And just like that, here we are at the start of the final week of this series, blogging through "Storyteller", the latest free Bible study from Sarah Koontz at livingbydesign.org.
Today’s passage of Scripture is Luke 10: 25 - 37, The Parable of the Good Samaritan ... Just then an expert in the law stood up to test Him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the law?” He asked him. “How do you read it?” He answered: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." “You’ve answered correctly,” He told him. “Do this and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus took up the question and said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll reimburse you for whatever extra you spend.’ “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” “The one who showed mercy to him,” he said. Then Jesus told him, “Go and do the same.”
The Samaritan who stopped to help the man who had been beaten had every reason to look the other way and pass by on the other side: the victim was a Jew, and Jews and Samaritans did not associate with each other. Yet in spite of that, the Samaritan reached out to help the Jew. He was willing to interrupt his schedule, possibly offend anyone who saw his actions and disapproved, and use his own resources to help someone in need. Why would this man stop and help, when two religious leaders refused to do anything at all? The answer lies in a single word: "compassion".
But this parable goes deeper than just teaching us to be kind to one another, to lend a helping hand to a neighbour in need ...
The enmity between Jews and Samaritans was such that the concept of a "good" Samaritan would have been either laughable or downright insulting to Jesus's Jewish listeners.
He is telling us that to truly love God means to love and care for not only the elderly man we see at the grocery store, struggling to carry his packages, or for the woman in our book club who recently lost her husband and needs help packing up her house to sell it ...
No, those things might be inconvenient or awkward, but they're easy compared to what Jesus is actually asking of us. He's telling us that if we really love Him, we will be willing to help the worst person we can think of; to extend kindness to our sworn enemy; to make a meal and personally deliver to the person who has hurt us in the most terrible way possible.
And why does He ask this of us, and expect us to be willing and able to do it? Because He did it for us!!
Paul explains it this way in Romans 5: 6 - 11: "For while we were still helpless, at the appointed moment, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! Much more then, since we have now been declared righteous by His blood, we will be saved through Him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by His life! And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have now received this reconciliation through Him."
Did you catch that? Read it again, slowly ...
Jesus didn't come down to earth from heaven for the "nice people"; He didn't hang on the cross for the "good people" ... in fact, Romans 3: 23 tells us quite clearly that, without Jesus, there are no good people!! Everyone who is not a born again Believer is, according to Scripture, an enemy of God.
But that's why the Gospel is the Good News - we could never be good enough, or do enough good to save ourselves, and so, while we're still His enemies, Jesus came dowto earth, took our sins upon Himself, and died in our place, taking the wrath we deserved so that we could wear His justification instead!
In today’s parable, the Lord is calling His Followers (you and me) to live with the same attitude of compassion that God has shown us in Jesus. He came to help and restore us when we were down and out in the worst way imaginable, and then He says to us: "Go, and do likewise".
Because of His spiritual perception, Jesus knew that the teacher questioning Him lacked mercy - so He told a story filled with such unexpected compassion and mercy that the “expert” could not miss the moral of the story. I am so grateful that our God is “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth” (Exodus 34: 6). The Samaritan possessed what the priest and the Levite lacked—compassion. This term means “to suffer with.” Because Christ suffered for us and suffers with us (1 Peter 2: 23 - 24), our lives should be marked by compassion for others. (Sarah Koontz)