Sermon Archives

July 11, 2010
Pastor Jim Bangsund

"When Neighbor is a Verb"
Luke 10:25-37

The story of the Good Samaritan is one of many that became clearer to me when we lived overseas. Night travel in East Africa could be treacherous, and gangs of robbers would sometimes have one of their group lie alongside the road while they hid nearby, hoping for someone to stop to give aid. So if you were driving at night and saw someone lying alongside the road, you would look long and hard at the surroundings before you would consider stopping. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a long, lonely, hilly and winding road notorious for robbers. I can understand the hesitation of the priest and the Levite.

But the overseas experience I remember most was being on the other end of the care giving. One day, we were driving in our Land Rover through Tsavo National Park in Kenya, a broad expanse of wildlife and beauty and quite lonely in some areas. The road was fairly good for that part of the world and we were moving along at probably 40 miles an hour when suddenly we hit a patch of deep dust on the road and it grabbed the right tire of the Land Rover. The car spun to the right, started to slide sideways, and then rolled.

Judy and I were in the front seat wearing all the seatbelts the car had come with. Our three kids in the back were mixed in with the luggage and a large spare tire, and I remember everything churning as all the glass blew out, the roof caved in and red road dust filled the car. It happened in a couple of seconds, and fortunately no one was hurt seriously. But there we were, all alone and exposed in a game park standing beside a Land Rover rolled on its side with no one else around. It's amazingly silent at a time like that.

After 20 minutes or so, a safari vehicle filled with people like us came roaring down the road - and passed us without even slowing down. We were shaken by their indifference. After awhile, it happened again - a safari vehicle with four or five Europeans or Americans and a driver and no slackening of speed whatsoever. But finally, after 40 minutes or so, a lumbering bus filled with Tanzanians and Kenyans rolled up, stopped and folks piled out - folks very different from us, of course.

They surrounded us with words of encouragement while three big burly guys inspected the bottom of our car, decided it was still road worthy, and flipped it back up on its wheels. Then they got up on the bumper and hood and pried the roof up again so that we could at least crawl back in and slowly drive the 200 km we had to go to get home. I'll never forget the kind fellow who patiently hunted down what remained of the windshield, carefully removed the insurance sticker and brought it to me, rightly surmising that that sticker was going to be important in days to come. They wouldn't take a shilling for their efforts, but, after encouraging us some more, piled back on the old bus and continued on their way, a bus load of Good Samaritans. You can imagine our gratitude - not unlike that of the poor fellow Jesus told of on the Jericho road.

So turn with me, if you will to our text which is Luke 10, beginning at verse 25. That's on page 1028 in your church Bibles. There we find Jesus once again being challenged by one of the religious leaders of his day. Luke 10:25:

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.

"Expert in the law," that is, the Law of Moses. So this guy was not a puzzled seeker looking for counsel in his religious struggles. He was an authority who felt completely assured and in command of the situation, and Luke reveals his motives when he says he

... stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

He starts well. He knows eternal life is an "inheritance," something that comes as gift from God. Yet when push comes to shove, he really believes it's something he himself can gain by jumping through all the right hoops. "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks, but one senses that he's pretty sure he knows the answer and is well able to cover all those bases.

Jesus doesn't correct him; rather, he asks him to say a little more.

"What is written in the Law?" [Jesus] replied. "How do you read it?" He answered: "'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.'"

He gives a good answer, in terms of what's written in the Law of Moses, but the requirements are way demanding. Do everything right; be good; be perfect even. And put your neighbors needs on the same level as your own. So, hearing this, Jesus gives him a little more rope. Verse 28:

"You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live." But [we read, the man] wanted to justify himself,

Clearly this guy had set the bar pretty high, and Jesus had just let him do it. So now this legal expert is a bit nervous. Time to start adding a few qualifications and caveats, a little wiggle room.

so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

An attempt to dodge and weave. Narrow the definition of neighbor enough and you are off the hook. So now, rather than challenge him, Jesus does what he does so well: he tells a story that makes the point.

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers."

That road dropping down to Jericho was a nasty one, as I mentioned, narrow, hilly and winding - and notorious for robbers who might have one of their members pose as a wounded person along the road.

So when the priest and Levite scurry on by, this was not surprising. It was the action of the Samaritan, self-endangering and caring, that was unusual - a point which would not have been lost on the legal expert. But what grabbed his attention - what got him to sit up and listen, though certainly not approvingly, was Jesus mention of the word "Samaritan."

I think many of us know why. Many centuries before, Israel had been split by a civil war into the north and the south. The capital of the north was Samaria, and the capital of the south Jerusalem, and although the northern kingdom had eventually collapsed, a group of people yet remained in the area. They lived near the old city of Samaria, had intermingled with people and religions of other nations, and said Mt Gerizim, not Jerusalem, was the place to worship God. The Jews in the south considered Samaritans to be half-breeds and infidels, not to put too fine a point on it.

So Jesus story suddenly takes an unexpected turn for this expert in the Law of Moses. What his feelings about priests and Levites were is not certain. Perhaps he had known some of them to be rather self-serving and just shrugged when he heard they passed the wounded man by. But there was no shrugging when Jesus described the third man as being a Samaritan. I can just see the sudden hardening of his face and narrowing of his eyes as he absorbed this turn of events.

So it's the Samaritan who takes the risk to help the wounded man and eventually pays for his care at an inn. And it's at this point that Jesus, having set the hook, looks the legal expert in the eye and asks

"Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" [Well, what could he say?] The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him." Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

Interesting. At first, Jesus doesn't seem to deal with his question. The legal expert had set up the question to make it easily answerable: "Who is my neighbor?" He was, after all, looking for a way "to justify himself," as we read - looking for a way to keep himself off the hook. Let Jesus define who his neighbor was - the house next door? The folks on your street? Perhaps extend it to all those in your "neighborhood" or even your small village. Because once you had set the boundaries, then you had it licked. It was all about getting the nouns right. Next house. Your street. Neighborhood. Village. Whatever it was, once you got the right noun in place you could limit your loss in terms of responsibility.

But Jesus turns it all upside down by making neighbor a verb thing. The man asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" -Give me the boundaries; give me the limits - and Jesus came back with "Which of these was a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?" "Which of these did the neighbor thing for the man?" Now, this alone was a treacherous enough answer, the legal expert thought - moving from nouns to verbs - but then Jesus had to go and make the third fellow a Samaritan, to boot! Why couldn't he just have answered the question as I gave it to him?

Now, what Jesus does here is not like what some politicians do. You know: "If you don't like the question they've asked, answer the question you wish they'd asked." No; rather, Jesus is like the teacher who is asked a shortsighted question by a student and, rather than embarrass the student, helps the student by reframing the question. And when Jesus does this, we suddenly find the word "neighbor" becoming like a verb. We all know how Facebook has turned "friend" into a verb: you "friend" those whom you allow to see everything on your Facebook page - and you can "unfriend" people, too! Well, God was turning nouns into verbs long before Facebook. In telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is saying that we are to "neighbor" people - with no cultural boundaries.

Well, all too often, you and I tend to be more like the legal expert. We argue about where the lines should be drawn. Get the boundaries and definitions right; know who's in and whose out. But Jesus talks about what it means to "do" neighbor.

And why? Because God is like that, shows himself to be that way in Scripture, and wants us as his people to act this way, too. We may speak of God's omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence - all nouns, of course. They describe God, yet that isn't the way he speak of himself to us. Those words never appear in the Bible. Rather, we find the Bible describing God by what he does: God creates, loves, seeks, saves, redeems, reconciles, restores ....

Now this isn't to reduce God to warm fuzzies; it's not to reduce Jesus just to a smiling friend of children, accepting of all who come. He is that, of course, but much more. His acceptance is with a purpose. Jesus came to save and change lives. And then he sent disciples and those who would follow them - people like you and me - to do the same. To bring God's saving and changing of lives. The verb thing again. Remember the woman caught in adultery in John 8? - another outcast, just like the Samaritan. Jesus saves her from her adversaries, and then, when they are gone, he turns to her. She is accepted, but the way she had been living is not. "Go, and sin no more," he tells her.

And in his encounter with another Samaritan - this time, the woman at the well in John 4 - he accepts her but is not afraid to say,

"You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews."

And when God encounters you in Christ, you will find him doing the same thing: accepting you, forgiving you, but also poking and prodding like a doctor in an exam - doing so in ways that are often uncomfortable but always healthy for body and soul.
As you read the Gospels, you find large crowds of people following Jesus and hanging on his every word. If you read carefully, you find out why. He had a way of taking questions and challenges loaded with agenda and stripping them of their spin in a way that often revealed what was really at stake. So he did when and expert on Jewish religious law thought he would test him and show him to be out of his depth. Jesus took his abstract and safely academic question and answered it in a way that revealed to the man - and perhaps to those around him - a disconnect in his own life. An attitude toward the outsider, toward those considered beyond the pale - an attitude that was at least indifferent toward them if not dismissive.

And through this encounter, Jesus speaks to you and me today, as well. We ourselves can be outsiders in the eyes of God, beyond the pale because of our turning away from God and sinking deeply into ourselves. Yet God reaches out to claim you for his own in Christ - to reconnect the broken relationship - and then calls you to show that same attitude toward others. We may try to keep it all abstract and distant, like the legal expert in our Gospel lesson. But God won't leave it at that. And we may even find him poking and tweaking us a bit when we think about current hot button issues like immigration policy or the Mehserle verdict this past week. At times, you and I may even come down on different sides of such issues and find God challenging each of us to adjust our attitudes for different reasons. Bottom line: we who have received such great mercy are now called to be merciful to others.

You know, the word "Samaritan" appears only once in the Gospel lesson. The word should be there twice. It should have been spoken the second time when Jesus asked the legal expert which person along the road was a neighbor to the injured man ... but the legal expert couldn't bring himself to spit out the word "Samaritan." All he could say, perhaps with averted eyes, was, "The one who had mercy on him." I suppose Jesus could have given him a bit of a lecture on attitude here. But he didn't. Instead, he looked at him knowingly, sadly, but perhaps also hopefully, and said to him - and to you and to me - "Go and do likewise." Amen.