Doing Likewise--October 11, 2024

Doing Likewise--October 11, 2024

[Jesus asked the expert in the law:] "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." [Luke 10:36-37]

It's one thing for this to be a thought-experiment; it's another thing entirely to have to live out the conclusions.

It's one thing to be asked to speculate on hypotheticals about who, for the sake of argument, qualifies as "my neighbor;" it is harder to be dared to put those correct answers from our heads into practice with our hands.

It's one thing to identify the outsider from Jesus' story (the Samaritan) as the one character who truly understood the commandment to "Love your neighbor" despite the failures of the Respectable Religious Professionals who passed by the beaten man at the roadside. But it is altogether life-changing to follow Jesus' instruction when the story is finished: "Go and do likewise" with the real people in our lives whom we are sent to love.

And yet, of course, that's the whole point of this.  Jesus isn't interested in writing a systematic theology or writing an essay about the nature of love or human relationships. He is interested in forming us into people who love the way he loves, as broadly and deeply as he loves.  And therefore, Jesus is interested in changing our way of seeing the world and the people in it, so that we will show mercy for strangers, practice compassion for outsiders, and be brave enough to risk ourselves for people who can never pay us back.  You know, the same way Jesus has done for us.

In fact, I think we often miss just what a big deal it is for Jesus to tell this story the way he does precisely because of his own personal experience.  The parable we call "the Good Samaritan" (which again, would have sounded like a laughable contradiction and a preposterous oxymoron to his Judean audience) comes just a chapter after Luke gives us a story where Jesus is rejected by a town full of Samaritan people.  In Luke 9:51-56, Jesus intends to pass through a Samaritan village--which would make him the outsider and the foreigner on their turf--but they reject him.  And in response, two of Jesus' inner circle of disciples, James and John, ask Jesus, "Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Jesus, of course, rebukes them for so completely missing the point and just goes on his way.  In other words, Jesus knows what it is like to have been the outsider seeking hospitality and to be rejected--by people in this very same ethnic group that everybody else in his culture hated and looked down own.  And yet not only does he refuse to answer their rejection with hatred from his side, but he also still makes a Samaritan the unexpected hero of his story.  Jesus has already put his money where his mouth is and crossed barriers to respond with love to people outside his little group.  So when he tells the expert in the law that "loving your neighbor" includes people across those imaginary lines we have drawn, he is only calling him to do what Jesus has done first.  This talk of loving across the barriers we impose on each other isn't just fanciful theorizing or wishful thinking for Jesus; he has done it himself before he calls us to do likewise.

So, now some twenty centuries later, the question turns to us: what will we do in light of Jesus' story?  How will we move from learning about biblical texts to living them, and who might Jesus be sending across our path today?  How will we respond when there really is someone broken down by the side of the road (and we are oh-so-busy with Very Important Things To Do)? How will you engage with the person whose politics are different from your own but who needs your help--or whose help you need, even if you didn't want to admit it?  How will we reframe the ways we think of people mentioned in passing on the news, when it is easy to reduce them to faceless crowds of "those people" rather than neighbors beloved of God?  How will we move from hearing and reflecting on this story about loving our neighbors... to going and doing likewise?

The next move is ours...

Lord Jesus, transform us by your love and then empower us to follow in your footsteps.