Luke 10:25

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" ... So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves? And he said, "He who showed mercy on him." Then Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." (Luke 10:25-37)

When a lawyer tried to justify himself, Jesus told a story that cut through every loophole—and aimed straight at the heart.

A Season of Giving and Receiving

The 2016 Christmas shopping season is more than underway. Maybe you braved the crowds Friday or Saturday, or maybe the turkey went to your brain on Thursday and you headed out at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. If you saw the pictures, going to Walmart on Thanksgiving night looked like standing in the middle of Fallujah in 2003—not a good place to be.

When we come to this time of year, with Christmas just 28 days away, we are reminded of giving and receiving. So between now and Christmas we are looking at passages of Scripture that touch on giving. Last week we talked about giving thanks. Today we turn to Luke chapter 10, beginning at verse 25.

A Certain Lawyer Tests Jesus

This is probably not an unfamiliar passage to you. Even people who have never opened a Bible or gone to church have heard the words "the Good Samaritan." There are Good Samaritan laws in virtually every state, and many people don't even realize the phrase comes from a story Jesus told right here.

On a certain day Jesus was confronted by a lawyer who stood up and tested Him. This was the norm for Jesus everywhere He went. Multitudes came for different reasons—to be fed, to hear Him, to see a sign, to touch Him for healing, or because they had family who were sick, demon-possessed, or near death. And then there were those who came to test Him, just like this lawyer.

The lawyers of the day were also called scribes, the copyists of the law—the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. They were experts who often had whole sections of Scripture memorized verbatim. While many of us get tripped up just reading the book of Leviticus, these men sometimes had it memorized completely, and they debated endlessly about its interpretation. This lawyer may have been sincere, but most of the time these groups came to trip Jesus up.

Aim for the Heart

His question seemed simple: "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Two people in the Gospels ask that exact question—this lawyer and the rich young ruler, who came running and bowing, saying, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" That tells us Jesus was clearly teaching about eternal life throughout His ministry.

Now here's a fascinating thing. There are more than 180 times in the Gospels where people asked Jesus questions, and in all but three He answered with a question. More than 300 times Jesus asks questions. For every direct answer, there were a hundred questions He posed. That method can frustrate people—when I was a junior high pastor at camp, a kid would dance up and ask, "Can I go to the bathroom?" and I'd say, "I don't know, can you?"

To the rich young ruler Jesus said, "Why do you call Me good?" To this lawyer He said, "What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?" This isn't because Jesus lacked an airtight answer. His logic was awesome—when they tried to trap Him over taxes to Caesar, He had them show Him a coin, asked whose inscription it bore, and said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's." They walked away wondering how He escaped.

So why answer a question with a question nearly every time? Because Jesus was aiming at the heart, not the head. Aim for the heart in your evangelism.

This is difficult in our culture, which loves the God of reason and airtight answers. We love Peter's exhortation to "always be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within you," and out of that grew the apologetics movement of the late 1970s and 80s, with names like Francis Schaeffer. We need to be able to give an answer. But the reality is that when most of us—myself included—are hit with a hard question, our first response is fear.

So follow the pattern of Jesus. When someone asks, "Do you really believe sincere followers of other religions go to hell?" ask, "So do you believe in hell?" When someone asks, "Do you really believe Jesus is the only way to heaven?"—and the exclusivity of Jesus in John 14 is one of the biggest problems people have with Christianity—ask, "Do you believe in heaven? What way do you think it is to get there?" When someone says, "Can you prove there is a God?" instead of rushing home to study the teleological and cosmological arguments, ask, "Can you prove that there isn't?" It changes the whole dynamic, because the heart of man is the heart of the matter.

Love Is the Focus of God's Law

The lawyer answered rightly: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." In Matthew 22, when another lawyer asked the greatest commandment, Jesus gave the same answer and added, "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

Every devout Jew knew this answer. It is the first passage a Jewish child in the first century would learn—the Shema, meaning "the hearing," from Deuteronomy 6:4-9:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart; you shall teach them diligently to your children... You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

This is why a devout Jewish home has a mezuzah on the doorpost containing this text, and why you'll see worshipers at the Western Wall wearing phylacteries—little boxes bound on the head and hand—in literal fulfillment of these words. Every child and every legal scholar knew this answer. Love is the focus of God's law. As Paul wrote in Galatians, the entire summary of the law is in one word: love.

Knowing Versus Doing

This lawyer knew how to read and interpret the law, but Jesus is moving from the head to the heart. So He said, "You have answered rightly; do this and you will live." It's one thing to know the right answer; it's an entirely different thing to do the right thing.

But the lawyer, "wanting to justify himself," asked, "And who is my neighbor?" This was precisely where the scribes loved to split hairs. When Moses wrote that a man could divorce his wife for "some uncleanness," some scholars debated whether cooking the eggs wrong counted as uncleanness—I'm not kidding. They argued over what a Sabbath day's journey was. When our group was in Israel a few weeks ago, I pointed out 18-foot poles with a wire on top marking the boundary of a Sabbath day's journey, so no one would walk too far and break the law.

To justify yourself is what religious legalists do, and it usually comes at the expense of others—we point out their inconsistencies and failures so we can look better. I find that same desire for self-justification in my own fallen nature, looking for loopholes when a passage cuts me to the core: "Well, maybe in the Greek it's not so sharp." But Jesus has an amazing way of cutting through our self-justification like a razor through silk.

This Fallen World Is Full of Trouble

So Jesus told a parable. A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves who stripped him, wounded him, and left him half dead. No doubt this man was Jewish, traveling a well-worn but treacherous path. Jericho lay 800 feet below sea level and Jerusalem about 2,500 feet above—a climb of some 3,300 feet over about 20 miles. People traveled in groups for safety. Historians tell us robbers hid in that wilderness; Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible, recorded that this path was called "the way of blood" because so many fell there.

So this was no rare occurrence. This fallen world is full of trouble. Every day on the radio, television, and internet we are confronted with the fallenness of the world.

Piety Without Pity

By chance—though I don't believe in coincidence; this was divine providence—a priest came down that road. Surely this is the very kind of person you'd hope would come, a representative of God on his way home after his month-long rotation of service at the temple. But when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.

Then a Levite came. Levites belonged to the priestly tribe, and though this one wasn't serving in the priesthood, he was about temple business. He arrived, looked—the word means he examined, beheld, perhaps even saw the faint rising and falling of the man's chest—and he too passed by on the other side. Charles Spurgeon said, "If anywhere there should be compassion toward men, it should be in the heart of the priest who has chosen to speak for God to men and for men to God." But both passed by.

No doubt they had reasonable excuses: I'm in a hurry; I've already done my service; I've been gone from my family a month; it's getting dark and dangerous; it's his own fault for traveling alone; what good could one person do; if I touch him I'll become unclean and soil my garments; maybe it's a trap. Spurgeon said, "They had been near to God, but they were not like Him."

Piety without pity is of little value. Religious piety without compassionate pity is worth little. Interestingly, social psychologists have identified a condition called moral licensing: "Doing something that helps to strengthen our positive self-image also makes us less worried about the consequences of immoral behavior and therefore more likely to make immoral choices." In other words, religious observance—coming to church, giving a tithe, serving in ministry—can callus us so that the rest of the week we feel we've done our duty and need not get involved. Religious piety that does not move us to righteous compassion is of little value.

Compassion Cares Beyond Creed and Cultural Lines

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where the man was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. The Samaritans were an ethnic minority despised by the Jews. "Samaritan" was used as a racial slur—in John 8:48 they insulted Jesus by saying, "He is a Samaritan and has a demon."

Of all people, this one had every reason to pass by and think, "He got what he deserved." Yet he was the one moved with compassion. He bandaged the man's wounds, pouring on oil and wine, set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he gave the innkeeper two denarii—two days' wages, all the money he had left—and said, "Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, when I come again I will repay you."

Compassion cares beyond creed and cultural lines. Religion often creates boundaries and walls—us and them, the righteous and the wicked pagans, keep the doors closed and keep them out. But love, the focus of God's law, breaks those things down.

True Religion Compels Us to Show Mercy

So Jesus asked, "Which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?" The answer was obvious. The lawyer said, "He who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said, "Go and do likewise." That is a command.

True religion compels us to show mercy to others—and therein is a blessing. We began with Acts 20:35: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." James tells us in the last verses of chapter 1 that true religion is to care for the needs of those who cannot care for themselves; the religion of those who pass by is worthless before God.

And what is the blessing? In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:7, Jesus says:

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

So we are to be those who give thanks, and also those who give mercy, like this Samaritan who saw beyond culture, creed, and ethnic divide to minister to a man left for dead. This is a challenge to me, and probably to all of us. As we move through this season of giving, let us remember that the Lord calls us to be merciful. When He introduced Himself to Moses and Israel, the first word He chose was, "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful." If we are children of our Father in heaven, it should be seen in us that we too are merciful.

Closing Prayer

Father, I thank You that we, like the man taken by thieves, were left for dead in our trespasses and sins. But You, who are rich in mercy because of Your great love for us, even while we were in that pitiful, suffering condition, came and gave us grace—by grace we are saved. Lord, though we are not saved by our works of mercy, You have saved us for good works of mercy, grace, compassion, and love.

I pray for myself and for my brothers and sisters as we prepare to leave this place for work, school, and wherever we will be this week. Help us to see beyond racial lines, cultural lines, and creedal lines to those who are in need, and stirred by Your compassion and grace, to reach out with mercy. It is not in our nature; our nature wants vindication, justice, justification. But help us to live after Your nature, that we would represent You well in the world, especially as we celebrate Your coming. Shine Your light in and through our lives. We ask this in Jesus' name, and all those who agree said, amen.