Good People, the Law, and Following Christ

The difference between doing good and thinking we are good.

In Luke Chapter 10, Jesus has just sent out 72 disciples to go into towns near the border with Samaria to preach that the kingdom of God has come near. The disciples went out and came back with glorious reports of the great things God had done, even having demons submit to the disciples when they used the name of Jesus.

An expert in the law of Moses stood before Jesus and asked Jesus a question to test Him. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

It’s a common question today, although we’d more likely phrase it as, “What do I need to do to be saved?”

Jesus turned it around on the expert. Jesus asked the man, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” You see, Jesus understood that the best way to teach someone is not to lecture them, but to ask them to explain something to the teacher, because it’s so easy to just let the teacher’s words wash over us, but when we are asked to respond to the teacher, we have to engage our mind – which is how deep learning happens.

The expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5. And then he added, “and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”, which came from Leviticus 19:18. This man knew his Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Of course, the New Testament had not yet been written, so we can cut him some slack for not knowing the New Testament.

You can just see Jesus smile. He said to the man, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

And there we have it. Jesus tells us that the Old Testament has a solution to the problem of how to be saved. Love God completely and love your neighbor like yourself. It’s in the Old Testament Law. Simple. Straight-forward. Sell-out completely to God – make God the end-all be-all of your life and love your neighbor as well as you love yourself.

Of course, these two simple commands are not all that easy, are they? The world we’ve grown up in tells us that many other things are more important than our total devotion to God. The world tells us that we need to dress well and that takes money. We need a decent car and that takes money. We need to be involved in politics. We need a good education, if not for ourselves, at least for our kids. Our kids need to play on a sports team, be involved in dance, in extra-curricula activities. We need to be successful at our job. We need to have the latest smart phone.

We need this and we need that and we must be comfortable so we can be seen as good people. And comfortable means a nice home and a nice car and nice clothes and eating out a couple times a week. And so we’ve also learned that to be a member of the good people’s club, we need to attend church once a week. That’s important because we think and have been told that people who attend church are good and people who don’t attend church are lost.

So how do we love God completely?

The key, I believe, lies in the Holy Spirit, something that was rare in the Old Testament, but comes to every baptized Christian.

According to Paul’s advice in Colossians Chapter 1, the Holy Spirit gives us wisdom to understand God’s will. As Paul says to the church at Colossae, “We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,”

WHY?

“so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.”

Did you hear Paul? Everything that gives us a great relationship with the Father comes to us through the Holy Spirit!

So if every baptized Christian has the Holy Spirit, where’s the problem? Why don’t we love God completely?

Because, you see, we don’t take the time or the effort to listen for the quiet whisper deep in our mind that is the Voice of the Holy Spirit guiding us to love God. Instead, we listen to the radio, to the television, to podcasts, to music – anything we can listen to which will drown out that whispered Voice because that Voice often tells us to do things we don’t really want to do – but those are the very things God wants us to do. Growing closer to God is as simple as listening to God the Holy Spirit and recognizing it as the ever-present Voice of God.

And, of course, sometimes we don’t listen because we don’t really trust that God’s way is the right way. But David, in Psalm 25 told us, “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in his ways. He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way.”

Well, the expert didn’t contest the first part of the prescription for eternal life. After all, the expert in the law had made it his life’s work to study the scriptures so he would know God’s will very well. He was committed, he was focused, he probably truly was learning to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.” After all, he spent many hours every day reading the scrolls of scripture and probably discussing them with his fellow experts.

You see, one key way to love God is to try to understand God every day. God is soooo good that when we try to understand Him, we will fall in love with Him.

My wife Saundra put in many hours trying to understand me when we were dating and first married. She read books I’d read. She watched movies I’d watched. And most importantly, she talked with me and listened to me and learned to understand my jokes, which can be rather dry. And so, she learned to love me more and more over the 36 years we’ve been married. You may have had a similar experience.

To love God, we must do much the same, learning about God from scripture and from those people who already know God and love God. We need to put in the time. The expert on the law had already done this.

But our expert wasn’t quite as totally committed to God as he thought. There was still a large part of the expert’s ego floating around inside him, for with his knowledge of scripture he had developed a certain arrogance, a certain feeling that he was already very good, an idea that him and his scripture-studying friends were members of an elite Good People’s Club, better than the average person.

And so, as Luke tells us, to justify himself the expert asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

You can just imagine the discussions these experts had. The Talmud, the encyclopedia-sized document that describes the discussions the rabbi’s had over every word of the Law, contains all sorts of discussions about every sentence of the Old Testament. But looking at the discussions from a distance of nearly a couple thousand years, we begin to see a pattern to the discussions.

For the law of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is written down in black-and-white. And it is very easy to look at those individual laws and see that they are black-and-white. For example, one law (Exodus 16:29) says that no one should leave their home on the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday evening to sundown on Saturday evening. Very simple. Very black-and-white.

But life happens. It is difficult to follow the Old Testament laws completely, 100%, as black-and-white laws. But if you truly “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”, that seems to lead us to say that we need to follow God’s laws 100% of the time. After all, in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit only came to a handful of people, and so that meant people had to try to work out how to follow the God’s laws without the constant, subtle guidance of God the Holy Spirit to understand God’s will.

So the rabbi’s had great discussions over “how to follow the law”. Actually, they worked to find loopholes, exceptions, work-arounds, ways to avoid the law but justify to themselves and others that they were following the law. In the case of the “don’t leave home on the Sabbath” law, the rabbi’s eventually came up with the idea that if you were within a fence around your property, you were still at home. And then, years later, when that became inconvenient, they extended that so that a fence around a couple of neighbors’ farms could be considered a single fence so you could visit your neighbors. And today, there is a single wire, a fishing line, that runs around most of Manhattan in NYC that represents that fence so Jews can travel all over Manhattan without leaving home on the Sabbath.

And, you know, this sort of nitpicking and loophole finding is common in some churches, where some parts of God’s Law are celebrated and other parts are ignored or loopholes are found. And grace and forgiveness – something else that Jesus taught extensively upon – they are only applied in certain situations instead of across the board.

Our particular expert, asked Jesus, “and who is my neighbor.” Hoping, perhaps that Jesus would say, “the four families whose property touches your property.” Or something similar. The expert was looking to see what the loopholes were. Surely the question of who the “neighbors’ were was limited in some way. But Jesus didn’t give him a quick answer.

Instead, Jesus told a story…

Jesus said “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers.” Since the man was leaving Jerusalem, he was probably Jewish. Everyone knew that the road down to Jericho is a drop of over three thousand feet, more than three times the height of Seneca Rocks in West Virginia, or the twice the height of the new World Trade Center. The road is long, difficult, lonely, dry, rocky, narrow, and cuts past many great hiding places as it winds down the cliffside into the Jordan River valley. And except during the times of the great festivals like Passover and Rosh Hashanah in Jerusalem, the road was deserted and lonely and therefore it was dangerous for a lone traveler, for robbers hid in those hiding places.

So the robbers attacked the man. “They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.”

Jesus continued. “A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.” You see, the priest had been to Jerusalem and was now returning home. In Jerusalem he had probably done his good activity for the month – he had worked in the Temple, and now he could consider himself a “good person”. So, he felt himself to be good and pure – after all, many of the priest’s duties involved him being pure, without touching any blood or dead people. He might lose some of his goodness if he stopped. Besides, who would want to stop and help a naked, bleeding stranger they found in the ditch on the side of the road. Maybe he’d mention what he saw to the guards at Jericho when he got there.

Jesus continued, “So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.” The Levites were also good people. In the Old Testament, the Levites had been set apart for God at the time of Moses. They were holy and closer to God than the ordinary people, so this Levite also decided he was a good person and didn’t want to contaminate himself by touching this bloody, naked man. Who knew? He might simply be a drunken beggar who had tripped and fallen on the path. He probably deserved all his wounds after all. And since he wasn’t wearing any clothes, he clearly wasn’t a good person.

It is clear from reading all of the Gospels, that there were many people in Jerusalem who considered themselves to be members of the “Good People’s club”. We see this when we read of John the Baptist’s preaching. We see this when Jesus rails against the Pharisees who place burdens on people’s backs but do not help them. We see this when Jesus calls them “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” Neither John nor Jesus thought much of the “Good People’s Club” of Jerusalem.

And so Jesus brings out the Samaritan. Samaritans lived in the area north of Jerusalem and south of Galilee. They were almost Jewish, but were hated by the Jews because they worshiped at Mount Gerizim instead of Jerusalem’s Mount Zion. They went to the wrong church. They spoke differently. They had strange ideas. Good Jews simply did not associate with Samaritans. To Jesus’ listeners, the Samaritan was anyone but a “good person”. Almost by definition, Samaritans were “bad people”. They might contaminate a good person and lead him or her astray.

But now, Jesus says, “But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.”

The oil would seal the wounds against infection; the wine contained enough alcohol to kill the germs.

“Then,” Jesus says, the Samaritan “put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii^{“ –} two days wages - roughly two hundred dollars – “and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

Notice that the Samaritan did things which put himself at risk – he stopped beside a man who had been beaten by robbers, robbers who might still be in the area. He used his own supplies – made bandages from his own clothing, used his olive oil that he could have used for cooking, used his wine he could have used for drinking. He put the bleeding man in his own pickup..er… on his own donkey. Then he gave two days wages to the innkeeper and committed himself for more expenses. No one should have to do such things, such inconvenient, uncomfortable, and risky things.

The Samaritan did not act because it was convenient or comfortable or safe for him to act – he acted despite the fact that it was inconvenient and uncomfortable and risky. He did this because he was humble enough to realize that God wanted him to do good things, and those actions were what the God he loved commanded. He did unselfish things for a total stranger because God asks it of him – and us! And because of this, “Good” Samaritans are talked about, not only in the Bible, but in our society as a whole, in our laws, and in our common speech. An entire group of people were redeemed in the imagination of the world by the actions of a single member.

Jesus then 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?”

³⁷ The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

When was the last time I did something inconvenient, uncomfortable, or risky for a stranger?

So often, we look at the people around us who are lying broken and bleeding on the road of life. They have been robbed of their possessions because the robbers of addiction, poor family teachings, bad relationships have left them in terrible ditches that they are having trouble crawling out of. And we smugly look at them and say to ourselves, “I’m a good person. I’d never end up like that because I’m comfortable and I go to church. I am a member of the Good People’s Club.”

There was a common saying that has gone out of style in the last couple of decades. The saying is “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

When we carefully look back at our lives, most of us can remember situations where everything could have gone horribly wrong. We can remember how a couple words from a teacher, or a relative, a friend, or an employer gave us encouragement or advice that took us along the right path. Some of us can even remember situations that looked terrible at the time, but now we realize were critical in helping us become who we are today. We may have lost a job but found a better job. We may have lost a relationship but found a great spouse. We may even have had similar experiences to those few people who missed their plane flight – and then heard later that their plane flew into a building in New York.

God has been watching each of us since before we were born. We are here today only because of God’s grace – and the fact that certain people listened to the gentle whisper of the Holy Spirit, doing things and saying things to us that changed our lives.

The great difference between churches that are growing and churches that are stuck or slowly declining, are the answers the churches give to these simple questions:

● Are we a “good people”, like the priest or the Levite in the parable, loving our own image and our goodness?

● Or do we simply do good things - inconvenient, uncomfortable, and risky things, like the Samaritan?

Churches which are a “Good People’s Club” have trouble growing. Churches filled with people who do good things that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and risky grow like crazy.

Here’s the really neat thing: It doesn’t take a church full of good people to change a community. It only takes a few people doing good things. Even one person who is totally sold out to God can give a church a wonderful reputation in the community. Will you be that person who acts, who does inconvenient, uncomfortable, and risky actions, the person about whom strangers say, “They’re different in a wonderful way.”

So when you go home this afternoon, I’d like you to seriously ponder and think and wrestle with these questions:

1. Have I been thinking about myself as a good person because I attend church and live comfortably?

2. Or am I doing good things, helping others both friends and strangers – even doing things that no one should have to do, things that are inconvenient, things that are uncomfortable, things that are risky?

3. When was the last time I did something inconvenient, uncomfortable, or risky for a stranger?

4. How arrogant am I when I think of myself as a good person simply because I live comfortably and go to church? How much does that arrogance or the love of my image control my life choices?

Jesus agreed with the expert on the Law that to gain eternal life, we must ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”