As many of you have come to know by now, I love trivia – all kinds of trivia. I love finding tiny little details and storing them away in the recesses of my brain, where they’ll stay tucked away until I have just the right opportunity to bring them out. As those of you who have attended one of our Bible Classes have seen, I especially love Bible trivia – little details which are so easy to overlook but which actually change many of our longstanding conceptions about what God is actually telling us in His Word.
Today’s Gospel lesson about the Good Samaritan offers us several points of what seem to be trivia, little details that can be easily overlooked. Of all the parables taught by Jesus in His ministry and recorded by the Gospel writers, we probably know or think we know the Parable of the Good Samaritan better than almost any other parable. A man is traveling along a road when a bunch of thugs jump out, rob him of everything he has and almost beat him to death. A priest, a man who leads the worship life of the people at the Temple in Jerusalem, comes by and sees the poor man lying in a ditch, but for some unstated reason he doesn’t want to get involved – so he goes to the other side of the road and walks right by like nothing has happened. Then a Levite, a man whose life is devoted to serving God and His people, comes along, but he doesn’t want to get involved either. Finally a Samaritan – a man who would have been roundly hated and shunned by any good Jew – sees the injured man, and he’s the only one who’s willing to do something to help. He tends to the victim’s injuries, using wine to disinfect the wounds and oil to sooth them – more trivia for you – and then he takes him to an inn and uses his own money to see to it that the man is cared for. We never find out if the injured man was Jewish – that little piece of trivia is left out of Luke’s account – but since Jesus is talking to a group of Jewish people on that day, you can only imagine how shocked they must have been to hear Jesus make their religious leaders look bad while making a Samaritan out to be the good guy.
Before Jesus launches into the parable of the Good Samaritan, our Gospel lesson actually begins with these words: “Behold, a lawyer stood up to put Jesus to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’” And here’s our next bit of trivia. When you hear the word “lawyer” you immediately think of someone like our friend Bill Farr, someone who’s been trained and educated in the civil and criminal laws that govern our society. But lawyers in Jesus’ day were Pharisees and sometimes priests who had been specially trained in God’s Law – the Law of Moses given by God on Mt. Sinai, the Ten Commandments. In the New Testament lawyers often are referred to as Scribes, since one of the many functions they served was the copying of the holy scrolls of Scripture. A lawyer knew God’s Law inside and out, backwards and forwards, so this particular lawyer wasn’t asking Jesus questions because he wanted to learn from Him. No, the lawyer truly was testing Jesus, probing, looking for a weakness – wanting to see if Jesus gave him the answer that he wanted to hear.
So Jesus answers the lawyer by asking him a question: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” The lawyer responds with a standard catechism answer, the same Biblical answer that we teach in our catechism classes. He answers by quoting Moses: “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.” It’s a perfect answer – the lawyer knew it and Jesus knew it. It’s the same answer that Jesus used when people asked Him what the greatest Law is. Love God. Love your neighbor. So Jesus congratulates the lawyer: “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
Then the lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” What he’s really asking is this: “What is the minimum amount of love I have to show – and who, exactly, do I have to love?” He doesn’t want to put himself out any more than he absolutely has to, and he seems to expect Jesus to give him a definition of those he should love and those he can ignore. By asking Jesus who his neighbor is, he’s implying that there are some people who are not his neighbor. He seems to be asking Jesus to interpret the Law and produce a list of people who can be excluded from his love. The Hebrew word for “love” as it’s used in the original Old Testament text has a sense of a sacrificial love, a love that exists to serve the needs of another, but it seems that the lawyer wants to put a limit on just how much love he has to demonstrate to win God’s approval. In the mindset of a Jewish lawyer 2,000 years ago, he probably expected Jesus to tell him to love his fellow Jews, but not to bother with Romans, Greeks – or even those scum-of-the-earth Samaritans who lived not so very far north of Jerusalem.
We know from the frequent references in the Gospels that the Jews hated the Samaritans, but do you know why this hatred existed? Here’s some more Bible trivia for you. Over 700 years before Jesus was born, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was punished by God for the great evil and idol worship of the people. Ten of the 12 tribes of Israel were exiled to Assyria, where many intermarried with gentiles and forever abandoned the worship of the true God. Most never returned to their homeland, but those who did inhabit the area north of Judea became known as Samaritans. Samaritans were considered to be unclean half-breeds, and no honorable Jewish man or woman would have anything at all to do with a Samaritan. Samaritans accepted the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – but they rejected the rest of what we call the Old Testament. They refused to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem and built their own temple north of Jerusalem on Mount Gerizim. So what you have is a nasty mixture of ethnic and religious discrimination. Jews hated Samaritans and Samaritans hated Jews. A Jewish person was strictly forbidden from marriage to a Samaritan, and a popular saying in Jesus’ time went like this: “He who eats the bread of a Samaritan is like the one that eats the flesh of swine.” Not a lot of love there – right?
Time and again in the Gospel accounts we see Jesus turn the tables on His listeners, teaching a lesson or making a point totally the opposite of anything they had ever heard before or expected. You can only imagine how shocked the lawyer and everyone else who heard Jesus tell His parable had to be when Jesus takes a Samaritan and makes him the hero of the story.
As Jesus relates the story, the Samaritan came along and didn’t just look the other way and pass by like the fine, upstanding priest and the Levite did. He didn’t say something like, “Tough luck, buddy – maybe some other schmuck will stop and help you.” Instead, the Samaritan felt a deep, courageous, godly compassion for the wounded man. The Samaritan showed love to an enemy, to a person who hated him, to a person who considered him less than human – something that the lawyer of our account would never dream of doing. The Samaritan sacrificed his time, his money and probably even his safety to save the life of someone who so clearly needed his help. In other words, he did exactly what the Law demands: love your neighbor as yourself.
Let’s go back to the lawyer’s original question: “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” As I mentioned before, this lawyer was an expert in God’s law – he knew every little detail, every piece of trivia that could possibly be learned and taught. But he was so self-pompous and self-righteous that he couldn’t accept the fact – something he very definitely should have known – that there was absolutely no way that he or any other human being could ever keep God’s Law in every respect in every day of his life. As a highly trained religious scholar, he would have known the words of Ecclesiastes 7:20: “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” He would have known the words of Isaiah 64:6: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” He asked Jesus what he could do to inherit eternal life, but he ignored the answer that he already knew. He could do nothing. No matter how hard he tried, he could never satisfy the demands of the Law. He could never satisfy God.
What the lawyer needed – what we need – is a Good Samaritan. And that brings us to something that is far more than just a point of trivia, but really one of the major lessons we learn from today’s Gospel lesson. The true Good Samaritan is not some nameless man walking along a road 2,000 years ago in a parable – it’s Jesus. We tend to forget that Jesus was hated and despised by many people during His life on this earth, but that didn’t matter. Jesus is still hated by countless millions or even billions who reject Him and revile Him – but that doesn’t stop Him. Jesus the Good Samaritan has rescued us from death at the hands of those robbers who prowl along the roads of this earthly life – the devil, the world, even your own sinful flesh. Jesus has bound up your wounds with the forgiveness of sins won by the wounds that were inflicted on His holy, sinless body. Jesus the Good Samaritan has delivered you to the care of the Holy Spirit who brought you to faith and who keeps you strong in the one true faith. Jesus the Good Samaritan has prepared a place for us – with Him – in heaven. And until we join Him there, he continues to feed and nourish us with His Word and with His own precious body and blood that we receive in the meal known as the Lord’s Supper.
And while we wait for our Good Samaritan to return in glory on judgment day, we love our neighbors as ourselves every day. Not just by our deeds – but by our words. We have the blessed opportunity to tell others how we have been rescued from eternal death. For as believers in Christ, we have what the lawyer 2,000 years ago wanted – eternal life. We have that inheritance not because we kept the Law in any way, shape or form, but because we have been baptized and forgiven of all our sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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