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When the Good Samaritan is Bad News
A sermon by
Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Fifth in a series on “The Mirror Stories of Jesus”
Sunday, October 29, 2006
A newspaper headline
read recently, “Good Samaritan Injured While Trying to Help.” Good Samaritan—two
words that have become part of our language vocabulary. You can find them in
dictionaries. You can find them in encyclopedias. Good many Americans do not
realize that Good Samaritan comes from one of the parables of Jesus and good
many Christians know the parable well, but would have no idea where to find it.
I’ll show you. Turn to Luke 10, the 25th verse.
The parable comes about
because of a question. On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test
Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus
answered with a question, “What is written in the law?” he replied. “How do you
read it?” He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all you heart, with all your
soul, with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as
yourself.” It was customary in ancient Israel to answer a question with a
question. The late John Claypool once asked a Jewish friend of his why it was
that Jewish people often answered questions with questions. His friend got a big
grin on his face and said, “Why not?”
This is what’s going on
here. An expert in the law has asked a question and Jesus has come right back
with another two questions. Now, the four verses that I have read are incredibly
strategic to the whole Bible. Jesus calls this in another place The Great
Commandment. Now he answers it in the light of the question, what must I do to
inherit eternal life? There are, you see, two dimensions that the scripture
gives us. The first one is a vertical dimension. It has to do with our
allegiance to God. You love God with all of your heart, your soul, your
strength, your mind. Vertical. Of course, part of our problem there is we keep
transferring what ought to be God’s to something that we can control and
manipulate here on earth. And one of the things Jesus did when he tried to bring
people into his kingdom was to puncture the balloon of their idolatry—that is,
what they had transferred or what they had lended that was supposed to be
God’s. To the rich young ruler, it was wealth. To the woman at the well—John
4—was sensuality. And for Nicodemus in John 3 it was his stature in the
community.
But friends, there is
another dimension to our allegiance and it is horizontal. Vertical and
horizontal are both so crucial and that’s why the law is given “love your
neighbor as yourself.” The first part of that, the vertical, comes from
Deuteronomy 6:5; the last part comes from Leviticus 19:18. Both are Old
Testament. Both are wrapped together by Jesus the Lord. The answer that Jesus
gives and the affirmation is, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will
live.” Typically he asks another question, “Who is my neighbor?” In other words,
who am I responsible for? And typically Jesus, he tells a story, a parable.
He says in his parable
that a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands
of robbers and they stripped him of his clothes and beat him and went away
leaving him half dead. Went down from Jerusalem to Jericho—it’s almost an
understatement. You see, it’s 2300 feet above sea level in Jerusalem. The
highest point except north at Mount Herman of any place in what we call the Holy
Land. Jericho, on the other hand, is right next to the Dead Sea which is 1300
feet below sea level. So you are talking about 3600 feet in elevation from
Jerusalem to Jericho. And it is rugged. Rugged, rugged territory. And not only
that, on both sides of the way is desert and so the robbers would come, they
would rob the person, often wound him, then they would slide back into the
desert. This precipitous way was known as the Red and Bloody Way. So much
violence occurred there.
Now, here is a man who
perhaps in the morning heard his wife say, “Don’t go.” But he went anyway. Why
would anybody go with as much track record to give it the name Red and
Bloody. Well, you see, Jericho was a terrifically rich city. And Jerusalem
was the hub, the capitol of everything. No email, no faxes. They had to carry it
back and forth. Perhaps he had a big deal, who knows. At any rate he went and
he fell among robbers. The good news is three people walked by that could help
him. The bad news is two of them walked by on the other side. The first was a
priest. He was the wounded man—he passed by the wounded man on the other side.
Priest was significant, man of stature, he was the man that represented the
people to God and God to the people. He was the one who walked into the Holy
Place and offered their sacrifices. He was the one who blessed them on high and
holy days. A priest. Why would he walk by on the other side? My guess is because
he was in a hurry to get to a religious meeting.
In Princeton they did a
study some years ago. A seminary professor asked 15 students in one of his
classes to help him. They arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon. Each one of
the 15—they were divided into three groups of five—were given some instructions.
The first five were coded as the High Hurry Group. The High Hurry
Group. They were told they had 15 minutes to get across the campus and they
were to attend a very, very important meeting. They had no time to waste and if
they were late their grades would suffer.
The second five, they
were called the Medium Hurry Group. They were instructed that they had 45
minutes. Take their time, but don’t be late.
The third group was
called and coded The Low Hurry Group. All they were told was there’s a
meeting and you need to be there at 5 o’clock. Don’t be late.
Unbeknownst to any of
these students, the professor had arranged with some drama majors to help him.
And three of them were where those students had to walk. One of them, through
the afternoon, had his head in his hands and was sobbing and moaning. The second
one was stretched out on the lawn as if he had had a seizure. And the third one,
was stretched, also, but was writhing, moaning, groaning, obviously in trouble.
All 15 of the students
made their way to the appropriate place, but here’s what happened. Of the five
in the High Hurry Group, not one of them stopped at any of the three who
were in trouble.
Of the Medium Hurry
Group, two out of the five stopped and tried to give aid.
Of the Low Hurry
Group, all five stopped to try to assist these who were suffering. All 15
of these aspired to become ministers.
What is the lesson to be
learned? Can we hear it? There is a tie between our schedules and our
discipleship. There is a tie between the crunch of our hourly date book and our
compassion. The stress we live under has ethical, spiritual and moral
implications. It is not simply scheduling.
Let me ask you a
question. Have you recognized that you live in a culture that Satan has somehow
shrewdly manipulated so that children are scheduled so that they may not even
have a childhood. And youth are so scheduled with homework they have no time to
learn relationships... and prayer and Bible study. Adults, we are scheduled so
tightly that most of us are just trying to survive.
The priest walked by on
the other side. The second of these was the Levite. Now the Levites were kind of
second-rung temple functionaries, but they were the experts in the law, the fine
points of it all. They were the policemen. They were the ones who said, “This
is not being observed.” These were the ones who pointed out how to interpret it
all. Anyone traveling on this road and passing by a man who was injured
and hurt probably would step back and put his hand on his chin and reason like
this: “Why would anybody be traveling on this road alone with items of value?
Everybody knows that this is the Red and Bloody Way. The victim deserves
what he gets if he hasn’t any better sense than that. He made is bed, now let
him lie in it.” From Jesus’ point of view at least, bad news.
Then there was another.
The Samaritan. Well who was a Samaritan? Well any time a Jew married a non-Jew,
the children were called Samaritans. We probably wouldn’t be able to tell the
difference, but their neighbors could or they could.
It reminds me a little
bit of a time in 1989 when on a sabbatical I went across the ocean to teach at
our seminary in Arusha, Tanzania, East Africa. And at the close we invited our
three sons and their wives to come and spend some time with us. They were
delighted to do so and we were delighted to see them. We had a grand and
wonderful time, part of which was on the Indian Ocean, white sand, azure water,
magnificent place. One morning I got up early and I walked down the shoreline.
Walked a long ways. When I came back, Shirley was gone. I knocked on the other
doors. They were gone. I looked where we would have breakfast. Not there. I
looked around the grounds. Not there. So I went to the front desk where the
wonderful African lady in perfect English said, “May I help you, Sir?” And I
said, “Yes. I wonder if you have seen my family.” And I described each one of
them, one by one. And when I had finished, she said, “Aw, I’m sorry, Sir. All of
you white people look alike to me.” As it turned out, Shirley and our sons and
their wives had walked down the beach as well the other direction.
If we had been there, I
doubt we could have told the difference between a Samaritan and a Jew. They
could and therein is the problem; for they ostracized the Samaritans. Now there
are three things that a Samaritan can do. You can see this in Iraq being played
out on the front pages. When you are ostracized by a segment of the culture, by
a segment of the population, one thing you can do is just slide into the
woodwork into the shadows and try to survive. The second thing you can do is
rebel. To rebel against those who hate you and to return the same hatred. The
third way to use what has happened to you to understand others who may be in the
same situation. I believe that is what happened with the Good Samaritan. He knew
what it was to be wounded. Knew what it was to be walked around. Knew what it
was to be abandoned, ostracized, hated. And now he stops. The next day he took
out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, for he had taken the
wounded man on his own donkey to the inn. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I
return I will reimburse you for any extra expense that you have.”
You want to help. Take
what has happened to you. . . Listen to Paul. 2 Corinthians 1st
chapter. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father
of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all of our troubles
so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have
received from God.”
Look in the mirror,
friend. Which one of these characters are you? Are you the wounded one? Feel
abandoned and left by the side of the road? Are you the one who is just so busy
that finally the crunch of your calendar is ruling your relationship to God and
others? Are you the Levite, who is kind of the policeman and running everybody
through your own filter on who you would accept or won’t accept. Or, are you the
Good Samaritan. The one who having been hurt knows how to use that hurt to help
others.
Whichever one of these
you see in the mirror of your own soul, there was a day, there was a life when
God became your Good Samaritan. And in Jesus Christ, God’s son and our Savior,
he became like a Good Samaritan for all of us. God in Christ, stripped of
everything he owned, wounded and beaten, put on a cross and buried in a borrowed
tomb. But the Father raised him up. He come to us with a smile on his face, he’s
here this morning. You can’t see him, but I’m gonna tell you this—he’s here! And
there’s a smile. And what he does is come with our wounds. He puts on the oil of
love. Bandages them with his own forgiveness and care. And then he puts us on
his own donkey called GRACE.
Most of the time, here’s
what we do. We say, “Lord, I can handle this all by myself.” But there comes a
time when we realize we can’t. And we turn and we say, “Lord, I give it to you”
and the Lord bandages us up and he puts us on the donkey called grace and
he walks along with us, side by side.
Don’t leave here without
the eternal, divine Good Samaritan.
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