Justice ParablesSample

The Good Samaritan

Rev. Joe Watkins

Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church

Many people who attend church believe that they are okay with God as long as they follow the rules. For many people, the rules are: attend church regularly because attendance probably matters to God; pay attention to the important holy days each year and observe them; do the required rituals and say the mandatory prescribed prayers at the appropriate time. More devout worshippers would add: read the Bible—at least occasionally—to the above list. After all, if you understand the rules, you’re okay, right? Doesn’t that put you on the road that leads to eternal life? Or is there something else that God expects of us?

In the New Testament epistle of James, followers of Christ are warned to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. It is one thing to enjoy hearing the Word of God in song or through preaching or teaching, but it is quite another to be obedient, to listen and then do what the Lord asks us to do.

And what does the Lord ask us to do? In the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, an expert in the law asked Jesus what he, the lawyer, needed to do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus asked him what the Jewish law required, the lawyer responded, “ ‘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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ ” (Luke 10:27 NIV).

In other words, to inherit eternal life, a follower of Christ must first fully love God—enough to obey and please him. Secondly, love his or her neighbors—the people around them—like they already love and care about themselves.

While this is a pretty simple and straightforward directive, the lawyer realized right away that he didn’t have love in his heart for everyone. As a matter of fact, like many of us, he really didn’t care about (or certainly deeply care about) most of the people outside of his small circle of loved ones, family, and friends. So he asked Jesus to define “neighbor.”

In the story of the Good Samaritan, we learn that if we have the love of God in our hearts, then any of us is capable of caring about everyone around us—including people that we don’t personally know. After a man who has been robbed and mugged is passed over for help by two people from his own ethnic group—a minister and a church worker—a man from a despised ethnic group takes pity on him. Out of the love in his heart, he tends to the beaten man and gets him the medical attention he needs. And then to demonstrate how much he cares about what happens to the beaten man, whom he did not previously know, he also commits to pay the hospital bill for the man.

When Jesus asked the lawyer which of the three men who passed the beaten man was his neighbor, the two who shared his ethnicity and religion or the stranger from the other ethnic group, the lawyer answered, “The one who had mercy on him” (Luke 10:37). He was right.

Christians today would do well to heed the words of the Bible: “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22 NKJV). For believers, that means loving God enough to listen to him and then loving the people around us enough to help them when they need help.