Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

Text: Luke 10:23-37
Date: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost9/10/06

  The first verses of the Gospel for today actually constitute the end of a major section of St. Luke's Gospel (9:51—10:24). The theme is the hiding and revealing by God of the wisdom of the Gospel. As we have been seeing in the past number of weeks, Christians owe their entire faith and salvation from beginning to end not to any worthiness, merit or effort of their part but solely to God, specifically the Holy Spirit, who, prompted by His grace in Christ and operating through the means of grace, calls, converts, justifies and sanctifies and keeps them in the faith. We have repeatedly heard the truth that, because of the fallen, sinful nature of all men, no person has the least ability on their own to come to faith, to believe in Jesus Christ. Oh, they may “believe” that He existed in Palestine at the beginning of what our calendars mark as the “common era,” in the same way that we “believe” Hitler or some other person in history existed, but no one can decide to follow Jesus, to “join” His Church like they can decide between or join a political party, a union, a health club or an auto insurance plan. When it comes to salvation from sin and death and our separation from God, the scriptures are clear; because of the total depravity of the fallen nature, no one has the least ability to believe in Jesus Christ the Lord or come to him. The only way saving faith enters the heart and mind of the sinner is by means of the Holy Spirit working the miracle of faith, when and where it pleases God, in those who hear the Gospel. When Jesus said to his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see,” and the ears that hear what you hear, He means to emphasize that faith is that spiritual sight and hearing that God gives and works in a person who has been brought to repentance and conversion by the Holy Spirit through the Word of the Gospel that centers in and is all about Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of the world. This conversion and this faith is called the Great Reversal as described in the old hymn, Amazing Grace, when it says, “I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind but now I see!” [LSB 744:1]. To be Biblically and doctrinally accurate, sinners do not really “accept” Jesus Christ as their Savior as much as they “receive” Him. He comes to us. We do not indeed cannot flee to Him on our own strength, effort or reasoning.

  This hiding and revealing of the wisdom of the Gospel, this distinction between spiritual blindness and saving faith, then, is illustrated in the approach of a lawyer coming to Jesus with the question, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” and Jesus' story we call “The Good Samaritan.”

  First of all, that our English Bibles translate the word as “lawyer” should not conjure up images of what we call lawyers. The man is not a representative of 1-800-CALL-SAM. This man is a leader of the Jewish people, an expert in the administration and understanding of the Law of God, a member of the Pharisees, a teacher of the Torah, the Bible, like the scribes. And Luke wants us to notice, right off the bat, that this was no so-called “innocent” inquiry as of a poor sinner seeking help and salvation. It was a confrontation calculated and designed to catch Jesus in some error, to prove that He was actually a law-breaker, to expose Him as a false teacher and a loveless troubler of Israel.

  Now what's wrong with this question? “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” If you zeroed in on the word “do” you are correct. The question is the same as all spiritually blind sinners and hypocrites who think of salvation or membership in the household of God a result of their being qualified as good enough to deserve eternal life. I would simply turn the question by asking another question, “what does a person ‘do' to receive, say, a family inheritance?” The answer is, nothing! An inheritance is not normally the result of something you have done but of who you are, namely, a member of the family of the deceased.

  Seeing through not only this man's evil intent but also his spiritual blindness, Jesus (in good Jewish fashion) answers the man's question with another question. “He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? How do you read it?'” Well, the man has been a good Jewish boy brought up in Hebrew school and through the rite of his Bar Mitzvah, so he knew the “catechism” answer to the question as he simply recites “the creed” every good Jew has been taught, the Shema Israel, “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.” Jesus responded to the Law question with the appropriate Law answer, as much as if he were saying, “Okay. If you want to be saved (justified) according to the Law, then do it.” “Do this, and you will live.” That's true, you know. But the problem, as we said to begin with, is that, because of sin, because of the fallen nature of all men, no one is able to live perfectly according to God's Law, for perfection is the only passing grade.

  The real issue that the lawyer cannot see or understand, that is hidden from his eyes, is that the Torah or the Law of God is part of the God-given means to eternal life, meant to reveal that this life comes purely by grace through faith, which is active in love (Gal. 5:6). Conversely, the lawyer attempts (and fails) to justify himself by twisting the Torah, the Law of God, into a legalistic system that he thinks excuses him from showing love to all others. The lawyer, you see, is not content with God's answer of love. He wants to stay focused on codifying his deeds of love; he wants to assert his own righteousness and his claim to deserve eternal life. Therefore follows the second round of two questions.

  “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?'” This too is not an innocent question simply asking for information. The lawyer becomes defensive. He knows that he has been put in an indefensible position, that if he claims he does love God, he should love his neighbor as well. To profess love for God but to hate one's neighbor is hypocrisy as St. John so clearly demonstrates in his first epistle (1 John 2:3-6, 9-11; 3:11-24; 4:19-21). If the lawyer professes to love his neighbor as himself, someone can ask, “Where is the evidence?” And so, you see, the lawyer begins to squirm. He tries to deflect attention away from himself by implying that the Law is the problem, that the Law is unclear. It is necessary to clarify who is “neighbor” and (more importantly!) who is not, to divide between “us” and “them.” The question “Who is my neighbor?” implies that there are some people who are not my neighbor. He's asking Jesus for the kinds of people He would exclude from his love. And anyone vaguely familiar with Jesus' ministry up to this point should know that as Jesus fulfills the Old Testament in his ministry, absolutely no one is excluded from his love.

  As with the first question, Jesus answers the man's second question with another question. But first, he tells a story that will prepare for and clarify it. So He spins this story involving this man's world of heroes and villains, namely, the super-religious priests and Levites on the one hand, who would have been on the top of the lawyer's list of “neighbors” to be loved, and the despised Samaritans on the other. (By the way, it is interesting to me that, in our otherwise secularized even anti-religion public square in America these days, people, like in a recent “On Star” commercial, use the phrase “Good Samaritan” apparently ignorant that this phrase comes from the Christian Bible!) Samaritans were once Israelites of the former northern kingdom of Israel. Because they despised the Lord's covenant, they were exiled in Assyria, where they “went after false idols and became false” (2 Kings 17:15). Therefore they were no longer true Israelites. They were considered unclean and marriage with them was prohibited. They were to be avoided and despised. Like the so-called radical Muslim's of future days, they probably felt that it was even God-pleasing to show hatred toward Samaritans and Gentiles as “unclean,” “infidels” and unbelievers.

  The story is simple. A man, apparently a fellow Jew, is going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. The first man to discover him was a priest who intentionally passes by on the other side of the road. The second was a Levite, again a good “church worker” we might say. But he follows the priest's example passing by on the other side of the road. Now one might expect the third person to be a lay person “coming home from church.” But the great surprise is that the third traveler is a Samaritan, the last person the lawyer would expect to be held before him as an example of one who fulfills the Law by loving his neighbor as himself. So runs the theme of the Great Reversal that runs throughout Luke's gospel.

  The Good Samaritan stands at the center of this story with his compassion. So then, Jesus' question for the lawyer, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” Of course the answer is “the one who did the merciful thing for him.” “Go and you do likewise,” says Jesus. In this way Jesus challenged the man to cease and desist his legal maneuvers to avoid the central issue. God, as revealed in the Torah, the Law of God, and especially as revealed in Jesus, is the God of love, mercy, and compassion.

  Now, what, do you think, happened to this lawyer as a result of his conversation with, his confrontation of Jesus? We're not told. It was possible that he may have had a spiritual awakening, given eyes to see and ears to hear, and discovered the truth in Jesus that God is a God of love, mercy and compassion and that he would then respond in like manner showing this love, mercy and compassion to all others as neighbor, dropping his former prejudices, racism and wrongful discrimination. It was also possible that he may have just walked away bewildered at Jesus, maybe with even greater antagonism thinking Jesus is just confused, talking through his hat, a religious weirdo. We don't know. Such is the mystery of faith on the one hand and the rejection of God and His Word on the other.

  So while the story of the Good Samaritan can speak to each of us, the real story here is that of the antagonistic lawyer! Legalists of every age who cross-examine Jesus like this make no progress until they recognize that they are the man in the story lying half dead on the road and Jesus is the one who does mercy as neighbor. The lawyer says, “I will act to love my neighbor as myself; tell me who he is.” But Jesus answers, “You cannot act, for you are dead. You need someone to love you, show mercy to you, heal you, pay for you, give you lodging, revive you. I am the one you despise because I associate with sinners, but in fact I am the one who fulfills the Law, who embodies the Torah, and who brings God's mercy. I am your neighbor and will give you the gifts of mercy, healing, life. [Only] as I live in you, you will have life and will do mercy—not motivated by laws and definitions, but animated by my love” [Just, p. 454].

  You see, my friends, likewise, you are the poor, half dead man lying at the side of the road and the Good Samaritan is Jesus! Central to his teaching for you is his exhortation to “love your enemies” (Luke 6:27) and to “become merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). What clearly identifies Christians as Christians is their inclusiveness, their unity in Christ, their works of reconciliation showing mercy toward all.

____________________
Rev. Allen D. Lunneberg

Contacts:

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Pastor: Rev. Allen D. Lunneberg
7979 Commerce Rd.      (1/4 mile east of Union Lake Rd.)
West Bloomfield, MI 48324
Phone: 248.363.0741
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