Jesus, the Law, and My Neighbor
Good evening. I’m so excited to say that we’re celebrating the Eucharist today. We’ve been holding off in order to orient ourselves in this worship space and make sure we have enough of a group to make all the moving parts work together. And we’re getting there, and eventually we’ll have a Eucharist service every week, Lord willing.
We can see the word for Eucharist in our epistle reading today. It’s the Greek word for giving thanks. That first verse in Colossians has Paul giving thanks to God for the faith God has given them and for their love for all the saints.
The order is important. God has granted the Colossians faith in Jesus and as a result they have love for all the saints. It’s a picture of how Jesus summarizes the Law which we heard earlier in our service: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
So let’s turn in our Bibles or our bulletins to Luke 10:25-37
There Jesus shows us some things about himself and his relationship to the Law. He shows us some things about human nature. And he paints a picture of what real love looks like.
It begins with a lawyer.
Luke 10:25–26 ESV
25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”
They lawyer sets out to test Jesus, but the lawyer is now the one being tested.
Luke 10:27–29 ESV
27 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.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” 29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
And as a lawyer, seeking to justify himself, he was probably looking for a narrow interpretation. It would be easy to get one from the original context in the Old Testament. That quote, to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” comes from Leviticus 19:18:
Leviticus 19:18 ESV
18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
The simplest, plainest reading of the Law here looks like the neighbor is “one of our own.” The lawyer wanted to hear that we are to love the people like us, the people of our own culture, race, social status, as ourselves.
In that passage from Leviticus, “Your own people” and “your neighbor” are in parallel. They look like they’re the same thing. So it looks like when we love our own people, we are loving our neighbor as ourselves. But then Jesus shows us that there’s room for more generosity in this Law that contains so many of the OT laws. The expert of the law is getting a lesson from the Author of the Law. And he gives his lesson, as he does so often, through a parable.
Luke 10:30 ESV
30 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.
Jericho is on the border of Samaria. The Jewish audience could have very well thought to themselves that the robbers were probably Samaritans.
Regardless, the man has been beaten, stripped, and left for dead. This is terrible, but don’t worry, he’s on the road. Someone is bound to come along and help.
Luke 10:31 ESV
31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road,
Oh good! He’ll surely take care of the man. He’ll surely love his neighbor as himself. Because, if you think about it, man, if I were left for dead on the side of the road, my only desperate hope would be that someone would put themselves in my place for a second, to care whether I lived or died. And a priest, someone who really knows the Law well would surely stop and help. But Jesus goes on:
…and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.
Luke 10:32 ESV
32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
The Levites were a larger group of Israelites, one of the tribes of Israel, set aside for serving God. And as the Levite passes on the other side, the question of the Law and whether or not anyone actually kept it is rising up in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ audience. If a priest and a Levite won’t keep the Law, if they can’t find the empathy to love their neighbor as themselves, will anyone? Can anyone?
Jesus continues:
Luke 10:33–35 ESV
33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34 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. 35 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.’
The Samaritan. The “filthy” Samaritan, almost certainly not a Roman citizen, loses hours in his day when he could be at Costco, takes his own oil and wine, cleaning up blood, bandaging wounds, lifts the man onto his own animal that he was riding on, and walks in the dirt, sweaty, clothes dirty and stained or ruined now, and brings him to an inn. He gives the inn keeper around a thousand dollars and promises more, if only the inn keeper would take care of him.
Jesus asks the lawyer:
Luke 10:36 ESV
36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”
The lawyer, the legalist in all of us, still wants to say, the fellow Israelites. It’s a legal question. And the law says:
Leviticus 19:18 ESV
18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Your neighbor is your own people. But how can that be the answer? The best of the people listening, the exemplars of the people left the man to die. Who proved to be a neighbor? Even the lawyer has to say:
Luke 10:37 ESV
37 “The one who showed him mercy.”
He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, “The Samaritan.” The one who doesn’t look like me, or dress like me, or worship quite like me. All the lawyer could bring himself to do was point at the act itself: “The one who showed him mercy.”
We have our answer, but it’s not the end of the parable. We need our Sunday school answer, but our souls aren’t helped from knowing what we should do and never going on to actually do it. So Jesus tells the lawyer, the legalist in all of us:
Luke 10:37 ESV
And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
Where we rely on Scripture to justify our lack of generosity and empathy, Jesus shows us the generosity and mercy in the Law. In the Law: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” where we want to put the emphasis on “neighbor” and debate its meaning so we can limit our own responsibility, Jesus maximizes the word “love” so that it overshadows all the limits we try to set on it. Emphasizing neighbor and finding out everything we can about the nuance there is met with the challenge to emphasize love and find out everything we can about how to love.
So Jesus expands the love and mercy in the Law, he magnifies it. And so he gives us a new appreciation for mercy and empathy as things that should characterize us as Christians. Did that Samaritan’s business grow that day? Did the thousand dollars he spent make money in the stock market? Did he look competent and put together when he showed up in that inn, with a man’s blood and dirt from the road on his clothes? No! And so love and showing mercy are actual Christian virtues that will always be at odds with winning and looking competent, and finding our identity in cultural and ethnic pride. So much of our society is about getting what should be mine: health, wealth, convenience, winning. It’s in the air we breathe. But Jesus calls us to love people, even when they aren’t like us. And that can jeopardize our health, wealth, convenience, and looking like winners.
So this gives us a lot to think about in terms of what it looks like to live as Christ intended. We need the Law, but we need the gospel even more. The Law is the good foundation that the gospel is built upon. The gospel is about more than just doing better. The church is a hospital. We’re broken people here to be healed. And so we look to Jesus who does that work through the gospel, through his work on the cross. The good news of Jesus Christ is that at the Cross Jesus loved his neighbor as himself. And Jesus knows what love is. As God, he is the author of love. And as he sees us beaten, stripped, and left for dead by our sin, by the world, the flesh, and the devil, through his work on the cross, Jesus takes oil and wine and bandages and heals our wounds. Where we can’t take even one step on the road to eternal life, he lifts us up and brings us there and pays for our entry and we are healed.
And so that’s part of why I’m so pleased that we can share in Communion together today. Because as Paul tells us, whenever we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we proclaim the Lord’s death until we come.
It’s that sacrificial death that heals us. By his wounds we are healed. The great love of Jesus for his neighbor is the salvation of the world. So let us remember his love for us today as we partake together.
