Often when
I am wrestling with a biblical story, especially a familiar one, I like to read
what has come before and what takes place after. This story takes place in the
midst of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, a journey characterized by a sense of
urgency. The urgency is not so much to arrive at his destination, but of
proclaiming the nearness of God's presence and of responding to that presence.
So when one would-be follower rushed up to Jesus as he was on the way and said,
"I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my
home" (Lk 9:61), Jesus answered very abruptly, "No one who puts a
hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Lk 9:62).
That is rough. Uncompromising. Urgent. No excuses. The kingdom is near.
Something is at stake. No second thoughts. Jesus does not sound very pastoral,
does he? He does not sound very understanding.
In the
latter part of Chapter 10, we find two encounters between Jesus and people who
are slow to grasp what he is about. The first is with a lawyer and is our text.
The second is with two sisters, Martha and Mary. It is fascinating that Luke
puts these two stories right up against one another. They have such different
messages, such different words to speak.
To the
lawyer, who wants to turn the kingdom of God into a discussion group, Jesus
says, "Go and do." However, to Martha, who is a doer and gets upset
that Mary is not, Jesus says, "Sit and listen." We wonder,
"Which is it, Jesus?" We thought the message was "go and
do." Is that not the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan? Go and
do likewise? Yet, a few verses later, the message seems to be different.
"Sit and listen." Maybe there is more to this than we thought.
For now, we
focus on the lawyer. Maybe he was out there in the crowd, listening to this
rabbi talking about God's wisdom revealed to the simple but hidden from the
wise. Maybe that pushed the lawyer's buttons. After all, he was among the wise.
An expert in the law asks Jesus what the greatest
commandment in the law might be. Jesus
has his questioner respond first. His
answer is consistent with one school of thought among the rabbis of his day: Love
God completely. Love your neighbor as
yourself. Jewish literature of the late
Second Temple period discussed much the question of “eternal life.” The
conclusion was that observance of Torah was essential.[1]
Quoting from Dt 6:5 and Lv 19:18, he articulates the two commandments that
Jewish scholarship and tradition felt represented the ultimate distillation of
the 613 points of the Mosaic Law. The
first tenet, to love God, was Hebrew shorthand for insisting that the totality
of all that makes up a human being must be involved in loving God. The second tenet of the ultimate commandment
grows out of this integrated, all-consuming love of the Lord: to love one's
neighbor as oneself. Amy-Jill Levine
notes that this would have meant, “Love your neighbor, who is a human being
just like you are.”
Pannenberg[2]
stresses that we misunderstand the creative nature of love if, appealing to
this passage, we think of Jesus as abrogating the Old Testament law by a new
Christian law. All law seeks to make a form of life that achieves permanence,
and may even cut declare a regulation to be normative, so that it has to deal
with new situations by casuistic extensions or expositions. Freedom
characterizes the work of love. Love does not despise orientation to given
rules. Yet, agreement with them is always a free act because one does not
accept them in every situation. For love, each new situation is an appeal to
its inventive powers. In this fact, we find the contrast to the mere following
of a law.
In v. 28, what the lawyer must
"do" is live by these two commandments. By affirming his answer,
Jesus agrees that Torah observance is indeed the way to eternal life. Jesus
agrees, but then adds the challenging statement: "...do this, and you will
live." You can have a full and
meaningful life if you will do this.
Luke has
structured 10:29-11:13 as his way of giving further content to this summary of
the Law.
The expert in the law asks,
"Who is my neighbor?" What a
stingy question. If Jesus answers it,
then it will be all right to parcel out our love to others only to certain
individuals. As Pannenberg[3]
points out, love has imagination that can create new forms that aptly meet new
situations in their uniqueness, even if as a rule they have to move within
given forms of social life. The law binds one to a specific form of conduct.
Love has the power to give new life to what is right by developing in
extraordinary circumstances, and without disrupting the nexus of social life,
new solutions and modes of action that do better justice to the situation. Love
with its many creative possibilities thus stands in contrast to a legal form of
life that is regulated in the same way for each case. Love is at work where the
law leaves gaps and where those who are oriented to law ignore situations that
they do not find in the precepts of the law. As an example, the priest and
Levite passed by the one who had fallen victim to robbers, whereas the
Samaritan, even though he had not known the man before, became a neighbor to
him in this situation. Love is flexible and can bring new solutions to new
situations.
Instead of a definition, in
10:29-37 we hear the story of the Good Samaritan. The person from Samaria is the hero. The animosity between Jews and Samaritans is
something most of us know. He did not believe the right things. He did not have the right ethical standards. After all, they married Gentiles. Yet, Jesus makes this person the hero of the
story. Even Jesus did not have peaceful
relations with them. In Luke 9:51-56, the Samaritans refuse hospitality to
Jesus and his disciples as they journey to Jerusalem. James and John had asked
permission to call fire down upon the Samaritan village that had rejected them.
Now this is the person, known only by his ethnicity, whom the lawyer must call
“good.”
Some criminals rob and beat a man
along a country road. Religious leaders,
the priest and Levite, see the man in distress.
These people believed all the right things. They obeyed all the ethical laws. Yet, they refuse to help. They had the change to help face-to-face. Instead of taking the time to trouble
themselves about the other fellow’s troubles, they gave him a quick glance and
a wide berth, and walked on. We know that the robbed and wounded man was
Jewish. So was the priest; likewise, the Levite. This means they were of the
same community. The priest and the Levite both have the chance to do what the
situation demands, but they do not. Their misunderstanding of what is
important, of what matters, actually gets in the way of their compassion, their
humanity and their faith.
They had the change to help face-to-face. Instead of taking the time to trouble
themselves about the other fellow’s troubles, they gave him a quick glance and
a wide berth, and walked on. We know that the robbed and wounded man was
Jewish. So was the priest; likewise, the Levite. This means they were of the
same community. The priest and the Levite both have the chance to do what the
situation demands, but they do not. Their misunderstanding of what is
important, of what matters, actually gets in the way of their compassion, their
humanity and their faith.
The Samaritan, on the other hand,
sees the man in need, stops and helps him, gives him a room for the night, and
even leaves money to provide any other needs.
This parable draws the lawyer,
those hearing the story with the lawyer and readers of the story two millennia
later, into its world, luring the listener to identify with the characters
involved. With whom would the lawyer identify? Certainly, he would not identify
with the robbers, nor, probably, with the innkeeper. As a lawyer — remembering
that the Greek word may also be translated “conventional man” — the
brigands would not be suitably conventional and the innkeeper simply has an
insufficient role to attract sympathy. Nor, one would think, could the lawyer
identify with the priest and Levite who “pass on the other side” of the wounded
traveler. They are too unfeeling and, again, only sketchily drawn characters.
That leaves the Samaritan and the victim. Is it possible that the lawyer, and
the listeners to this story, would identify with the victim? Travelers in
first-century Palestine rightly feared attacks by highway robbers.[4]
Perhaps the lawyer himself was involved in such a situation. Luke’s audience,
too, might identify most with the victim, presumed to be a religiously
observant Jew on his way home from a festival celebration in Jerusalem.
They fail
to act. They fail to see. They fail to feel. They turn their faces away. They
do not just turn the other cheek; they turn their backs to suffering.
The
Samaritan stops to assist. He puts in face time. He stops by for a helpful
visit. He shows Samaritan behavior that we know should really be “Christian
behavior.” The Samaritan stopped, got off his donkey, and used his own olive
oil to pour on the man’s wounds. He used an expensive type of oil, oil that fueled
the Roman Empire. It lit oil lamps and soothed cracked, sore feet. It was the
prime commodity, the petroleum of its day. On top of this, the Samaritan used
his own wine as an antiseptic. He lifts his human burden, risking his own back.
He pays two days’ wages and offers more, whatever the cost, on his return. All
this for a man he does not know; for a man who was, until that moment, not his
neighbor.
The point is that a ‘neighbor' is
anyone in need that one meets. The issue
is not who the neighbor is. The issue is being neighborly to all. It answers the question the lawyer did not
ask, "What does it mean to behave as a neighbor?" This parable
ignores the lawyer's question, revealing that the proper question is not who by
how should I love my neighbor? Priest
and Levite had their love for God intact, but were found wanting in love of
neighbor. In responding that the one who showed mercy was a neighbor, we find
an important connection with the character of God. Thus, the answer to what it
means to behave as a neighbor, Pannenberg stresses,[5]
is to show mercy, a notion closely related the goodness of God in creating and
sustaining the world. The merciful turning of God to the needy, the suffering,
and the helpless is one we must see as a specific expression of divine goodness
and its practice.
"Do
this, and you will live." Do not
just hear it in a sermon and go on with your life. Rather, love God completely. Be a neighbor to all you meet.
Barth[6]
stresses that the community of the church would be guilty of too close
conformity to the world if it were to exist within it for its own sake,
refusing the active assistance that it ought to give. In fact, this world is
hungry. The church must not be like the priest and Levite. Society awaits a
Good Samaritan to appear within it who will not act for himself, who not be how
own neighbor, assistant, and helper. It awaits one who will relieve it of the
burden of being left to itself and having to save and preserve itself. A
community active only for itself, and inactive towards those around, conforms
in its own way to the world. The Christian community cannot encounter the world
in this conformity. The Christian community gathers and experienced edification
by this Good Samaritan for active service on behalf of Christ and Christ sends
it into the world in this service.
To go back to what Luke places after this story,
we might say that while the story of the Good Samaritan illustrated what it
means to love your neighbor, the next story is Luke's way of describing what it
might mean to love God completely.
Martha is busily engaged in her activity around the house, getting
things ready for her guests, which included Jesus. Mary wasted her time at the feet of Jesus, in
the position of a disciple learning and listening. Though Martha is upset about all this, Jesus
says there is need of only one thing, and Mary has chosen the better part. Take out time for God, to listen and learn. Love God completely.
[1]
(See Sylvia C. Keesmaat, “Strange Neighbors and Risky Care (Matthew 8:21-35;
Luke 14:7-14; Luke 10:25-37)” in The Challenge of Jesus’ Parables, ed. Richard
N. Longenecker [Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2000], 276).
[2] Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 76-7.
[3] Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 76.
[5] Systematic Theology, Volume I, 432-3.
[6] Church Dogmatics, IV.3 [72.2], 778-9.
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