Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 5 Year C. Luke 10.25-37
Our readings today bring us to the core of our faith: the great commandments, neighbourly love, and eternal life.
We start noticing a change in translation from the NRSV to the NRSVue, and why translations matter. In the NRSV and some older translations, the person who asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” is described as a ‘lawyer’.
Here, in the NRSVue he is referred to as an ‘expert in the law’. The distinction is important because law the person is expert in is the Torah, the Jewish religio-cultural law. He is not a lawyer in the modern sense of a university-trained lawyer or a tax lawyer.
Also, since these ‘experts in the law’ are often positioned as one of the groups of people opposed to Jesus, like the scribes and the Pharisees, it is probably better to avoid lumping the good members of our modern legal profession into the same category.
25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?
This exact question asked by the expert, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”, is also asked by a ‘certain ruler’ later in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18. In both cases, the writer of Luke brings the Law into the frame. To the certain ruler, Jesus lists some of the commandments within the law. Here today Jesus leads the expert to summarize the law.
And then we get one of the most famous stories within Christian tradition. We probably know it as the ‘parable of the Good Samaritan’ and would have heard this phrase hundreds of times, in church, in the media, in speeches by politicians, and as a bible heading. The phrase itself is not in our gospel text. And for the Jewish culture of the time using the word ‘good’ as an adjective for a Samaritan would have been deeply shocking. For us it would be something like ‘the parable of the good terrorist’. Good and Samaritan just did not go together … so keep this idea in mind as we ponder the story.
And this story shows a radical development of ancient ethics, a development that changes the course of the western world, a development that becomes so normalized in our time, we can go onto Facebook, like I did this morning, and see a request to support charities in other countries, charities that support people outside our country, outside our culture, outside our social group and class. This was not the case in the ancient world.
Greco-Roman ethics focused on people of the same ethnos, the same people group or social class. Support and love and compassion were not required to non-Greeks. In the Jewish world, the concept of neighbour was extended to any and all other Israelites and anyone residing in the land of Israel.
Our passage today shows the tension that was developing at the time concerning the question of “who is my neighbour”. The resolution of that question by Jesus is the source of the extension of the concept of neighbour to essentially mean all people, everyone, everywhere. Which is why it is normal, it is expected, and happens that now that people, not only Christians, support other people, all across the globe, at times of natural disasters and other crises.
All this stems from the reframing of neighbour begun with Christ and continued by the early Jesus Followers. This fact is recognized by Dr Bart Ehrman, one of the foremost New Testament scholars today. Bart is an atheist, so he has no Christian bias to push, and yet clearly teaches it was the change initiated by the early Church that led to the broad compassion we have in secular western countries today. He explores this in an upcoming book with a great title I wish I could steal, “Love your stranger…”
Love your stranger … this is what the Samaritan does today, moved with compassion, he loves the half-dead stranger before him, he loves a Jew, a stranger, an enemy. To him, to the Samaritan, this stranger WAS his neighbour.
This of course is the shock aspect of the story, the moment that would have really got to the expert in the law, really affected the first hearers of the Gospel. The robbed, beaten and half-dead Jew was not helped by his fellow Jews, by a priest and a Levite, a temple functionary – but was helped, was brought back to life, was saved by a Samaritan.
As wonderful and as beautiful as this ethic, to love our stranger, is, there are other aspects to this story easily missed. The injured traveller in our text is described as “half dead”, not injured or badly hurt. Half dead, meaning he could die. For the Levite and and the Priest this was a problem – if they went and offered assistance, and the stranger died, they would be in contact with a dead body. Which according to the Law, meant they were polluted and could not attend the temple, could not attend their religious duties.
So, the parable, which began as with a summation of the weighty matters of the Law, to love God and Love neighbour, has another crucial message for us. Because it highlights, it holds up to view and critiques a choice to follow the lesser matters of the law – concerning ritual pollution – over the law to love neighbour. It brings into focus then also our own, and our own churches capacity to hold fast to rules and regulations, to place law over love. When do we, when does our church, place procedures over people?
All we need to do is look at the controversy in our church, in our diocese, over blessing of same sex marriages and the rules regarding ordination of LGBTIQA+ people to get a sad and hurtful answer - akin to the Levite’s choice to cross the road.
Finally, it is SO significant that the expert in the law asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He does not ask what he must do to gain eternal life. Because of course as a mortal person, bounded by finitude, bounded by his own life, he cannot do anything at all to affect eternity. Eternity cannot be traded or purchased or achieved by DOING anything at all.
Rather, the life eternal is INHERITED. It is his birthright, as it is ours, as it is all peoples, because God has created us in Her image and adopts us as Her children. Eternal life is already ours: how we respond to, accept, live into, or attempt to reject or qualify this eternal gift is up to us.
And as a final answer to the question posed by the expert, Jesus depicts the Samaritan as he inherits and embraces the life eternal – and he does this by fully entering this life now, by caring for and healing in the present, through monetary generosity, by engaging in interdependence with the innkeeper and his own animal who carried the injured traveller; by restoring life now, he inherits eternal life.
And so, we now, inheritors of this radical ethic, we also inherit the life eternal - by loving our stranger. AMEN