The Lawyer's story - Luke 10.25-37

We are in a wine bar in the neighbourhood of the law courts  in Jerusalem. A small group of lawyers are comparing notes on their recent legal experiences.

So, I’d been wanting to meet him for some time. I’d heard he was a remarkable teacher and as you know we’ve been debating what we have heard of his teaching in the last few weeks. I was out of town recently and when I heard that he was in the next village, I hurried over there. I spent most of the journey thinking what I would ask him. I wasn’t looking for a trick question. I was not planning to catch him out. I did not need to ask him what the scriptures say because of course we know them well enough. But he’d been getting the reputation for saying something new, for going beyond the text in a quite unexpected way. I could not decide what to say.

Serve me right for trying to plan. In the end I surprised myself by going up to him and saying ‘Teacher’, (the right start, I thought) ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ As you know that’s a question which has been bothering a lot of us. We all feel strongly that God has something to come for us all, but we don’t know how to approach it. He had often been reported as giving startling insights into these rather basic questions.

Well, his answer was a question. Of course, that’s not unusual in this kind of discussion. He was not trying to test me any more than I was trying to test him. That was the next step in the debate. He needed to know where I was coming from. So I replied with the texts from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus. And I was rather pleased when he agreed with me that loving God first and then my neighbour as myself was the right answer. I could have added further texts from the Psalms - Psalm 86 ‘I give thanks to you O Lord my God with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name for ever’, or Psalm 111 ‘I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the company of the upright, in the congregation’ ... What? Yes I agree that listing all the texts would be overkill, and as I said, I only mentioned the first two.

Then I stopped thinking and got rather mischievous. Loving my neighbour as myself is open to many interpretations, so I asked him who is my neighbour. Well, the first part of the conversation was important enough. I’m quite convinced that a full love of God is absolutely essential and I’m glad he agreed, but I would not have gone as far as he did after that. I can’t stop thinking about it and nor can the others who were with me.

You see, at that point the conversation changed direction. We stopped discussing scripture and its interpretation, which is what we all like to do, and he started telling a story. Everyone’s been telling it over and over again since. There was this man, you see (have you heard it?) who set off from Jerusalem to Jericho. Well, that was a stupid thing to do on his own, without a mobile too! It’s asking for trouble. So it was no surprise when he got mugged. Yes, I know, you’ve heard the rest - how in the end the only person who would help was someone I would not even stop to talk to. I mean, I don’t really blame the priest and the levite. They are important people and probably had to get somewhere and were running late. But that Samaritan! We do so much to avoid them that I could not even say the word at the end of our conversation. When he asked me who was the neighbour, all I could say was that the neighbour was the one who showed kindness. I wouldn’t even expect a Samaritan to obey God’s law, particularly as we, he and I, had agreed it at the beginning. And then to top it all, he told me, and everyone around, to go and do what the Samaritan did.

So it’s really made me stop and think. Quite a few things. I’ve had to think about what I mean by love. Because the neighbour is to be loved as I love myself - and I feed myself and clothe myself and keep up my house. That’s the simple bit. But you all know what I am like. We’re all quite similar really. I expect a lot of myself professionally, and pride myself on my knowledge of the law, and sometimes I get depressed when I lose a debate or don’t do something as well as I might. I get cross with myself, and I’ve begun to realise that in this kind of frame of mind, I don’t really love myself.

It all turns out to be much bigger than I thought, bigger than just the simple story, striking though it is. In thinking about being gentle with my neighbour, I realised that I have to be gentle with myself too. And I looked at exactly what the Samaritan did. I was, as I said, amazed that he did anything at all. He did what was necessary and he did what he could at the time. Then he went on and did his own business. He did not forget the traveller, but provided for him, and left him in the care of others. So this love of our neighbour is something we share with each other. It’s not something we own ourselves. We do what we can, when we can.

              I could go on. I got really stuck into the deeper implications of the story. Further new ideas came to me as I was falling asleep, but I’ve forgotten them now. ‘Go and do as he did’ is still a challenge. Sometimes I do, sometimes I miss the chance, sometimes I don’t want to. What I’m finding is that if I start on the right lines, with loving God, I seem to be able to pick up the opportunities to love my neighbour. When I’m tied up with my own agenda - and that can include study of the law - I usually blow it. So I have to remember the whole story, and then, things seem to happen. You look as if you don’t believe me. Think about it, see if it works. I’m thirsty after all this talking. My round I think?