Luke 10:25-37
Here in the section of Luke 10, Luke tells us of an encounter between Jesus and a man who is a lawyer or an expert in the law.
1) What might we learn about this lawyer from what he does and says? (Luke 10:25)
The man was bold to stand up among the crowd
and was willing to ask Jesus a question. However, he wasn’t asking to learn.
Rather the man, we are told, was testing Jesus. He asks Jesus what he must do
to inherit ‘eternal life’. He wanted to know what people should do to be in God’s
favor and to inherit and live under the blessing of God in the age to come when
Messiah comes and brings an end to the present evil age and ushers in the ‘age
to come’ or the Messianic age. What do I have to do to be a faithful Jew so
that Messiah will come and how can I make sure I will experience the favor of
God, now and forever, when Messiah ushers in the Messianic age.
2) What can we learn
from Jesus’ response to this lawyer or law-expert? (10:26)
Jesus flips it back on the lawyer. Essentially,
Jesus telling this man that he is a trained so-called expert in the law. What then
does the law say about your question? You’re trained in the law as a so-called
expert what is your understanding of what the law says?
3) The
lawyer summarizes the law (Dt.6:5, Lev.19:18). What can we learn from the dialogue
that results between Jesus and the lawyer? (10:27-29)
This
trained scholar knew full well how to summarize the law. He knew he was to love
the Lord, the God of Israel, from the heart with his whole soul and mind and
with everything he could gather from within himself. He also knows he was
responsible to love his neighbor as himself. He knew this and stated a common
summary of the law that Jesus himself used at times (Matthew 22:37-40, Mark
12:29-31). So Jesus tells that he had answered correctly, but the man wants to
find a loophole and ‘justify himself’. The lawyer asks Jesus to further define ‘neighbor’.
In other words, the man wants to know who he is actually responsible to love as
himself.
4) Jesus tells the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’. (10:30-37) What
can we learn from the ‘Priest and the Levite’? (10:31-32)
Jesus tells a story of a Jewish man who while traveling
from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked, stripped of his possessions, beaten and
left for dead on the road or the ditch. Then Jesus tells of both a ‘Priest and a
Levite’ who look to themselves and not to the hurting man. Remember that this
man is coming from Jerusalem and would have been a fellow Jew who had been
robbed, beaten and left for dead. Neither the ‘Priest or the Levite’ can see
past their own concerns. They fail to look through ‘a window’ to the man heart
and life of the dying man. They look in a mirror and they only see their own
concerns and fears. They both ask themselves what will happen to me if I seek
to help this man. The most likely conclude that they would be made ceremonially
unclean and to care for the man would put them both at risk of being attacked
by robbers themselves and so the choose to look the other way and pass by the ‘dying
man’.
5) What can we learn from what the Samaritan
does? (10:33-35)
However a Samaritan who was considered the
enemy of the Jew came to where the man was (Luke 9:54, John 4:9). Also note
that Jesus’ own disciples, James and John, wanted to call fire down from heaven
and punish a Samaritan village that didn’t welcome Jesus into their town
because Jesus was headed to Jerusalem. Samaritan, by contrast, looks through ‘a
window’ into the life of the dying man and thinks that this man will die if I
don’t help him. The Samaritan sees the dying man and his heart went out to the
man with compassion. He gave him first aid, disinfecting his wounds with wine
and oil and bandaging them at his own expense. The wine, oil and bandages cost
him money and took the time to help and even put himself at risk. Then he had
to lift the man up onto donkey and took the man to an inn where at his own
expense he cared for him through the night. In the morning he gave a couple of day’s
wages to the innkeeper and asked him to take care of the wounded man. He gave
the innkeeper a couple of days wages and promised if the innkeeper had to spend
any more money caring for the man the Samaritan would repay the innkeeper when
he returned. This Samaritan went way out of his way and at his own expense took
care of a dying Jew who would have been considered by most in that day as his
enemy.
6) How does the story apply to the Jewish lawyer?
(10:36-37).
Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three, the
Priest, the Levite or the Samaritan was a neighbor to the man attacked by
robbers. Jesus doesn’t define who the lawyer’s neighbor was; rather he tells a
story that depicts what being a neighbor looks like. Ironically, it was he
despised Samaritan who was a neighbor to a Jew who under other conditions would
have rejected any interaction with a Samaritan. It was the despised Samaritan
who treated the ‘dying Jew’ with compassion and in a neighborly way. The Jewish
scholar had to admit that it was the Samaritan who should mercy and that the
Jewish Priest and the Levite who looked away and passed by their fellow Jew.
7) How does the story apply to us? (10:36-37).
First Jesus asked this lawyer questions to open him up and
to seek to understand him. We are to ask and listen to understand others.
Secondly the man knew what to do to get on and stay in God’s
favour! He was to obey the Law of Moses which at its core it was about ‘loving
God and neighbour as self’. He knew what to do; the problem was in the doing of
the thing. Moreover, none has or can do this consistently and truly from the heart.
This lawyer and everyone else ‘falls short’ of loving God with other as self.
We can exclude people, tribes, races or classes of people from the category of neighbour.
We are responsible to love all people and we’re not to demonize and exclude people
and groups. We all ‘fall short’ and to ‘inherit eternal life’ we’re going to
need a ‘saviour to save us from our sins’. Jesus was despised and rejected for
us. He was beaten and left for dead, like the Jew in the ditch, in our place on
the cross and for our sins.
We need Jesus to ‘die for our sins’, but we also need his ‘righteous
life which he lived for us’ in our place on our behalf. Jesus is also the ‘truly
other-centered loving and good Samaritan’ who lived a perfect life of loving obedience
to God and neighbour. We are to look in faith to Jesus who lived and having conquered
‘sin and death’ for us he gives us ‘new resurrected life’.
Then having embrace Jesus as our ‘suffering servant and
conquering king’ we are to seek to love others, even the ‘outsider and the
outcast’ as we love ourselves. We are to love even those opposed to us! Why
should we do this? We are to love others because that is what Jesus has done
for us and when we to reflect him, especially when we love those who can never
repay us. We are to love with our others at a personal cost to ourselves, in
terms of time and resources, and when we do this we are actually doing it to our
Lord Jesus (Luke 9:48, Matthew 25:45).
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