Luke 10:25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.a “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27 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 given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii,a gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
This is the word of the Lord
Thanks be to God.
What does love look like? Is it a feeling like we see in the movies, where people do things that might be out of character for them – like the tough guy bad boy that no one understands who turns out to be the good guy with a heart of gold? Or is love more like we see in the cartoons – the old ones like Tom and Jerry where Tom’s heart jumps out of his chest to show you how he feels about the object of his attention?
What does love look like?
Maybe it looks like showing up when you are needed and every time thereafter. Maybe love looks like calling someone by their pronouns. Maybe love looks and sounds like correctly pronouncing someone’s name.
What does love look like?
Pop music has been toying with that question of what love is for as long as I can remember and I would venture to guess for as long as any of us can remember. In his song “True Love Ways” Buddy holly wrote
“:Sometimes we’ll sigh
Sometimes we’ll cry
And we’ll know why
Just you and I
Know true love ways”
Another picture of what love might look like shows up a few decades later when the Foundations wrote one of the spritelyest lovelorn songs ever committed to tape
Build me up buttercup.
They sang
“I need you
More than anyone, darling
You know that I have from the start
So build me up
Buttercup, don’t break my heart”
Love isn’t all fun and games – no matter what cartoons and pop music might tell us – A few years ago The band Death Cab for Cutie wrote wrote a song title “What Sarah said” In the closing lines of the song writer Ben Gibbard sang
“But I’m thinking of what Sarah said
That love is watching someone die”
The raw honesty of those lines has sat with me for many years. Being willing to sit with someone and face those hard moments with them is an act of love. My friends who are chaplains who do end of life care have said that, that moment is often one of the hardest but most loving gifts they can offer.
So what does love look like?
I’m sure there are as many answers to that question as there are grains of sand on the beach. There are so many ways to show love, to give love to other people. There are so many ways to give love, and to receive love. It’s almost overwhelming to try to understand love when you think about it, because to begin to answer the question of what does love look like, we need to know a little bit about love and in what context we are talking about love.
So what does Love look like?
For this exploration It might be helpful to explore our gospel reading for today – the parable of the good samaritan. This particular parable has a pretty storied history and has a lot of resonance in certain cultural circles. It is unlikely (I doubt that there are) that many of us who are not familiar with this story and who do not understand the Samaritan to be the epitome of charitable works. The Samaritan is seen as the one who transgresses religious boundaries and legalism to help the poor and beaten down. In her writings on the Parable of the Samaritan, Scholar Amy-Jill Levine writes “The standard reading is the one in which “we” are the Samaritans; “we Samaritans” help “them,” the sick, the poor, foreign nationals, and so on. The parable of the Good Samaritan has come to mean whatever we want it to mean. The various appropriations and interpretations of the parable heard today are generally good news. What’s not to like about helping the stranger and being charitable toward others? But those are not the messages a first-century Jewish audience would have heard. They would have heard a discussion between two opposing worldviews.
The initial question from the lawyer which starts our reading “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” is problematic. On its face, the English translation is adequate, but it fails to capture the nuance of the language and in particular, the intention of the sentence. In the Greek this phrase the The verb “do” is an aorist participle, a tense that suggests a single, limited action. The question the lawyer is asking is more like what one thing can I check off my to-do list: recite a prayer, offer a sacrifice, drop off a box of macaroni for a food drive, or put a twenty in the collection plate to then achieve eternal life
This is a transactional approach to (salvation) and as we will see from Jesus’ ultimate response, it’s the wrong question. In response to the lawyer, Jesus asks “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” Jesus does not merely ask, “What is written in the Torah?” He makes the question more specific: “How are you reading it?” It is interesting that he asks the lawyer not just what is written in the Torah – but further clarifies the question by asking for the lawyer’s interpretation of the Torah. This is a signal to the people listening that the lawyer is literate, a quality not shared by the majority of the population in antiquity.
The lawyer responds using a combination of the shema and a quotation from Leviticus saying “You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind/intention, and your neighbor as yourself.” This combination of verses was well known before the lawyer used them to answer Jesus’s question and these quoted were well known to jews then and now. It is a correct answer, and Jesus responds “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”
He says nothing of eternal life or justification. He just acknowledges the answer.
It’s not that the lawyer’s answer was wrong, it’s that the combined verses command both love of God and love of neighbor. But they don’t stop there. They do not mean, “Just do some good loving, but forget about dietary regulations, circumcision, Sabbath observance, or Temple sacrifices.” They mean that the love commandments become the touchstone by which all other actions are assessed. By that metric the lawyer’s answer does not hit the mark. It is instead a surface level answer and shows that the lawyer presumes that eternal life is a commodity to be inherited or purchased on the basis of a particular action or actions rather than a gift which is freely given. When the lawyer asks about “eternal life,” Jesus reframes what is at stake by exhorting, “Do this, and you will live.” The imperative “do” focuses not on a single action, but on an ongoing relationship. (way of living ones life)
If the interaction stopped right here – the lawyer could leave unscathed and go out into the world – living into that greatest commandment – “You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind/intention, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Not being able to leave well enough alone – the lawyer asks Jesus “And who is my neighbor?”
Strictly speaking – from a legal point of view the question isn’t a bad one. In terms of the law, knowing who is in the community, who is a resident alien, and who is a neighbor has merit. Legally speaking – those classes of people could (and would) be dealt with in different ways. But the verses the lawyer uses to respond are pulled from greater contexts. Contexts which lay out rules for how neighbors are included in the community. Leviticus – from which the phrase love your neighbor as yourself is drawn – argues that love has to extend beyond the people in one’s group. Leviticus 19 insists on loving the stranger as well. It insists that Love and how we exercise it is Love and that love does not obey legal boundaries in the same way property and boundary markers might. Love commandments are the touchstones by which all other actions are assessed.
Jesus stated that asking “Who is my neighbor”, is the wrong question. To ask “Who is my neighbor” is just a polite way of asking, “Who is not my neighbor?” or more specifically – who does not deserve my love?” or “Whose lack of food or shelter can I ignore?” – all are questions which can evolve into “Whom can I hate?”
According to Jewish law, the lawyer is responsible for loving those like him, and those who are not like him but who live in close proximity to him even though they are not part of his particular community. In Jewish thought, one could not mistreat the enemy, but love was not mandated. Only Jesus taught that one should love ones enemy: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” We see and hear this over and over in Jesus’s other teachings. In the sermon on the mount Jesus says “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous”. The trick is that the Torah includes no commandment to hate one’s enemy. Love cannot be restricted. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus makes the same point: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them”. So when the lawyer asks the question – who is my neighbor?” He finds himself on the receiving end of a parable.
In the parable a merchant is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he is accosted, beaten, stripped, and left for dead. Jesus says that both a priest and a levite pass by the half dead man. There is a common teaching of this passage that indicate that both the priest and the levite left the victim because to interact would have made them ritually impure, but there is good reason to question this interpretation. Since the Priest and Levite were going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, the temptation to remain ritually clean is outweighed by the commandment to love your neighbor. In both cases, the priest and levite were shown leaving Jerusalem having fulfilled any duties and obligations – instead the command to love and care for the stranger should have been the foremost thought in their minds.
However, as we know from the parable, they do not stop, and instead hurry along the way. Martin Luther King Jr argues that these men are not bad people – but rather they are scared people. Faced with a victim, the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ The samaritan inverts that question and asks -‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
To really understand the parable as its original audience might, we need to think of Samaritans less as oppressed but benevolent figures and more as the enemy, as those who do the oppressing. From the perspective of the man in the ditch, Jewish listeners might balk at the idea of receiving Samaritan aid. According to the Hebrew scriptures, Samaria had an earlier name, Shechem. It was at Shechem that Jacob’s daughter Dinah was raped as told in Genesis 34. The second reference to Shechemm or Samaria is in Judges 8–9. This is the story of the false judge Abimelech, who murdered his rivals. It is to him and his supporters that Jotham tells his parable of the Trees. Thus, to Jesus’s Jewish audience as well as to Luke’s readers, the idea of a “good Samaritan” would make no more sense than the idea of a “good rapist” or a “good murderer.” From the Persian period in the late sixth century BCE to the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans remained at odds. Each claimed the true descent from Abraham, true understanding of Torah, the correct priesthood, and the right form of worship in the proper location. However, given the cultural antipathy between them, it is important to note that the samaritan is not a social victim – He has money, freedom of travel, the ability to find lodging, and some leverage with the innkeeper. The parable, in its original setting, is not about the type of prejudice that creates people on the margins; it is about hatred between groups who have similar resources. In addition, a benevolent reading of the Samaritan’s final actions understands him as providing not one-time aid, but long-term care for the injured man. Thus the sense of loving ones neighbor means continual action, not something to check off the to-do list.
After telling the story Jesus asks the lawyer – Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.
So what does love look like?
As we learn from Jesus in this parable, love is an action that is continual. It crosses boundaries to care for one another by asking the question “What will happen to these people, if I do nothing?”
Love is more than just a feeling. It is an action that extends care to people – without qualification. Just love.
Love your enemies. Love your neighbors. Give love and in return, receive love.
It can be hard to adjust to this idea – and so maybe we go back to those ways of showing love that we mentioned at the beginning.
Love is using someone’s pronouns.
Love is being present in moments where we are uncomfortable and not looking away in hard times.
Love is asking the question “what will happen to them, if i do nothing?”
and then, committing to actions that will change the outcome.
Love is an action put out into the world that by its very nature can, will, and does change the world in all sorts of ways.
So friends let us go out into the world – hearing the parable of samaritan – hearing the question “what will happen to them, if i do nothing?” and do something to change the outcome.
May it ever be so.
Amen.
Matthew Messenger 