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In the name of Jesus. Amen. Dear saints, we will consider and rejoice in the words of our Lord Jesus about the good Samaritan. I want to preface it with a few words about the tragedy that’s been unfolding in Texas and all the flooding in the last couple of weeks. We had bad news already last week, and the news got even worse this week.
As I thought about it this week, I was reminded of the text from the Gospels where the children in Bethlehem were slaughtered, where Herod sent the soldiers to try to kill the Christ child, and he failed to kill them, but there was this collateral damage of all the children in Bethlehem that were murdered. And the Gospel quotes the prophet that says, “A cry went up in Rama, Rachel lamenting for her children.” And it seems like that’s the cry that has gone up from our neighbors and friends, Rachel weeping for her children, especially as we mourn the death of all those lives that have been lost this last couple of weeks, but in people that have been lost, and all the families that are mourning, especially the death of children.
And our conscience cries out in this whole circumstance that there’s something wrong there. It’s good maybe for us just to pause and reflect on that, the reality of it. Our conscience is a gift from God, and it’s supposed to indicate to us, most especially, when we’ve done something wrong to our neighbor. But the conscience also tells us when something wrong is done to us or when we see something wrong being done to someone else.
But there’s a fourth thing that our conscience registers, and this is what’s going on, I think, with probably all of us, especially this week, that the conscience will say that there’s just something that’s wrong in the world, that things are not how they are supposed to be. When we see disaster and catastrophe, especially natural disaster and catastrophe, our heart cries out that this is wrong, the groaning of the conscience. And we want to treat this groaning as Christians, and I think there’s two ways. The first is that we turn this groan of our conscience into a prayer, especially for all those who are affected. And then, as we’re able, we turn that groan into love. We look for the opportunity to love and serve and bless our neighbor as the Lord gives.
But there’s a danger that happens whenever our conscience is groaning in such a way. And I’ve noticed this; it’s not necessarily the people that are suffering tragedy directly, but it’s mostly people who are observing tragedy from a distance, close or far. The cry goes up, “Why?” And I think there’s an argument that the devil wants to make whenever we feel that pain in our conscience. The devil comes along and says, “Well, why did God let this happen? Where was God in the midst of this disaster and catastrophe?”
Now, I want to offer a little simple apologetic to that question, but I want to even preface the argument that this does not—apologetics can never comfort or satisfy the conscience. But we can use this as a way to fight off that voice of the devil when he comes to us. Hopefully, we can use it to help our friends as well. And the apologetic argument is something like this: there are certain conditions that must be true for us to recognize evil. So that whenever we see evil happening, and whenever we feel evil, we know that there’s a certain truth that underlies that recognition.
Here’s the first—I mean, maybe the way to think about it is that if everything were evil, if everything were wrong, if the Lord had simply handed us over to the will of the world and our flesh and the devil after the fall into sin, and if things were as bad as they possibly could be, then we wouldn’t recognize evil. We wouldn’t know any difference. If, on the other hand, there were no evil, and the Lord would prevent every evil from happening, and everything was good, then we likewise would recognize no evil at all.
So this means that in the recognition of something evil, I think we can simply plainly use that biblical word for the floods that happened in Kerrville and Hunt and Ingram and Burnett and all over the state in the last couple of weeks that that was an evil—a natural evil. The fact that we recognize that evil indicates that the Lord holds back so much evil from us, treats us with care and compassion most of the time, and that groan of our conscience that says that things are not how they’re supposed to be, that groan tells us that we were never meant for this. It tells us that God created us for the Garden of Eden, but we’re not living there anymore.
That groan is what happens when we are east of Eden, when we’re cast out of that original state. And so that groan tells us that we once were good, but that we messed it up. And that groan reminds us then that the Lord is working to restore all things, and when the Lord Jesus comes, he will do it. There will be a new heaven and a new earth in which the righteous dwell.
So we weren’t meant to endure floods and funerals and fires and sin and sickness and sorrow and death. We weren’t meant for those things, and that groaning conscience testifies of this reality. It testifies to the goodness of God, even now after the fall, and it echoes the promise of the life to come. Now, I hope that little kind of apologetic argument is helpful as we are fighting against the devil. But this is a true thing that that apologetic will never satisfy—that will never satisfy the conscience. The only one who can do that is Christ our Lord, who comes to us in the midst of our sorrow and in the midst of our suffering and in the midst of our sin, in the midst of our own rebellion. He comes to us in the midst of us to save us.
And for that, we want to turn to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Normally, we think the parable of the Good Samaritan is the Lord’s way of saying, “Hey, you better love your neighbor.” We heard it in the Old Testament lesson from Leviticus 19. This is the Old Testament verse that is quoted most often in the New Testament: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Good Samaritan parable comes to us and says, “Hey, you cannot choose which neighbor you want to love. You can’t say, ‘Well, this neighbor I’m going to love and that neighbor I’m not.'” That was what the lawyer was trying to do.
The lawyer comes to Jesus. The text tells us it’s pretty—I really love it when the Gospel writers give us the motive of the people who come to Jesus. Every now and again, it doesn’t happen all the time, but every now and again, it’ll tell us the motives of the people who come to Jesus. And twice in the text, Luke tells us the motive of this lawyer. He says he came to Jesus to test him. And he says, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus says, “Oh, you want to talk about what you’re doing? Well, let’s just go to Moses. What does the law say?” And he answers rightly. He says, “The law says, ‘Well, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.’ Do this, and you will live.”
Now, the lawyer must have had a sense that he hadn’t done that, right? At least that’s what is indicated by the next question because Luke tells us that he wanted to justify himself. The reason why you’re busy justifying yourself or making excuses for yourself is because you know you’ve done something wrong. So he wants to justify himself, and to do it, he asks this question, “Well, who is my neighbor?”
Now, this lawyer knows, and we know this too, that we’ve loved some people, but not others. We’ve cared for some people, but not others. We’ve blessed some people, but we’ve cursed others. And the way that I can be righteous is I can just make sure that those people that I haven’t treated rightly are not on my neighbor list. We want to edit the neighbor list so that it just so happens that everyone I love is on the list and everyone I don’t is not. And if we go about curating this list of who my neighbor is, of who deserves my love, then we can self-justify.
But Jesus looks at this man, and he is going to simply crush him with the law, and in doing so, he’s going to bring this most precious Gospel to us. He tells him the parable. He says there’s a man who is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among robbers who captured him, who beat him, who stripped him, who took all his stuff and who left him there in the ditch half dead.
But then someone came along. You know, if you’re in the ditch half dead, someone coming along is going to be good news. Except the problem was that one who came along to help him was a Levite. And when he saw him, he didn’t run to him. He actually went around him, avoided him, and went on his way. And then a priest, the same thing, comes along and sees him and goes around the other way. But then a third guy comes—a Samaritan. He looks and he sees him. He runs over to him, and he goes down in the ditch with him. He binds up his wounds. He stops the bleeding. He treats the wounds with oil and with wine. And then when he’s strong enough, he lifts him up on his own animal and walks alongside so that he could deliver him to the inn and tends him to make sure he’s not dying and then gives provision to the innkeeper to keep him alive. He says, “I’m going to leave, but I’m going to come back. And if you spend anything else, I’ll take care of him.”
Now, at this point, if we could just pause right there before the end, because Jesus is about to flip it around for this lawyer and for us. But we pause right there, and remember that when we’re listening to these parables of Jesus, one of the questions that we’re going to ask is, “Well, where am I? Which character am I in the story?” If you just stop there, you say, “Well, Jesus is saying to the guy, ‘Don’t be like the Levite; don’t be like the priest; you should be like the Good Samaritan, and you should go and love your neighbor, even if you don’t want to.'” That would be the parable.
But then Jesus asked the lawyer not who was the man’s neighbor, but rather who was a neighbor to the man. In other words, the place where this lawyer is in the parable is not avoiding or even helping. He’s in the gutter with you and me. So the parable is Jesus’ picture of humanity—that here’s Adam and Eve in the garden, and the devil comes along and captures them and beats them and strips them of their original righteousness and leaves them half dead in the gutter.
The law and Moses, the Levite and the scribe, cannot save. I mean, Moses is good. It’s not Moses’ problem. The law is good. It’s not the law’s problem. It’s right and holy, but you are a sinner, and so am I. There is no power to save in the Ten Commandments. We cannot achieve it that way. We instead need a neighbor. And if the neighbor didn’t come—the stranger, the Good Samaritan, who is Christ the Lord—if he did not see fit to come down into the gutter with you, to take upon your flesh and blood, to assume your humanity, and not just that—not just to become bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, but also to take upon himself your sickness and your weakness and your sin and your shame and to suffer in your place—then we were lost.
But here’s the point of the parable, at least the first point: you have a neighbor who comes to help you. You have a neighbor who loves you even more than he loves himself and loves you all the way to the cross, loves you all the way to his death and his grave. His suffering, his death is your rescue and deliverance. He’s picked you up and he’s brought you to the end of the church. He’s dropped you off here.
Yeah. And he’s promised to come back for us. So that we, before we even begin to think about our life of love, have this promise: Jesus loves you. He has died for you. He forgives you. He blesses you. He saves you. It’s the sick. Remember what Jesus says? “Those who are well don’t need a physician, but those who are sick.” And we are the sick, and we have the good physician of body and soul, none other than our Lord Jesus Christ himself. And he is your life and salvation.
Now, because you are saved by Jesus, because his compassion and mercy drove him all the way to the cross for you, you are now free to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—not so that you might attain eternal life, because you have that eternal life already. But because the Lord Jesus, who has won for you life eternal, has also given you a spirit so that you might rejoice in his commandments.
You can suffer for the sake of the neighbor. You can go and love even if it costs you your own life because your life is hid with Christ in God. So we rejoice now that the Lord Jesus, with this parable of the Good Samaritan, completely undoes this idea of inheriting eternal life by our own works. He gives us eternal life by his work, his death, and resurrection. And then he sets us free to follow in his footsteps and love our neighbor.
We love God. John says it like this: you want to show your love for God, who you can’t see? You can show your love for God by loving your neighbor, who you do see. And I suppose that the reason why the Lord Jesus has left us here on earth, instead of simply baptizing us into eternal life and carrying us right now into heaven, is because he wants us to love our neighbor and care for the people who are next to us.
So we’ll do it. We’ll follow the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved and who suffered, but we will do it in this way: trusting his mercy, rejoicing in his love, resting in his compassion, and rejoicing in his salvation. May God grant it for Christ’s sake, our good Samaritan. Amen. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.