Luke 10, July 15, 2001

I would be hard pressed to think of a more important question than what happens to us upon our deaths. One might turn to Holy Scripture, expecting a rich answer with lots of details. After all, we should surely expect that a book that spends chapters and chapters describing the furnishings and dimensions of a tent ought to be willing to shoot a few details about our eventual fates our way! But as it often does, the Bible surprises us.

In our gospel lesson for this day, a young lawyer asks this most important question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Luke placed the familiar story of the Good Samaritan in the midst of Jesus’ conversation with this lawyer. The parable is unique to this gospel so it may give us some insight into Luke's view of Jesus. But we need to get clear about something. A "lawyer" in first-century Israel was really a scribe or expert in the Law of Moses. The rules and regulations of the Torah governed how the people of Israel were supposed to behave. So far, so good. Less happily, the young lawyer felt that the teachings of Jesus were a threat to his carefully ordered, rule-governed world. In what was probably an effort to expose Jesus as a religious fraud, he asked Jesus about eternal life.

As he often did, Jesus responded to one question by asking another, namely, "What does the law say?" The lawyer’s response was flawless: "to love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and to love your neighbor as yourself." But the young barrister in the Mosaic law had no intention of dropping his cross-examination of Jesus, so he asked, "And who is my neighbor?" The question of neighbors in the Middle East has always, of course, been a particularly vexing one. Instead of addressing this question head on and falling into the lawyer's trap, however, Jesus chose to tell a parable.

Parables are curious little critters, designed as they are to lure us into the charm of story and outcome. But parables often also serve the purpose of exposing our pretentions and turning our worlds upside down. Indeed, sometimes our worlds need turning upside down.

A Setting in the "Path of Blood"

The setting of the parable is the infamous "Path of Blood," the seventeen-mile road that links Jerusalem with Jericho. The geography makes the road a particularly frightening one. Jerusalem is 2,300 feet above sea level; Jericho is 770 feet below sea level. That 3,070-foot drop feels particularly precipitous because the road is so narrow.

The road was named the "Path of Blood" because its rough terrain made it an ideal place for ambushes by thieves and bandits of various sorts. In a vicious attack, as relayed in the parable, robbers took everything the traveler had, stripped and beat him, and left him half dead at the side of the road.

The first two men to happen by were respected pillars of Jewish religious life. Priests served in the Jerusalem temple and Levites were the descendents of the tribe of Levi, men set apart by Moses for religious duties. In modern day terms, we can think of a Levite as approximating a deacon. Both men, upon seeing the injured man, purposely crossed to the other side of the road and continued on their way. It is natural for us to be angered by what we take to be the obvious hypocrisy of these two men.

Before condeming the two men too quickly, however, we should remember that the Jews believed that anyone who touched a corpse was "defiled." In the Old Testament, Numbers 19 instructs us, "Those who touch the dead body of any human being shall be unclean for seven days. ... All who touch a corpse, the body of a human being who has died, and do not purify themselves, defile the tabernacle of the Lord; such persons shall be cut off from Israel." Neither the priest nor the Levite would have been allowed into the temple or given any religious duties during that seven day period, so they would have been inclined to refuse defilement by stopping to help what they viewed as a dying man.

Estranged Cousins and a Final Question

The third person to come upon this grizzly scene was a Samaritan. The Samaritans were religious cousins of the Jews who nonetheless rejected the core of Judaism, that the temple in Jerusalem was established by God as the center of true religion. The Samaritans had their own temple in the north. The racially mixed Samaritans were descendents of the ten northern tribes and their Assyrian captors--and were therefore considered by the Jews to be "half breeds." The Jews were appalled by the Samaritans’ religious practices as well as their ethnic heritage and refused to have anything to do with them.

In practice, the antipathy was even more intense. If a Jew were forced to buy something from a Samaritan, for instance, the Samaritan would ofen insist that the money be washed before it touched his or her hands. If a Samaritan entered a Jewish village, the Jews would sometimes burn the path on which the Samaritan walked, to make it clean again.

As a result, Jesus’ Jewish audience would have been angered to hear that the Samaritan was the hero of the parable. The text says that the Samaritan was "moved with pity." The Greek word used here means the type of compassion that springs from the very center of one’s soul. The Samaritan applied the kind of aid he would have been able to provide--pouring wine and oil to disinfect the wounds--before bandaging them. The Samaritan then put the Jew on his animal and took him to an inn, where he paid two denarii--or the equivalent of two days wages--for the man’s room and board. He promised the innkeeper to stop again on his return and cover any additional expenses for the Jew’s care.

Jesus concluded his parable by posing one final question to the lawyer, namely, "Which of the three men proved to be a neighbor?" The lawyer knew the right answer, but it must have been revolting for him to verbalize it. Of course, it was the one who showed great mercy, namely the Samaritan. Ceremonially unclean, socially outcast, and religiously a heretic, the Samaritan was the last person any Jewish lawyer would have wanted as the hero of the parable or, more importantly, as a neighbor in the eyes of the Law of Moses.

 

Eternal Life

We might suppose that the meaning of the phrase “eternal life” is obvious. But it turns out that the phrase "to inherit eternal life" is much richer than simply the account of what happens upon our deaths. Its deeper meaning hints at a life where one breaks free of the many restraints which are too typical of human existence.

In the Bible, human life is often portrayed as a mystery which is beyond our understanding. On the one hand, it is recognized in Gen. 9 that life is related with blood. We are bodily creatures and traditional Jews knew nothing of a life beyond this one. It was only during the Intertestamental period that some Jews came to believe in a resurrection of the body. It was the Greeks, not the Jews, who gave us the idea of a soul.

As a result, the phrase "to inherit eternal life" reflects more than a simple description of the time after our deaths. I’ll say again: its deeper meaning hints at a life where one is free of the restraints typical of human existence. Eternal life has to do with breaking free of these restraints and the Bible is far more interested in calling us to such a life now than it is in describing heavenly accommodations.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is questioned about the promise of eternal life. Jesus answers that the Law commands love of God and of one’s neighbor. In the Gospel of Luke, however, the conclusion is particularly personal, specifically, "Do this, and you will live." The lawyer wishes to achieve his salvation by following traditional Mosaic rules. And there is something to be said for that. But for Jesus, loving God and one’s neighbor is the way God’s will regarding eternal life is realized on earth.

Loving the neighbor is indeed the day that eternal life begins. As we embody the love of Christ for our neighbor, our eternal life has already begun. In effect, God says, “Take care of this and I will take care of all the rest.” The Bible is just full of surprises.