[Machine transcription]
And the lawyer said to Jesus, desiring to justify himself,
who is my neighbor?
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, the Holy Spirit has before us today this text,
this parable of Jesus, the Good Samaritan.
But we don’t want to miss the context.
I mean, Jesus is not just preaching this to the crowd.
Jesus is telling this parable to a very specific fellow who came to Jesus, the text tells us,
to test Him.
He came testing Jesus and said, what must a man do to inherit eternal life?
And Jesus says, well, you’re a lawyer, you’ve got the Bible, what does it say?
And so the man answers and says, well, you should love the Lord your God with all your
heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you should love your neighbors yourself.
And Jesus says, surprising to us, Jesus says, well, good answer, go ahead, do that and you’ll
live.
But the man can’t let it go, he wants to justify himself, that’s what the text says, he wants
to justify himself.
So, he says to Jesus, who is my neighbor?
And Jesus answers that question with this parable.
Now we want to really dig into this this morning and understand what’s going on, how this man
figured that he would justify himself, because all of us are under the same risk, at the
same danger.
We, too, are born with our sinful flesh with an innate desire to justify ourselves, to
make ourselves appear right before God and man, to be able to stand on the day of judgment
based on our own works or our own efforts, or to be able to excuse all of the things
that we have done wrong, to be able to have a good conscience by our works.
It’s part of our native, it’s like the, you know how if you go and you buy like a
telephone at the store and it comes, or a computer, and it opens it up and it has the
software already loaded on it?
Like the, it’s like it’s downloaded already, you don’t even have to do anything.
This is the theology that comes downloaded in your flesh, the desire to justify yourself
by your own works and your own efforts.
And the way that this guy, the way that this lawyer wants to justify himself is a trick
that we also use.
I’m going to call it this.
I’m going to call it the not my neighbor list.
Because the command to love your neighbor is an impressive command.
And how many of us, if we have that on our to-do list, can check it off at the end of
the day?
Right?
Do the dishes, check.
Check, take out the trash, check, sweep the patio, check.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
When can you check off that box?
When can you claim to be good and right and holy in the sight of God and man by your own
deeds?
But still we try.
Still we try to make ourselves appear holy and appear right, and one of the chief ways
that we do it is by knocking people off of the neighbor list.
We know we’re supposed to love our neighbor, we know we’re supposed to care for those
that are around us, but if I hate that guy, then I can get around it by simply checking
him off the list.
Now, the Jews had done this with the Samaritans, and I think probably the Samaritans had done
it with the Jews.
This is an old animosity.
I mean, it goes way back, back to the death of King Solomon and the civil war that started
in Israel in the year 930 BC and it’s amplified a couple hundred years later when the Assyrians
come in and they deport all of Israel, well a bunch of Israel and they import a bunch
of pagans and they intermix and then you have the people called the Samaritans.
They claim to worship the same God but they worshiped remember on the mountain instead
of in Jerusalem and they had all sorts of strange practices that are mixed in there
and there was this great animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans.
There is this old Jewish prayer and it said, Oh Lord, may I never set my eyes on a Samaritan.
That’s the kind of animosity that they had.
And what that means is, do you see what that means, is that while the Jewish people knew
that they were to love their neighbor, they could see a Samaritan and say, but that guy
doesn’t count.
He’s not my neighbor.
He’s my enemy.
He doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve my love, I’m not going to, I’m not going to love him.
Him.
That’s not what God meant when He said, love your neighbor.
Not that guy.
Now, that’s the basic trick, but we want to see how we apply it.
There’s a couple of ways.
I mean, we’ll just talk about two of them, but I think there’s a lot of ways that we
do this ourselves.
One of the, one of the chief ways, and we can’t sort of, we can’t not mention this
with this text.
We have to talk about this, is one of the chief ways that, that this temptation comes
to us is simply through the sin of racism.
them, that the devil would tempt us to say, well, that person or that group of people
because of whatever, because of their culture or their skin color or something, that that’s
not really our neighbor, so we don’t have to love them.
It’s a gross sin, it’s a form of hatred and breaking the fifth commandment, and there’s
no place for it in the Christian life or heart.
I mean, I don’t even think that we as Christians even know what people are talking about when
they say race.
There’s one human race.
We all come from Adam and Eve.
We all come from Noah, in fact, right?
You’re saying, but everywhere you go, you’re at a Noah family reunion.
We’re all related to each other.
There’s just humanity, and to divide people up and say, well, because of whatever reason,
now I don’t have to love that person.
That’s just, well, if we’re tempted towards that, we need to repent.
But I think the way that this neighbor, not my neighbor list game plays itself out in
our lives is maybe a little bit more subtle, but important for us to consider, and it comes
about through anger.
So you know how this goes, someone, I mean, normally when we come to church we’re thinking
about our own sins, right?
The sins that we commit, and we come to church and we confess to God the sins that we commit
it.
And we ask for the Lord’s mercy and the Lord’s kindness and the Lord’s grace towards the
things that we have done wrong and we receive it in the absolution and in the supper and
everything else.
But there’s another thing that we have to deal with as sinners living in this world
and that’s not only do we have to deal with our sins but we have to deal also with the
sins that other people commit against us.
The sins that we, not just the sins that we give but the sins that we receive.
And what happens when we’re sinned against?
I mean, the first thing that happens is we become angry, right?
When someone hurts us or wounds us or lies about us or betrays us or cheats us or whatever,
we become angry.
And then what happens is we want to get even, or that anger settles in.
And when someone has sinned against me, what do I do is I say, well, that person that sinned
against me, I’m just going to mark their name off of the neighbor list.
They’ve made themselves my enemy, they’ve wronged me, and they’ve hurt me, and they’ve
wounded me, and they’ve offended me, and so I am right not to love them.”
Now think about that.
In fact, let us, what if we define anger in this way?
That anger is justified lovelessness, that you have made an excuse to not love somebody.
And that excuse means that you go along not loving them and you don’t feel bad about it after all they don’t deserve it
After all they’ve hurt me after all they did it first. I hope you know what I’m talking about
I think in every one of our families. There’s these situations where what people are not talking to each other
Because someone did this and they offended them and then this person did that and then this and that and then finally forget it
I don’t even think they’re family anymore
Not only are they marked off the neighbor list, they’re marked off the family list,
they’re marked off the brother list, the son list, the uncle list.
I’m not talking to them anymore.
Do you see how that goes?
Because of the sin that’s committed against us, and now we feel justified, we feel like
we’re doing right when we don’t love that person.
After all, they don’t deserve it.
After all, it’s not right what they did.
After all, doesn’t God believe in justice?
I know I’m supposed to love my neighbor, but that person doesn’t count.
Now Jesus, this morning, is getting after your not my neighbor list.
It’s what the parable of the good Samaritan is poking at.
Jesus is saying to you and to me that you are not authorized to keep such a list.
list, you are not authorized to determine who is your neighbor and who is not.
You are not free to pick people to not love.
This is hard because each of us has this list.
You know what I’m talking about, right?
Each of us has this list.
The people that we think that we’re just fine not caring for, oftentimes it’s in the family.
Each one of us has a list of people that have wounded us, that have hurt us, that have sinned
against us, that have lied about us, that have offended us, that have upset us in one
way or another.
Each one of us has a list of people that we think don’t deserve our love.
And so we, like the lawyer in the text, try to justify ourselves and say, but pastor,
that guy doesn’t deserve my love.
Now you’re probably right.
I mean, that person that you’re thinking of right now, they don’t deserve your love, I
imagine.
They shouldn’t have done that to you.
They shouldn’t have said it.
They shouldn’t have acted the way they acted.
They shouldn’t have done what they did.
But the reason why you love your neighbor is not because your neighbor has earned and
deserved your love.
You love your neighbor because Jesus says, love your neighbor.
He said it.
In fact, Jesus says, love your enemy, bless those who curse you, do good to those who
hate you, pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.
That’s what Jesus says.
In other words, that not my neighbor list, we have to rip it up and throw it away.
we have to destroy it before it destroys us like is it as if we’re gonna stand
there on the judgment day and and have this list and and Jesus will say look at
all the people you didn’t love and I said yeah but look at all the things
they did to me as if that’s gonna stand it’ll burn on that day so we might as
well get rid of it now and hear with clarity what Jesus is saying in the
parable of the Good Samaritan you know who your neighbor is you know what the
command is, go and do likewise. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do not keep a not my
neighbor list because Jesus doesn’t. I mean if anybody, if anyone would be right in having
a list of people who are not his neighbor, it would be Jesus. I mean if you’ve been,
Because if you’ve been sinned against and hurt in this life, can you imagine how it
is with Jesus?
Every sin that you commit against your neighbor is also directed at Him.
Every commandment broken is a breaking of the first commandment.
Jesus has suffered it all.
He was despised.
He was forsaken.
He was afflicted.
He was forgotten.
and he was beaten and mocked and spit on and had his beard torn out.
If there was anybody that Jesus could have looked down and said, okay, look, I’m going
to love a lot of people, but I’m not going to love you.
I mean, can you imagine?
Even the soldiers who were there at the base of the cross.
Maybe just those guys, Jesus will say, look, everybody else is on the list, but you guys
are off.
But what does he say?
Father, forgive them, they don’t even know what they’re doing.
Jesus has you on His neighbor list and He has loved you.
He’s seen you beaten and half dead and naked and stripped in the ditch on the side of the
road and He’s come along and He’s scooped you up and He’s put oil on your wounds and
He’s rescued you and delivered you and brought you into His home and He’s loved you with
an undeserved mercy and love and compassion that you could not even imagine.
It will take an eternity to meditate on and still we will not get there.
In other words, Jesus has a list and you are on it, an object of love and it is you.
And there’s nothing that can stop Him.
There’s nothing that can stop His love.
I had someone ask me once, Pastor, how do I know, how do I know that Jesus loves me?
And the answer is, He died on the cross for you.
You can just as well undo the love of Jesus as you can go back in time and peel Jesus’
dead body off the cross and get one of those little heart machines and bring him back to
life and put him in a cage so that he can’t get back on the cross.
You can just as well undo the love of Jesus as if you could go and somehow peel him off
of that cross where he is stuck for you and prevent him from going there again.
In other words, you can’t.
Jesus loves you, and His love carries you through even your own loveliness, to be with
Him forever.
So we rejoice today, I mean we rejoice that Jesus tears down our idols, that He takes
care of our lovelessness, but even more we rejoice that Jesus takes care of us,
that He dies for us and gives to us Himself and His life eternal. God be
praised. Amen. Please stand. May Jesus Christ, your good Samaritan, bless you
and keep you always in His eternal love. Amen.
