Sermon at St. Thomas. By Lynn Cunningham. July 15, 2007. Pentecost 7. Deut. 30:9-14; Col. 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37.

1.         Picture this. The Dubois Fire Department, responds to an alarm, a building downtown is smoking. A fireman rushes in to find broken power cables snaking around the floor, shooting sparks. Touching them means instant electrocution.

2.         In the gospel today, the lawyer risks instant spiritual electrocution by asking Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

3.         All over this town, people are asking, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Oh, maybe not using these words. Youngsters looking for answers about what would make their life mean something and be worthwhile.

4.         Hard working adults are asking themselves, in quiet moments of the day, where am I going with all this busyness and endless activity?

5.         And the older folks, folks who have slowed way down, ask in the too frequent quiet moments of their day, am I ever going to inherit eternal life? Is today as good as it is ever going to get for me, Jesus?

6.         Watch out when asking such a question. The young student of the Torah, the lawyer, who asks Jesus that question, got way more than he expected. The student was obviously in great spiritual crisis himself, as seen in the question he asks: what must I do to inherit eternal life? His life was at a crossroads. Like many today, he had lost his direction, the path in front of him was confusing and conflicted. He cuts to his core issue with this anguished question.

7.         Maybe on the surface of things he thought all he was doing was what students of the Torah always did: ask questions of the rabbis. Ho-hum, he may have thought: here is just another rabbi; I think I will ask him a slightly smart- aleck, technical question. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?’

8.         The student was clearly smart and knowledgeable. He knew the Jewish law, the Torah, well. When Jesus asks him a question back, “what is written in the law?”, the student must have thought, well this is just like any other rabbi. I ask him a question, and he asks me a question right back. The student knows the right answer, which is, the great commandments! He knows that somehow the great commandments are related to inheriting eternal life. In some ways, the student already knows the answer to his own question.

9.         God is always standing ready to ask a question back to a person, as Jesus does here, and strangely, people often already know the answer to the deepest question they are asking of God.

10.       But the student does not then just walk away satisfied with Jesus’ response. He asks yet another question, challenges Jesus. The text says that the student wants to “justify himself”. Well, who doesn’t want to justify himself? When the Holy One is telling a person to do something, and that person knows God is right, there is always the temptation, to say, Am I really hearing you right, God?

11.       Such exchanges happen over and over again in the Bible. Eve in effect argues with God about eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life. Adam argues with God about Eve. Abraham bargains with Yahweh over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses argues with Yahweh over leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Isaiah the prophet argues with Yahweh over the destruction of Israel for its sins. The list goes on and on.

12.       It seems to be human nature to want to argue with God just a little bit about the message, to see whether what the ears are hearing is credible or not.

13.       The student is no different. He argues with Jesus, to see if he can get the message more clearly.

14.       The students’ question back to Jesus cuts to the chase, to his own most painful issue. “Who is my neighbor?” For a man who spent life tucked away in the library studying the minutiae of holy scripture and sacred law, probably cut off from the people around him, what question could cut more deeply than, who is my neighbor?

15.       But notice, again, the student already knows the answer to his own question. Jesus is not challenging him with some obscure point of talmudic law. This is not a difficult question of nuclear physics or higher mathematics. His question places him squarely in front of the Lord with his most difficult challenge, how to share his own humanity with other people? And he shows that he knows a good answer, because he is already seeking to know and to understand more clearly what it means to love the people around himself as neighbors, as true neighbors.

16.       Jesus then tells the parable that, I suggest, is already in the student’s heart. The parable is directed to converting the soul of the student from his abstract understanding of love to the lived immediacy of the second great commandment. This is the live wire that burns straight through to the core of his life.

17.       The parable has four characters, a priest, a Levite, the Samaritan traveler, and the victim of the beating and robbery.

18.       Three of these characters are drawn from the world of Torah studies, and challenge the student to think inside the world he knows best. Notice, God usually comes to people in terms of the world they know best.

19.       The priest and the Levite are both from the class of people who serve in the Temple, and who must maintain strict religious purity. The Samaritan is from outside of Judaism altogether, someone by definition a heretic from Jewish orthodoxy.

20.       In other words, Jesus did not include in the parable three characters of random backgrounds, say a peasant transporting vegetables, a weaver with cloth to sell, and an imperial messenger. Every character is from the student’s own world of understanding.

21.       The student would know immediately that, of course, the priest and the Levite could not legally stop to help the victim on the road, since to do so would violate strict religious codes and defile them for service in the Temple. Jesus is setting before the student a profound contradiction contained in the Torah itself between the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, and the commandments to maintain ritual purity before the Lord. None of the commandments would have been trivial to the student, or to Luke’s original readers. They are all deadly serious commandments, as serious as live electrical connections!

22.       Remember: beware of asking God, what must I do to inherit eternal life? The answer may burn like those live wires!

23.       For the student the path to inheriting eternal life, lies in finding a way both to honor the commandments of God concerning religious purity, and to engage directly and immediately with the human suffering encountered in every day situations.

24.       When Jesus utters to the student of the Torah at the end of the parable those fearsome words, “go and do likewise”, the student’s spiritual life is toast, until he can sort out the practical implications for him in what Jesus has said.

25.       The “Go and do likewise”, is usually heard today to mean, Go and help people who are in need. The number of Samaritan Ministries named after this parable and operated by churches around the world to help better off people serve poor people is probably huge. I worked with one for 25 years. Helping the poor and the less fortunate is a no-brainer for most Christians.

26.       But do not trivialize this parable by reducing it to an injunction go help the poor and do good works.

27.       Jesus admonition to “go and do likewise” is like handing someone a live wire and saying, here, love THAT with all your heart and soul and strength! You want eternal life, HERE IT IS!

28.       I said that the parable has four characters, three of them from the world of Jewish law and practice: the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, the outsider.

29.       Who is the fourth character? The one upon whom the whole story hangs. The one who challenges the hearers of this Gospel. Who is he? The fourth character is the man beaten, robbed, and left for dead. I suggest that that one is Jesus himself, Jesus as later shown in the passion story.

30.       If the parable had said it was a man robbed at knife point, slugged, and left dazed, that would be one thing. But the victim is said to, first, fall into the hands of robbers, second, be stripped, third, be beaten, and fourth, left for dead, or left half dead. What other character in the Gospels is taken by robbers of the Jewish nation’s sovereignty, stripped by Roman soldiers, then beaten by them, and finally hung on a cross and left for dead? What other character is there but Jesus? The description of the robbery victim parallels the passion narrative too closely to be mere coincidence.

31.       So what does the parable accomplish by making Jesus himself central to the story? I am unsure, but offer these suggestions.

32.       First, the parallel highlights the challenge to the reader to metanoia, to convert their whole life more closely to God, to change their whole life, as the student is challenged to do. Go and do likewise. Remember? Not just an injunction to go and serve the poor but a direction to go and shake up one’s understanding of God’s great commandments completely!

33.       Second, both two great commandments are fulfilled by the Samaritan showing love to the victim on the road, loving both his human neighbor, and loving God in Christ in one person, Jesus.

34.       Finally, the student, and, by implication, the readers of the parable, are asked to find the suffering Christ in every encounter with fellow human beings. God is present to redeem in every human condition, whether in joy or in suffering.

35.       In short, this parable burns open a realization, a conversion, to understanding that eternal life comes to neighbors loving each other in God’s redeeming presence.

36.       In Jesus name, Amen.