The Great Commandment and the Good Samaritan—Luke 10:25-37

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Please read today’s passage here: Luke 10:25-37

In the preceding passage Jesus had said that God the Father in Heaven had hidden the truths of the Kingdom of Heaven from the learned and clever, but revealed them to the unlearned and simple. Immediately, the gospels give us an example of a man highly educated in the Scriptures (i.e., the Torah and the ethical discussions of the learned rabbis of his day), who asks Jesus a question.

Now we must understand as background here, that when a wise man asked a question in the context of Jewish learning in Jesus’ time, it did not necessarily mean that he thought he did not himself have the answer. Rather it was a convention of teaching and learning that people posed questions. Luke himself tells us that when Jesus was merely a child and sat among the learned scholars in the Jerusalem temple, they were impressed by his wisdom and his questions. So we must ask ourselves: Is this anonymous scholar truly seeking to learn from Jesus, or is he merely testing him? And if the latter, is he already predisposed to be hostile and critical? If so, we can predict on the basis of Jesus’ previous words that the Father will hide the truth from him. If not, then he will reveal it, as he does to all sincere seekers.

The question was: “What must I do to gain eternal life?” Every Jewish child would have had an answer for that: “Keep God’s commandments given to us in the Scripture”. So Jesus—again following the custom of the times for such discussions—answers him with another question: “What is written in God’s Word (the Torah)? How do you read it?”

The learned man then quoted a combination of two key passages from God’s law, the Torah (Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5). The essence of these verses is that one must love God with all your being and your “neighbor” as you would love yourself. An excellent summary of the ethical teachings of the Old Testament.

Jesus does not try to correct the man, but teases out of him the real question that underlay his initial question: “Who qualifies as my ‘neighbor’?” Luke says he asked this because he wanted to “justify himself”. This means that he wishes to interpret the quoted passage in a way that he can claim to have obeyed it fully. He seemed to feel that he had fulfilled the command to love God with all his being—a remarkable presumption on his part!—but perhaps not the second part. If he understood “neighbor” to mean “any other person”, he knew that he could not claim to have fulfilled that command. He was seeking a respectable loophole to slip through.

Jesus, of course, detected his motive, and offered to tell him a story from which he could derive his own answer to his question. It was the story children in Sunday Schools know as “The Good Samaritan”. I have alluded in earlier postings on Luke to the fact that the Samaritans were physical neighbors of the Jews, living in the area between Galilee in the north and Jerusalem in the south, precisely where in Old Testament times the so-called Northern Kingdom of Israel was located, with its capital in the city of Samaria. In contrast to the southern kingdom of Judah, the northern one was rebellious against the Scripture and the prophets of God. The descendants of this kingdom of Samaria, the Samaritans, also were regarded as morally and spiritually “suspect”. They acknowledged only a part of the Old Testament as their authoritative Scripture, and their manner of life reflected many points of disagreement with mainline Judaism. They had their own temple and therefore did not worship ever in the Jerusalem temple. Most jews in Jesus’ day regarded them as semi-pagans and reprobates, and avoided social contact with them.

Jesus’ attitude toward them is indicated by a story in the gospel of John, chapter 4. He made clear in his conversation with a Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews” (v. 22: "You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews"), meaning that he agreed theologically with the Jews in contrast to the Samaritans. The Jewish view of the extent of Scripture was correct, as was their claim that the true earthly temple of God was in Jerusalem, not in Samaria. But he did not side with the Jews in their ostracism of the Samaritans and their unwillingness to befriend them and try to teach them God’s truth. Jesus, on the contrary, gladly fraternized with Samaritans, as he did with the Galilean tax-collectors and prostitutes. Not to join in their sinful activities, but to be their friend and teacher. And such people gladly listened to Jesus, because they saw that he loved them, even though he knew that some of their ideas were incorrect and their manner of life often in need of repentance.

Jesus knew that many people like this scholar standing before him needed to be shocked into considering God’s saving message by what they might never have considered. The hero of the story of the Good Samaritan is—you guessed it—a Samaritan, while the villains were a priest and a Levite, members of the clergy of the Jerusalem temple. How topsy-turvy can the story get? A Jewish traveling man was assaulted by robbers on a deserted stretch of road, beaten badly and left for dead. When first one of his own priests and later a Levite saw him lying there, each in turn simply passed by, doing nothing for him. But a Samaritan passing that way saw him also and placed him on his donkey and carried him to the next inn, where he paid the innkeeper to tend to his wounds and give him a bed to lie in to recover.

Jesus closed the story with an altered form of the scholar’s original question. In the original question the word “neighbor” referred to one who would be the recipient of the love that God commanded Israel to show. In Jesus' question (v. 36) the “neighbor” was whoever showed love and compassion on a needy person. When he asked the scholar which of the three—priest, Levite, Samaritan—was neighbor to the man who had been beaten by the robbers, the scholar correctly answered “the one who treated him with compassion”.

It is interesting that he did not use the word “the Samaritan” in his answer. This may have been because of a lingering dislike of Samaritans. But it might also be because he saw that the point Jesus was making was that neither being a priest, a Levite or a Samaritan in itself made someone compassionate. No nationality, race, sex or creed automatically makes a person compassionate and therefore “neighbor”. But God can help a person become so. And in that sense the Torah and the gospel of Jesus can help. But only a “creed” that is sincerely and consistently put into practice helps. If the priest and Levite in the story had put into practice the sense of the Torah that Jesus explained with the story, they would have been “neighbors” and would have been fulfilling the Great Commandment of God's law.

Jesus concluded his discussion with the scholar with these words “Then go and do the same.” This too was a conventional way that learned rabbis in his days concluded their lessons. The scholar had sought to test Jesus. What happened was that Jesus tested the scholar. Their roles were reversed. He tests you and me as well. Are we the “learned and clever” who refuse to acknowledge our need for God’s forgiveness and instead seek to “justify” our behavior by clever diluting and qualifying of God’s moral demands? Or are we like the little children of Jesus’ words, coming to be forgiven, to learn afresh from Jesus how we should live and treat others?

Do not misunderstand. Jesus was not saying that we gain eternal life by trying to be “good” and kind. His other recorded statements in the gospels clearly show that none of us is able to be good or kind enough to earn eternal life. We are all "sinners". No, it is Jesus himself who was the ultimate "Good Samaritan" and "neighbor". His sacrificial death of the cross was necessary in order to pay the price of the wrongs we commit against God and our neighbors. Unless we confess our sinfulness and accept Jesus’ death on our behalf, there can be no eternal life. “Goodness” as a substitute for repentance and faith is a worthless claim on God. But once you or I accept God’s forgiveness in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we become his “disciples”, it is imperative that we become “neighbors” to everyone. May that be so today for each of us!