Serving Neighbors, Serving God

February 8, 2015 Background Scripture: Luke 10:25 – 37 Lesson Passage: Luke 10:25 – 37 There is a salient point in the parable Jesus gave of the “Good Samaritan”: We choose our own neighbors by the way we choose to treat individuals. Of course, Jesus being the Master Teacher, he did not state this but instead led listeners to reach that conclusion on their own through inductive reasoning. No doubt the prevailing thought concerning neighbors was far from what Jesus posited. We often think of neighbors as people we choose to live in close proximity to. Other than that, we don’t necessarily view ourselves as needing to do anything else once we are in the vicinity to be considered a neighbor. Jesus’ implied definition of neighbor really upsets geographical thinking concerning neighborhoods. My neighbor is not the person I choose to live next to but the person I choose to show mercy to. In other words, I could have neighbors who live thousands of miles from me and have complete strangers living next door. Now you see why Jesus’ definition creates a paradigm shift in traditional thinking? Quite truthfully many of us have more neighbors living across town than we have living on our street! There is a big difference between Jesus’ neighborhood and Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. I doubt if that Jewish lawyer ever forgot that parable because of the characters Jesus used to develop the mental picture. The context of the parable suggests that the wounded man was a Jew. The wounded man was shunned by a priest who went so far as to cross the road to avoid getting too close to him. Priests are ordained of God to offer sacrifices to God on behalf of the people because of our sinful nature that comes short of God’s glory. The implication is that I will pray for God to help someone who I will not help. So God can defile Himself with the person but I will not defile my sinful self in order to rescue a fellow human being. If he were dead, then his body would be left there for the scavengers to devour rather than given a decent burial. The priest would have nothing to do with this situation. A Levite came along and at least he went and looked at the man but that was still not enough. In the man’s condition of being near death, he was looked upon and then overlooked by a Levite whose assignment it was to take care of the things of God associated with the sacrificial system of worship. Perhaps he practiced a craft day after day but he was clueless as to how to apply it. He followed mindless steps in an attempt to offer true worship to the only living God but failed to grasp the gravity of not attempting to rescue one from death who was made in the image and likeness of God. The third traveler would have seared an unforgettable image in the mind of the legal expert of Judaism. That traveler was a Samaritan. Samaritans were the despised half-breeds that Jews went out of their way to avoid being around and you can forget about physical contact. But this was the hero of the story. Jesus did not say it but led the lawyer to paint himself into a corner and say it himself. The Samaritan’s actions went far beyond reasonable and he showed exceptional mercy to a stranger who by implication was a Jew. The parable causes listeners to place themselves in the position of the injured man who was the only one who could judge all three characters. And when put in that position, we all acknowledge that those who show mercy to us are our neighbors. Robert C. Hudson January 27, 2015