Sermon for 7/13/25

Sermon 7-13-25 5 Pentecost Lk. 10:25-37

A while back the young guys and I spent the week at Willow Grove School in Centralia, taking down several trees and grinding the stumps for a building project they had planned there. It was miserably hot. We were working around the edge of a big blacktop playground. We have these earmuffs with speakers and a radio microphone so we can talk to each other around all the loud equipment we use.

As I was walking back and forth across the playground I noticed the things they had painted on it. A big map of the United States, free-throw lines for the basketball goal, a four-square box, things like that. Then I saw their hop-scotch court. It was painted wrong.

I said, “This hop-scotch court is painted wrong”.

Then I hear, “ 'How do you know?' and 'what's wrong with it?' and 'what's hop-scotch?' “

I told you they were young. I called them over, showed them the layout of the court and explained why it was set up wrong. Then I told them about the rules and object of the game. How you plan to get to a certain spot and you go about doing it step by step. They just looked at me and went back to work.

Our gospel reading for today is probably one of, if not the most famous of Jesus' parables. The Good Samaritan.

But, the story about the Good Samaritan is not just about a man who does a good deed. The story is about the Kingdom of God. Jesus is telling His audience that the Kingdom of God will turn human values and judgments on its head.

At the beginning of this chapter Jesus sent seventy of His followers in pairs out to the places He intended to visit. They have just returned to great fan-fair and large crowds. This is our setting. And we read: “Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus”.

A lawyer in biblical times was not the kind of lawyer we think of today. The kind who have offices between here and the court house, up and down Main and Broadway. The lawyer who wants to test Jesus is a specialist in the Torah, the written word of God.

And he's not testing Jesus to be helpful or kind.

In the Mediterranean world questions are rarely perceived as requests for information. They are almost always viewed with suspicion, as a challenge to personal honor.

The hope is that the person who is asked the question will not know the answer and be shamed by ignorance. Luke explicitly states that the lawyer's intent was to “test” Jesus.

Here again, as throughout the Gospels, Jesus responds in His consistent way. He insults his questioner, and makes him look the fool. Jesus answers the question with another question. “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

The lawyer responds by quoting Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, verses 4 and 5, and Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 18. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus says, “You have given the right answer”. That shows everyone in the crowd that in true lawyer fashion, he actually knew the answer before he asked the question. I would imagine the crowd burst out in laughter.

The lawyer would have been beet red. Luke says, “But wanting to justify himself or “save face”, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Then Jesus threw salt in the lawyer's wound, He tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In what we now call the Old Testament, which was the bible of that day, and which this lawyer studied and lived by, the word neighbor meant not only relatives and friends, it meant fellow Israelites only. To be a neighbor you had to be a Jew.

Jesus starts his story by saying, “a certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho”. He doesn't tell us who the man was or whether he was Gentile or Jew, only that he was taking that route.

At that time it was a foot path, a well traveled foot path, but a foot path none-the-less, about 18 miles long, and steep. Six-tenths of a mile drop in elevation down from Jerusalem on top to Jericho in the valley below. And dangerous, full of bandits. No one would have traveled it alone.

The man falls into the hands of robbers. They beat him into unconsciousness, strip him of his clothes and leave him along side of the path, Luke says, “half dead”.

Then along comes a priest and later a Levite. Luke tells us they both saw the man but passed him by. Both of these religious men would probably have been traveling in a group of people, which was the common method of travel in that time and area. The man had no clothing and was unable to speak, either of which would have told his audiences whether he was a Jew or Gentile. He very well could have been a Jew, a neighbor.

According to Hebrew law anyone touching a dead body or blood would become defiled, and have to go back to the Temple to get purified and be quarantined for a certain period of time. They might as well have gotten COVID.

The risk was too great. They both walk on by.

Jesus is building His case, step by step. Moving up the Hop-scotch court to the place He wants to go. His listeners would be expecting the next character in the story to be a Jewish layperson. By throwing a Samaritan into the mix the entire audience would have been shocked.

Samaritans were the Jews least favorite people. They were considered by the Judeans only a small step above an animal.

Jesus tells us this dreaded Samaritan, this scum of the earth, was filled with compassion for the wounded man. He treats the man's wounds, puts him on his own animal and takes him on down the path to an inn and nurses him there. Then the Samaritan pays the innkeeper a tidy sum, what would have been about 24 days worth of rent, and promises more if need be, to take care of him.

Then Jesus asks the million dollar question, “Who was a neighbor to the wounded man?”

This is the top of the hop-scotch court. This is where He wanted to go. The lawyer's answer to Jesus also answers his own question of, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus is not offering a definition of neighbor but a definition of loving one's neighbor.

A definition of what living in the Kingdom of God should be.

Amen.