Let’s pray.
