DS 009

The Great Commandment

Luke 10:25-37

Jesus liked to tell stories. He made up stories about fictitious people that would capture the imagination of his audience, allow them to set aside some of their cultural notions, and grapple with reality from a new perspective. It was a tactic he often used to help people better understand God. It was also a way to force people to take a closer look at themselves and their received traditions.

In this passage of Luke, we find Jesus talking with one of his critics who was trying to trap him into saying the wrong thing. “What must I do to inherit the life of the ages?”

The Jews divided time into two sections. There was the age leading up to Messiah, and there was the age that began with the coming of Messiah. Jesus had spoken about a life of the ages, a quality that bridged both spans of time and was appropriate for the coming reality of Messiah's reign. Most people did not really understand what he meant, but they did understand that he was referring at least in part to participating in the coming reign of Messiah. That was something all of the Jews yearned to experience.

This critic was asking Jesus specifically about assuring his own place in that time to come. He wanted Jesus to offer a specific answer to bringing about the coming of Messiah and the Messianic age. There had been many false prophets and false Messiahs. Pinning Jesus down on this matter would be a simple way to attack and discredit him.

Jesus turned the question around to his critic. He asked him about his own reading of the Scriptures. The man replied, “There are two basic commandments: Love Yahweh your God with all you are, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

At this statement, Jesus commended the man for an accurate reading of Scripture. He told him to do that and he would experience the life of the ages. While this was an obviously valid response, the man felt uncomfortable with having asked Jesus his question, only for all to see that he had no reason for asking in the first place. He followed up with a second question, then, “And who is my neighbor?”

This is where Jesus began to answer with a story.

Once there was a man walking down the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. As he was walking along, a band of thugs surprised him. They beat him, stole all he carried with him, including his clothes, and left him to die. He was stripped of everything that would have indicated his status, national identity, and affiliations. Bleeding from his wounds, his life was threatened by his injuries, exposure, and wild animals.

As he lay in the dirt, a priest came by on his path to serve at the Temple in Jerusalem. He could not afford to touch the man and so become contaminated by contact with his blood. That would have rendered him ritually impure, barring him from serving in the Temple until after a seven day period of cleansing. Rather than allow himself to become unfit for his responsibilities, he slipped by on the other side of the road and hurried on his way, sure that someone else would stop to help the man.

Another religious man came along, this one a Levite in charge of service of one kind or another in the Temple. The Levites led music, cleaned, prepared elements of worship, and fulfilled a host of other supporting duties that would allow the priests to minister in the Temple. He would also have been contaminated and become unfit for his Temple service for a period of cleansing had he stopped to help. He also rushed by on the other side of the road. This was the only way to insure that he would be able to continue with his responsibilities of Temple service before God. People were counting on him. There would obviously be someone else who would be able to assist this man in need.

The next person to come along was a Samaritan. If Jesus had been telling this story in America at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, he would have called him a Muslim. Although technically they worshipped the same God of Abraham as did the Jews, the two groups did not get along. Each one declared the other wrong about God. Each one determined that they were the true descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Jews felt strongly enough about it that they would not speak to Samaritans and would not deign to cross through Samaria unless it were completely unavoidable. They had been one people, but they had parted ways definitively when Israel was conquered by the Assyrians.

Even so, it was a Samaritan that Jesus introduced into the story. One of those people hated by the Jews. The touch of a Samaritan would have made any Jew unclean and unfit for entry into the courts of the Temple. It was this Samaritan, however, who stopped to offer assistance to the man left for dead by those who had attacked him.

The Samaritan took the man, bound his wounds, treated them with what medicine was available, and placed the injured man on his donkey. He then took the injured man to an inn and paid for his continued care. Only after that did he continue his journey, but with the insistence that the innkeeper care for the man and charge him for whatever more he spent on his care when he returned from his journey.

Then Jesus turned to his critic. He did not ask him the original question, “Who is my neighbor?” Instead, he asked a slightly different one. “Which one of these was a neighbor to the man who lay injured?”

The slight shift in the question is important. Instead of looking upon others to wonder whom we are to care for as a neighbor, he was asking about whom we exclude from our definitions of neighbor. Jesus was asking the man to examine the limits of his own care with a challenge to broaden those definitions.

Stripped of his clothing and belongings, there was no way to tell if the injured man were a prophet, priest, beggar, or king. The question to concern one then, becomes whether or not to fulfill the mandate to be a neighbor to those we encounter. There is no place for establishing one or another category of those who are worthy or unworthy of our service and assistance. There is no room to limit the reach of our love for our fellow human beings.

Jesus' critic, however, was struggling with the implications of the story and Jesus' question. He well understood that the hated Samaritan was the hero in Jesus' story. He did not like Jesus painting the priest and Levite in less than glowing terms. He did not relish the comparison Jesus was making between religious purity laws and the greatest commandments as he himself had already defined them. He did not like the implication that tradition in Jewish life was taking priority over the weightier issues of serving and following God.

Instead of answering that the Samaritan was neighbor to the injured man, he responded, “The one who had compassion on him.” It was a meager excuse not to highlight that the hero of the story was a Samaritan. Jesus responded with, “Go and do likewise.”

That is the harder part of understanding the greatest commandments. Repeating them is simple. Actually applying them diligently to our lives is a very different exercise. Are we prepared to do more than provide lip service to loving God and our neighbors? Understanding that this is the greatest of all the commandments must necessarily transform our lives and the character of our interactions with all those around us.

—Pr. Christopher B. Harbin

© Copyright 2017 Christopher B. Harbin.