This sermon on Luke 10:25-37 was given at Canon Court Evangelical Church, Fetcham.
‘Tale as old as time. True as it can be. Barely even friends. Then somebody bends. Unexpectedly.’ Those are the famous words from the Disney classic Beauty and the Beast. I’ve never seen the movie, and yet I know the story well. It is a classic storyline that has been retold and relived throughout history. A coming together of two unlikely companions to highlight the power and nature of true love. If all of this is true of Beauty and the Beast, it is even truer of our passage this morning. Luke 10 also has a tale that seems as old as time. A coming together of two individuals even less likely than Beauty and the Beast. The Jewish traveller and the journeying Samaritan were racially and religiously opposed to each another, and yet, the compassionate Samaritan cares for the injured Jew. Prejudice and division overcome by love.
Not only is there a familiar tale, but there is a well-known teaching. Even if you have never read Luke 10, you will be aware of it. It was on the posters in your primary school classroom as you grew up. It was the first rule that the youth group leader explained when you attended their organisation for the first time. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Do unto others what you would have others do onto you. Love your neighbour as yourself. Many think this is the heart of Christianity. Living a life of love towards others is what it means to be a Christian. A Christian is essentially a good Samaritan. Christianity is really just morality, doing good unto others and overcoming prejudice with demonstrations of love. Is this what you think Christianity is all about? Is this what the tale of the Good Samaritan teaches us?
We may speculate on the storyline of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast without ever watching the movie, but when it comes to something as important as the meaning of Christianity, we should take time to examine the evidence. Have you ever looked at the story of the Good Samaritan to check your assumed interpretation of it? Perhaps you already know the content, but have you considered the context in which it is set? For rather than primarily directing our attention to morality, Luke 10 focuses instead on the two ideas of merit and mercy. Firstly, the Message of Merit (v25-28) and then the Meaning of Mercy (v29-37).
1. THE MESSAGE OF MERIT – The law promises life but produces death (v25-28)
What caused the Titanic to sink? It is a question that many have considered over the years and various answers have been given. The ship was travelling too fast, warnings of icebergs were ignored, weather conditions lowered the visibility and cost cutting measures left the hull of the ship weakened. In fact rather than one single reason, the evidence suggests that there was a chain of causes that eventually resulted in the great ship slipping beneath the waves. Similarly, when we come to the parable of the Good Samaritan, there is a chain of causes that result in its telling. Many know that it was told by Jesus in response to the question in verse 29, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ However, we need to realise that the question in verse 29 is in fact a result of the earlier question in verse 25. It is this earlier question that provides the starting point and foundation for the entire narrative. This is the question that the whole account sets out to answer.
‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ (Luke 10:25). It was asked by a lawyer, though not like the lawyers we have today. These were men who spent their lives learning and considering the law that God had given his people in the Old Testament (Luke 7:30; 14:3). However, this question is not only asked by religious lawyers. Luke 18:18 will record another man, a rich ruler, coming to Jesus asking, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.’ Whether a religious lawyer or a rich ruler, the question is the same. It is a pressing question for all kinds of people, it is a pressing question for each of us. We will all die, none of us will live in this world forever. And so we too must consider how we can obtain eternal life.
The religious lawyer and the rich ruler ask the same question, but Luke highlights that they have different motivations. In Luke 18:18, the rich ruler is presented as a genuine enquirer, he wants to know what he must do so that he can do it and receive eternal life. In Luke 10:25, the religious lawyer questions Jesus in order to test him, he ‘stood up to put Jesus to the test’. The lawyer wants to see whether this Teacher answers the way he believes to be correct. He is like that annoying student in a class who, believing they know more than their teacher, asks questions in order to demonstrate how much they already know. The misleading motivation of the lawyer only emphasises the compassionate communication of Jesus. You have been considering how God communicates with us in your current series. In Luke 10, even though the lawyer is seeking to test, trip and trap him, Jesus graciously takes up the question he asks. His interaction with the questioning lawyer is as compassionate as the Samaritan’s reaction to the wounded traveller. The lawyer readies himself to oppose the teaching of Christ, to ridicule and reject it, and yet Jesus is still willing to care for him, communicate to him, to carefully respond with compassion.
Jesus’s first act of compassion is to tell this lawyer, and each one of us, where we can go to find the answer to our question. How can we obtain eternal life? As Thabiti Anyabwile puts it, ‘the place to find the most important answer to the most important question is in the most important book ever written.’ We will find the answer to our question in the Bible. Just as Paul points Timothy to ‘the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation’ (2 Timothy 3:15), Jesus directs the lawyer to the Law, ‘What is written in the law? How do you read it?’ The lawyer’s response is to summarise the law in identifying its two-fold focus, the two things that the law calls us to – love God and love our neighbour. ‘And 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 neighbour as yourself."’ (Luke 10:27) Matthew records how a different lawyer on a different occasion would similarly stand up to test Jesus and Jesus would declare these two to be the greatest commandments, explaining ‘On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’ (Matthew 22:40) The commandments found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, love of God and of neighbour, summarise the whole law. God’s law is the law of love, love for both God and man. That is why Paul can write in Romans 13:10 that ‘love is the fulfilling of the law.’
The message of merit is that if you love, love God and love man, as required in the law you can obtain eternal life. That is what Jesus tells the lawyer, ‘You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.’ It is a message of merit because it tells us to do something to earn eternal life. That was what the lawyer had asked for, something he could carry out that will result in him being rewarded with eternal life. However, there is one crucial, critical thing you need to know about this message of merit: although the law promises life if we keep it, it always produces death because we break it. The law promises life but produces death.
A few years ago, we were relocated by my work to Slovakia for 6 months. It was a great opportunity for us to live on mainland Europe and spend some time travelling around at the weekend. On a number of occasions during the 6 months we rented an apartment on Airbnb in Austria, hired a car and drove across the border to spend the weekend there. Neither of us had ever been in Austria before, as so when we got into the car to drive to our apartment Sarah would set up the Sat Nav to guide us. She would put in the address and a map would come up showing us how to get to the apartment we had rented. What Sarah didn’t do was set up a picture of the apartment we were going to and tell me to drive there. A picture of our destination would be of no use in helping us travel there, we need a map of the journey not a picture of the destination.
The law tells us the destination but does not show us the way to get there. It pictures what the perfect life looks like, but it does not give the power to perform it. ‘Do this, and you will live.’ Do you realise the enormity of that ‘this’? Do what? Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. Can you do that? Is your entire heart, soul, mind and strength constantly and continually loving God? Do you ever in your heart or mind, desire something sinful? Do you ever use your strength to obtain something sinful? What about the second commandment, loving your neighbour as yourself. Do you always love others as much as you love yourself? Or do you ever prefer yourself to others? Are you ever selfish or self-centred? The law is a burden we cannot bear. It is of a standard that we cannot reach. You cannot love God and love your neighbour to the extent required in the law in order to earn eternal life. Such is the weight of these requirements that, after they are explained in Luke 18 to the rich ruler, Jesus’ followers will cry out, ‘Then who can be saved?’ (Luke 18:26) Who can ever hope to fulfil these requirements? How could it be possible to carry out these commandments? No matter how sincerely we might strive, we all sin. We will not earn eternal life for our efforts, instead Paul declares in Romans 6:23, ‘the wages of sin is death’. A few verses later, Paul will explain, ‘The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.’ (Romans 7:10) The law promises life but produces death. The law helps us to eternal life as much as the priest and Levite helped the man in the story told by Jesus. He was too injured, too broken, too close to death, for them to bother with him. We are too broken, too sinful, for the law to be of any use to us. None of us are able to measure up to this message of merit. The perfection required by the law is impossible for us produce. We will not inherit eternal life through merit. Like the dying man, we need something else. We must look not to merit, but to mercy.
2. THE MEANING OF MERCY – The Lord describes mercy for us and demonstrates mercy to us (v29-37)
Sometimes we make the mistake of asking the wrong question. In the classic board game Guess Who, failing to ask the right question may cost you the game. Everybody starts off the same way, you ask whether your opponent is a boy or a girl. Straight away half the cards go down. Then is gets trickier. Hair colour and eye colour are usually the next best questions to ask but eventually you will get to the stage where you have to choose: do you ask whether your opponent has glasses or short hair? Do you ask whether they have a hat or a beard? If you ask the wrong question at a point like that, you will fail to eliminate the right number of your opponent’s cards and they might guess who you are before you can guess them. In Luke 25, the lawyer asks the wrong question. Instead of realising the impossibility of performing the law and crying out ‘who can be saved?’, the lawyer decides to question the extent of the law of love. If he could somehow narrow the obligations of the law, if he could lower the standard, perhaps then he might stand a chance of measuring up to that message of merit. Luke tells us that in asking his follow up question, he was ‘desiring to justify himself’, that is to defend and vindicate his understanding of the law and the way he was trying to earn eternal life. So he asks the wrong question, he asks, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ (Luke 10:29)
Sometimes the most compassion thing is for somebody to show us just how wrong we are. Here again we see Christ’s compassion, rather than brushing him off, Jesus expends time and energy to tell him a story designed to reverse his reasoning and unwind his understanding of salvation. The tale told is famous, particularly because the two individuals at the heart of it were racially and religiously opposed to one another. The Jews and Samaritans for centuries had remained separate and distant from each other. Jews would walk for miles on a detour around Samaria rather than passing through it. They wouldn’t talk to them, touch them, eat with them, associate with them in any way. One Jewish scholar stipulated that to eat with a Samaritan was as the same as eating pork. They were unclean. And yet, as this stripped, beaten and halfdead Jew lay on the Jericho road, it is a Samaritan who compassionately cares for him. This Samaritan stranger becomes a far better neighbour to him than his own religious and racial brothers, who looked the other way as they walked past.
In the enjoyment of the story, don’t miss the genius of the storyteller. Through this story, Jesus reverses the lawyer’s question, redirects his reasoning. The lawyer asks, ‘who is my neighbour’, but Jesus replies ‘which of these three proved to be a neighbour’? The lawyer asks who his neighbour is, Jesus asks this man who he can be a neighbour to. Jesus explains we aren’t just born neighbours, but we become neighbours. The commandment of the law to love your neighbour is to go and meet the needs of others wherever you may find them whoever they may be. Jesus challenges us, who can we be a neighbour to? Who can we show the same kind of merciful love to? The kind of mercy that overcomes racial and religious differences, forgives centuries of isolation and hostility. Who can we befriend who has never been a friend to us? Which of our enemies can we love at the cost of our own comfort, for the Samaritan gave the man his donkey to ride on, cost of our own time, for the Samaritan took a detour to find an inn and promised to return, the cost of our own finances, for the Samaritan not only left money behind but promised to return with more?
Needless to say, that this response was not what the lawyer had hoped for. Rather than narrowing the law, Jesus show him its true width. Rather than lowering the bar, Jesus explains to him just how high it is set. Darrel Bock explains that, ‘The lawyer is looking for the minimum obedience required, but Jesus requires total obedience.’ Just as in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus shows us how impossible perfection under the law truly is. How can we do this and live? Yes, Christianity does have a morality, but one that none of us can ever hope to completely live up to. Who among us lives a life showing this mercy?
Luke 10 tells us about a journey that a man was taking from Jerusalem down to Jericho. But it tells us part of another journey, a journey of a man not travelling from but towards Jerusalem. Back in Luke 9:51, as he was passing through a village of Samaritans, we are told that Jesus ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem’. Even as he told this story, Jesus was on a journey to Jerusalem. In Luke 10 he describes mercy for us, but soon he will demonstrate it to us. Like the traveller in the story, Jesus too would fall into the hands of his enemies, would be beaten and bruised, stripped and left to die, not on a road, but on a cross. And on that cross, bearing the punishment for our sins, the wages that we have earned for failing to measure up, failing to love God and man as we ought, he would die for us.
That is the tale that is as old as time. Not the tale of Beauty and the Beast, or even the parable of the Good Samaritan. No, the story that was planned from before the creation of the world. God’s Son sent into the world to save sinners. The Lord describes mercy for us and demonstrates it to us. It is the story of Christ’s compassion, not the Samaritan’s, that is at the centre of Christianity. Christianity is not about morality or merit, by mercy. In Luke 18:26-27, hearing about the requirements of the law, they would cry out, ‘"Then who can be saved?" But he said, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."’
Unlike the lawyer, do you understand that you need mercy, not merit. We need a good Samaritan, not a priest or Levite. When you are fighting for your life, it is mercy that can save you. If you are ever to obtain eternal life, you need to receive it as a gift, not earn it as a wage. ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 6:23) The Message of Merit – The Law promises life but produces death. The Meaning of Mercy – The Lord describes mercy for us and demonstrates it to us. Far greater mercy is available to you today than was ever shown to the beaten traveller on that road. If you would repent of your sins, of your failure to live up to the requirements of the law of God, and by faith believe in Jesus for forgiveness, you will experience the mercy of God. The kind of mercy that lifts us broken and bruised and heals and restores us. The kind of mercy that pays our debts and takes care of us. The kind of mercy that promises one day our Saviour will return again for us.
ALEXANDER ARRELL