Bible Text: Luke 10:23-37 | Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard
I pray, I sincerely pray, that you never desire what the lawyer in today’s reading desired, for desire what he desired is to desire hell. He asked a simple enough question, albeit a bit of a strange one: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” I say it’s simple enough because the heart in each one of us asks that question, and does so by nature, even after the fall. Yet the fall has left its mark on the question. For it’s one thing to ask, “What needs to happen in order for me to have eternal life?” and it is something else entirely to ask, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” There is an answer to this corrupted question, and Jesus gives it. He points the man to the Law of God. If you want to do something to get eternal life for yourself, you have to keep the Law: perfectly, at all times, in all ways, without exception. The lawyer knows the Law. He, in fact, sums it up the same way Jesus sums it up: “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer is right. “Do this and you will live,” Jesus says. Just keep the entirety of the Law of God, perfectly, without exception.
But the lawyer understands how broad the Law of God is. He sees that to keep the Law would be like drinking the ocean or putting all the winds in a bag. It’s too much. But instead of lamenting his fallen condition and confessing as a sinner should, saying, “I can’t do it,” he asks Jesus to narrow the Law down for him, and he asks this because, as you heard, he was “desiring to justify himself.” On the surface this sounds harmless, or maybe confusing, but it is downright devilish, and I’ll tell you why: To desire to justify yourself is to say, “My sin isn’t that bad. My corruption isn’t that bad. I can take care of it myself. I don’t need the Gospel. I don’t need the Sacraments. I don’t need Jesus’ righteousness. I can get righteousness for myself.” The heart of unbelief desires to justify itself, and that is why I pray you never have that desire. You should desire the righteousness of Jesus because you cannot get righteousness for yourself.
To be clear, the desire to keep God’s commandments yourself is not a bad desire. The Christian laments that he does not keep God’s Law. God knows he wants to! You want to! And you will, one day, when either you put off the sinful nature in the sleep called death, or Jesus returns on the Last Day and in the twinkling of an eye those who are alive are entirely renewed. Jesus, speed the Day! But we have to be honest in the meantime. Our pattern of Christian worship and prayer is honest. At Matins we sing, “Grant, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.” And at Compline at the end of the day we start with a confession of sin. In Luther’s morning prayer we say, “I pray that You would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You.” And then in the evening prayer, “And I pray that You would forgive me all my sins where I have done wrong, and graciously keep me this night.” The Apostle Paul was honest about this when he wrote in Romans 7, “For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:22-25). And see where the honest man lands? At Jesus. Jesus will be my salvation and my righteousness, for my situation is so grave that I cannot save myself and my unrighteousness is so heinous that only the righteousness of God can cover me.
But the lawyer is not honest. He wants to justify himself, and he wants Jesus to whittle away at the Law of God to make that happen. Jesus refuses. The lawyer asks, “And who is my neighbor?” and Jesus gives him a John Doe, lying unconscious in the middle of the road with no identifying mark whatsoever, no distinctive clothing, unable to speak and show a dialect, his very skin color masked by the sheer amount of blood. Even if Jesus had said, “Love the Jews; don’t worry so much about the Gentiles,” what would it have helped? The lawyer would still be at a loss in this situation, not knowing whether the man in the road were his neighbor or not. So notice that Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question. Jesus instead shows the man that it’s a bad question, that in the end, even if he got the answer he thought he was looking for, it wouldn’t help him in the slightest. The lawyer would be like the priest and the Levite, who were more concerned about the possibility of making themselves unclean by touching a dead body than they were about actually loving their neighbor.
Note that this is where every attempt at self-justification always leads: to a so-called love that weighs and reasons and makes a list of pros and cons, “Is it in my best interest to help this person, or is it not?” And that’s not love! Love is for the sake of the other, not for the sake of the self! Love doesn’t stop to weigh pros and cons, but when it sees its neighbor in need it has compassion and acts. But the self-justifying man can’t love his neighbor. He can only see his neighbor as a means to an end. He can only treat his neighbor as a tool, as an object of his so-called good works, whom he uses in a futile attempt to lift himself to heaven. But he cannot actually love, because he does not have faith in Christ. Instead he has a delusional hope in himself. In this reading we see the truth of the words in Hebrews 11, “without faith it is impossible to please [God]” (Heb. 11:6); and again in Romans 14, “whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23).
Now if this were the only point Jesus were trying to make in His parable, He could have told a much shorter version. He could have simply said, “Even if I narrowed down a list of neighbors for you, you still wouldn’t know what to do with this unidentifiable man in the road, and you would inevitably be more concerned with yourself than with him, would do the wrong thing, and would sin against God’s Law.” Jesus could have made that point with the priest and Levite and ended at that. But this parable has not become renowned as “The Parable of the Priest and the Levite.” No, this is “The Parable of the Good Samaritan.” Jesus spends more time talking about the Samaritan than He does directly refuting the lawyer. And Jesus puts the emphasis where He does because ultimately He isn’t telling this parable for the sake of some self-righteous lawyer who didn’t want to hear it. Jesus is telling this parable for the sake of His faithful Christians, to teach them how faith and love are supposed to work. And everything springs from the Good Samaritan.
Jesus is the Good Samaritan in the parable, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we are not first and foremost the priest or the Levite or the Samaritan, but the man beaten and lying at the point of death in the road. Or at least that’s what we were, and that “were” is past tense only because of Jesus. The priest and the Levite passed us by. The priest the Levite signify the Law. “The Law no peace can ever give, / No comfort and no blessing,” as we sing in the hymn (LSB 555:8). And in Romans 3, “By the Law is the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). The Law passes by and says, “Get up and love God. Get up and love your neighbor. And if you can’t, then lie there and die under the wrath of God; you’ll get no help from me.” To be clear, this isn’t to say that the Law of God is bad. It’s just that the Law does not help you keep it. It tells you what to do, but it’s on you to do it. You may want to do it. Indeed, the Christian yearns with all his heart to keep the Law of God. But there he lies, helpless to make himself righteous through the Law, helpless to keep even a single commandment of God perfectly. Death is his lot, and if he hopes in the Law and trusts to himself, death he shall have.
But Jesus came along, and drew near to you, and when He saw you, He had compassion. Jesus didn’t stop to weigh the pros and cons of helping you. The only thing He cared about was that you would live and be saved from death. And that whole list of cons: mocking, beating, crucifixion―while Jesus knew they would come, they did not deter Him for a second. He came to you and forgave all your sins against His Law, every self-righteous desire in your heart, every thought, word, and deed that rightly deserved wrath. He would take the wrath so that you might have compassion. Jesus healed your wounds with His wounds and played the part of the servant leading his superior on a donkey, even though He is the superior and we are nothing. Jesus has brought us to the inn of His Church. And He has given two denarii, His Word and Sacraments, for the health of His saints.
Imagine the reaction of the beaten man when he awoke in that inn. His eyes opened, and there was the Samaritan, smiling at him simply out of gladness that he was conscious. “Where am I? Who are you?” And then he heard. He heard what the Samaritan had done for him, just as you have heard what your Lord has done for you. As the man lay in bed he knew: “Everything in my life that flows from this moment is thanks to the Samaritan. I owe everything to him, and I can claim nothing for myself. The only thing I had for myself was death, but this man has intervened so that I might have life.” So it is for you. From the moment Jesus enlightened the eyes of your heart in Baptism your life has been on a different course, a course not of death, but of life, a course not characterized by an empty attempt at self-justification, but a course marked through and through with the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, who alone can make us righteous in God’s sight.
And if you want to see what flows from the Gospel and a life of faith, consider what the Samaritan would have found when he returned to the inn some time later to see the man. He would not have found someone at the point of death, but someone upright, moving, active, doing, serving. This is what the Gospel does: it enlivens and animates us in love. Now it would be very silly for the beaten man, once he was able to get out of bed, to say, “I shall do many good things in order to earn the favor of the Samaritan.” Only a fool would say that, for the man had the favor of the Samaritan while he was an unconscious wretch, naked and lying in his own blood on the side of the road. But the man would nevertheless have wanted to do good.
So it is for the Christian. You want to do good, but not because you need to earn the favor of Jesus, which has already been proven in His gracious suffering and death and bestowed on you through the Gospel and the Sacraments. You don’t have to ask, “And who is my neighbor” and hope for some sort of checklist for getting into heaven. No, you’re already set for life, set for eternal life. But you still do good, and for two reasons. First, you love the commands of God and see them as an expression of His good and gracious will. As a child of God, begotten of Him in Holy Baptism, you want to do your Father’s will. That is only natural. Second, you do good for the sake of your neighbor. God doesn’t need your good works. You don’t need your good works, not in the sense of having to make yourself righteous. But your neighbor needs your good works. Whereas the lawyer had no faith, and thus could only see his neighbor as a means to an end and a tool for his own purposes, the Christian has faith, and that faith assures him that he is saved apart from his works. Thus you are free to love the neighbor simply for the neighbor’s sake. You are free to arise from your sickbed and use your hands and feet, your reason and senses, your whole body and being for the good of others. It is the life into which you have been reborn, a life marked forever by the Lord’s selfless love toward you.
Yes, when the Samaritan returns, he will not find the man as he was. And you can know that when Jesus returns He will not find you as you were when you first believed. I don’t say this in order to turn you back in on yourself, as if your progress in good works should be the basis of your hope. I point it out merely as a fact. The Holy Spirit, whom you have received, is not idle. He strengthens your faith through the Word and Sacraments. He stirs you up to love and good works through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you do not see such progress in your life, thank Christ that he’s hiding it from you to keep you from pride. And if you do see such progress in your life, thank Christ that he has wrought the change. Faith and love are the chief marks of the Christian life: faith in Jesus, love for the neighbor, as we pray after receiving communion that God would strengthen us through it “in faith toward You and in fervent love toward one another.” Today Jesus shows us in the lawyer that where there is no faith, there is no love. Today Jesus teaches us through His work the proper relation of faith and love. May the Lord preserve you from every desire to justify yourself, and may He evermore stir you up in faith and love until that day when faith becomes sight and we live a life of perfect love with our Savior and with our fellow Christians forever. Amen.