Rev. Michael Piazza in Liberating Word says of Luke 10:25-37 “For the next several chapters, Luke essentially retells stories told in Mark and Matthew. His emphasis is sometimes different, as he shows that Jesus is the Messiah, greater than the prophets (including John the Baptist). Then, in Luke 10, we encounter one of the most famous stories Jesus told: the Good Samaritan. This story is told as the result of an expert in the religious law asking, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.” This is a strange question if you focus on the word “inherit.” Children don’t generally have to do anything to inherit what is theirs by birth. Perhaps Luke is trying to illustrate that this expert missed the point right from the start. Jesus answers his question with a question about how this fellow understood the law. To his credit, he summarized it much as Jesus would have: Love God and love your neighbor. Jesus then simply said, “Do this and you will live.” That simple exchange left the lawyer embarrassed, so he asks a follow-up question to try to prove he was smarter than Jesus: “Ah yes, but who is my neighbor?” Maybe he had heard how Jesus almost had gotten himself thrown off a cliff in Nazareth for broadening the definition of neighbor too much. Was the lawyer counting on Jesus saying something that would alienate his listeners? If so, he may have gotten his wish, in that Jesus told a story that was far more radical than it sounds today. In the story Jesus told, the hero is a member of a group that his listeners would have despised and rejected as being a part of the family of God. It would be like making a liberal lesbian a saint in a fundamentalist church or making Dick Cheney a hero in a liberal church. Jesus tells a story that is an affront to the values they held as a community. There is a reason this story gets left out of Matthew and Mark’s Gospels. There is also a reason it gets included in Luke’s. Today the Church of Jesus Christ is divided into many camps on many issues. The bottom line then and now, though, is whether ours is a gospel of who is included or a gospel of who is excluded. Who really is our neighbor? And who isn’t? “
Rev. Michael Piazza in Liberating Word says of Luke 10:25-37 “For the next several chapters, Luke essentially retells stories told in Mark and Matthew. His emphasis is sometimes different, as he shows that Jesus is the Messiah, greater than the prophets (including John the Baptist). Then, in Luke 10, we encounter one of the most famous stories Jesus told: the Good Samaritan.
ReplyDeleteThis story is told as the result of an expert in the religious law asking, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.” This is a strange question if you focus on the word “inherit.” Children don’t generally have to do anything to inherit what is theirs by birth. Perhaps Luke is trying to illustrate that this expert missed the point right from the start.
Jesus answers his question with a question about how this fellow understood the law. To his credit, he summarized it much as Jesus would have: Love God and love your neighbor. Jesus then simply said, “Do this and you will live.” That simple exchange left the lawyer embarrassed, so he asks a follow-up question to try to prove he was smarter than Jesus: “Ah yes, but who is my neighbor?”
Maybe he had heard how Jesus almost had gotten himself thrown off a cliff in Nazareth for broadening the definition of neighbor too much. Was the lawyer counting on Jesus saying something that would alienate his listeners? If so, he may have gotten his wish, in that Jesus told a story that was far more radical than it sounds today.
In the story Jesus told, the hero is a member of a group that his listeners would have despised and rejected as being a part of the family of God. It would be like making a liberal lesbian a saint in a fundamentalist church or making Dick Cheney a hero in a liberal church. Jesus tells a story that is an affront to the values they held as a community.
There is a reason this story gets left out of Matthew and Mark’s Gospels. There is also a reason it gets included in Luke’s. Today the Church of Jesus Christ is divided into many camps on many issues. The bottom line then and now, though, is whether ours is a gospel of who is included or a gospel of who is excluded. Who really is our neighbor? And who isn’t? “