Luke 10:25-37
June 2, 2013
There’s nothing about this world that is completely black
and white. I think we often wish things were black and white, but we know
everything has shades of gray. The commandments say to honor your father and
mother. That seems black and white unless you have an abusive parent. We want
issues like abortion and homosexuality and war to be black and white issues.
But then your sister has an abortion or your uncle comes out of the closet or
your best friend dies on the battlefield and these issues take on shades of gray.
And we question what is right and what is wrong. We live in a world of gray,
wanting simple answers and usually only discovering more questions.
This is exactly what happens in today’s gospel lesson. A lawyer
stands up to test Jesus, challenging Jesus with a seemingly simple question:
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer would have been an expert
in Jewish law – knowing the scriptures inside and out. He would know from the
scriptures that inheritance was the reward promised to the people of God.
Inheritance belonged to the covenant people, extending all the way back to the
time of Abraham. In other words, inheritance belonged to the Jews. The answer
was simple: live into the covenant God made with you.
Jesus is an extraordinary teacher. Instead of answering the
lawyer’s question, Jesus answers the lawyer with two questions. The first,
“What is written in the law?” acknowledges that the lawyer should know the
answer. It is, after all, a simple question. The answer is black and white. Or is
it? Jesus’ second question alludes to the gray: How do you read the law? How do
you understand what is written there? What does it mean to you to live into the
covenant God made with you? Maybe the answer isn’t so clear cut after all.
The lawyer answers by going straight to the greatest
commandment, found in Deuteronomy 6. “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 then he tacks on a law from the holiness code in Leviticus 19:
“And love your neighbor as yourself.” Black and white. Right? It’s all about
love. God is love. Love God. Love your neighbor. And Jesus responds, “Do this
and you will live.”
But the lawyer, wanting to justify himself, asks a second question:
“Who is my neighbor?” At that time, Israel was part of the Roman Empire and the
people were caught in a difficult place between their desired allegiance to the
God of Israel and their required allegiance to the emperor. It was a tense
situation at best for the Israelites as Roman laws and customs threatened to
envelop and destroy the Israelites. The people of that time did much as we
would do today when we feel threatened by outsiders – they embraced their own
community. The neighbor was understood to be the fellow Israelite because so
many of the rest where so clearly the enemy.
Who is my neighbor? The answer should have been black and
white. But Jesus answered with a story. Stories, whether they are parables or
real life situations, open our eyes to the complexities of life. Stories are a
great way to help us see shades of gray. A man is beaten and stripped and left
for dead. A priest goes by without helping him. Then a Levite. This is rather
incredible that two men of God would go by on the other side. Certainly the
third person will help – that’s just good story telling. But we can hear the
listeners gasp when Jesus tells them that it was the Samaritan who stopped. It
was the Samaritan who took the time to clean his wounds and carry him to an inn.
It was the Samaritan who showed mercy.
A Samaritan! That’s a little bit like saying that it was the
Islamic extremist who stopped to help. Our minds can’t quite grasp the idea
that a potential terrorist might show mercy. We can’t quite wrap our heads around
how a person who reads many of the same scriptures we do could interpret them
so differently. We just don’t want to accept that we both worship the same God.
Jesus, that’s not just gray, it’s wrong! We want black and
white. Tell the story again and let it be an Israelite who stops to help. That’s
who the third person should be. Then we can just be critical of our leaders.
Don’t make the enemy be the one who showed mercy! That’s just wrong. It’s uncomfortable. What are we supposed
to do with that?
Christian ethics. Determining right from wrong, deciding how
to live faithfully, and making Christ-centered decisions is far from straight
forward. Jesus has this habit of taking what seems to be black and white and
making it very gray. How are we to love a neighbor who is so very different
from ourselves? We have enough trouble loving the neighbor we already know!
Let’s take a deep breath and step back to look at the big
picture. I think the story of the Good Samaritan does an excellent job of
showing us a faithful approach to Christian ethics. Jesus and the lawyer start
with the primacy of scripture. What does the law say? What does the Bible say
about a particular situation? All our decision-making needs to start here. Next
week we’ll begin to examine how we read scripture faithfully. For today, I
simply ask that we acknowledge the primacy of scripture. It is our best source
for understanding what God would have us think and say and do.
But scripture alone is not enough, as we see from Jesus’
answer to the lawyer’s question. It doesn’t provide clear answers to every
question we have. Even a seemingly simple question like “Who is my neighbor?”
is not always obvious.
John Wesley identified three other things that help us make
good decisions: tradition, experience, and reason. With scripture, these four
make up what is commonly called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Tradition,
experience, and reason help us to get a clearer picture of how God would have
us live. We always want to be aware of the roles of tradition, experience, and
reason as we wrestle with the difficult issues of our day.
The thing is, tradition and experience can lead us astray.
For the lawyer, tradition said that the neighbor was the fellow Israelite.
Experience said that the Samaritan was the enemy. And Jesus spoke a deeper
truth into that situation. Jesus used a shocking example to remind the lawyer that
the Israelites were once slaves in the land of Egypt, so we should love not
only our neighbor but the foreigner in our land. Jesus tagged the enemy as the
one who showed mercy to remind the lawyer that God’s covenant with Abraham was
a promise that through Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed.
And through reason the lawyer affirmed that it was the Samaritan, the one who
showed mercy, who was indeed the neighbor.
Oh, the discomfort of Jesus’ teaching! Jesus has pushed the
lawyer – and you and me – straight into the gray area. This murky place where
right and wrong are so far from black and white. And John Wesley did the same,
over and over again, with this movement he began called Methodism. Tradition
told Wesley that you preach in a church and expect the people to come.
Experience told him that the only way to reach the people was to go to the
people. So he reasoned that in order to show the love of God to the world he
needed to start preaching on street corners and in town squares. This was something
he found quite repulsive. Something he did not want to do. But the conviction
of scripture was clear. Go. Make disciples. Now. Not tomorrow. Today. And
Wesley went.
This is an exciting and terrifying place to be as we
confront the difficult issues of our day. We know most issues are not black and
white, but we so dislike the gray. We want simple answers. And yet Jesus has
invited us straight into the gray area by having the despicable Samaritan show
mercy. As we wrestle with the hot issues of our day we may feel and experience
much of the same discomfort as the lawyer as we are challenged by Jesus and by
God’s word. It is likely that at some point over the summer each one of us will
be offended or upset or angry, just as the lawyer was. It is my prayer that God
will use these difficult moments to help all of us grow in our knowledge and
love of God.
This is an exciting and terrifying place to be because
asking tough questions inevitably leaves us vulnerable – open to being
criticized, challenged, and found wanting. No one wants to be vulnerable. It is
so uncomfortable. Even humiliating. The poor lawyer couldn’t even say the word
Samaritan – he was so uncomfortable with this newfound truth. He had to say
instead, “The one who showed mercy.” And we can feel his discomfort. We cringe
at his humiliation. And then we remember Jesus on the cross.
Over these next weeks we will wrestle with scripture as we
seek to understand the issues, inviting God to speak to us through the
scriptures. This is a real challenge. Coming to God’s word with an openness to
hear God speak is scary because God may well push us to think in new ways. God
may well humble us. Sometimes this kind of thinking is painful because it
touches our lives and our hearts as well as our minds. It calls us to change.
And God may well invite transformation. Truthfully most of us really don’t want
to change. It’s more comfortable to think of the neighbor in narrow terms.
And still, God calls us. God pursues us. God invites us. God
longs for us to change – to repent – to turn away from sin and to grow in
holiness – to become more like Jesus. May this journey into Christian ethics be
a time of growth and transformation for all of us. May God have his way with
us. It is my hope and prayer that by the end of this sermon series and the
corresponding five-week study each one of us will have grown closer to the God
who created this world and all that is in it; that each of us will more deeply
love the God who already knows and loves us intimately; that each of us will
experience new life through the God who longs for healing and wholeness not
just for us but for the whole world. It is my hope and my prayer that each one
of us may gain new insights into the difficult issues of today – insights that
help us to love our neighbors even when they think and act and believe
differently from us. And in all things, it is my prayer that God be glorified.
Thanks be to God!
No comments:
Post a Comment