Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Romans 13:8-10
Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan to the Jewish scholar to show that your neighbor meant anyone he was able to show love to. But just like the closed-minded Jew, I lack imagination in understanding who could be my neighbor.
To most Americans of our day, Jesus might have told a parable about the Good Iraqi, who helped a wounded soldier at cost to himself even though his brother had just the week before been killed by stray shrapnel from a round of American freedom-bombing. Just the sort of story that could get Jesus assassinated.
If He was telling the story to me, though—to someone who thought he had a pretty good grasp of what everyone means—it might go something like this:
Two young adults graduated from college and landed good entry-level jobs in their field of study. Finding themselves with more discretionary income than they knew how to spend, and resolving to plant their feet solidly in the middle class, they each bought a house. Now both of them were handy and decided to fix up the houses on their own.
The first went to remodel his bathroom and found that the previous owners had done a very poor job of painting in corners that were out of plain view. Cheap new tile had also been laid to cover up a mildew problem. In the coming weeks he found many other cases like this where the owners had covered up something in haste to make the house appear better than it was.
The second, meanwhile, finishing the basement, found that his house’s electrical wiring had been updated recently, and in doing so, the last owners had made it very easy for him to wire the basement into the main electrical system. In fact, behind every wall he tore down and inside every light fixture he removed, in every part of the house that had been updated, he found that they had taken great care to do everything even above and beyond the minimum requirements of the residential building code.
Now, I ask you: Which of the previous homeowners was a neighbor to the new homeowner?
“What’s mine is mine” – for now, yes, but it won’t always be that way. This is reason enough to respect all kinds of property.
Who then is my neighbor? Anyone who can be affected by my actions, even if I will never meet him or even know his name.
Good. I could see some political overtones in this but I won’t go there.
Another thought though. Since the original question had to do with eternal life, Luke 10:25, is the whole passage disagreeing with the concept that faith and only faith in Christ saves or is the passage saying, go and do like the man who fell among thieves–love the Good Samaritan who is your neighbor! And who is the rejected despised Samaritan today? Wouldn’t it be the Lord? He came where we were when we were robbed by sin, he picks us up, fixes us up and puts us up in an inn (if you consider that to be a picture of a good fellowship of Christians). I think these parables can be looked at in more than one way.
You can probably infer that we’ve lately been doing a lot of home repairs as well :)
I hadn’t ever considered the parable from that angle before. I’ve given it a lot of thought over the past week or so (hence the delayed response). As you said, the parables can be looked at in more than one way—and every time I realize another of these layer of meaning below something I thought I already understood, it deepens my appreciation for Jesus. So thank you for that!
However, I don’t think that the primary interpretation of the parable (the way Jesus meant it and the way His audience understood it) was that He was the Good Samaritan. (I don’t think you do either, but it helps me internalize all this if I type it all out, so bear with me!) This parable ties back into the age-old faith vs. works discussion—in this case, it’s not just thematically tied but also cross-referentially: James mentions the “royal law”, the same one being discussed here, in 2:8. Then, later on, 2:14-17:
By asking “Can such a faith save him?” James was directly addressing the question of eternal life, as Jesus was. Not because the works are in any way required for salvation, but because they are tied together in such a way that if a person’s faith was unaccompanied by a change of heart (which leads to actions), it might not be saving faith.
So it’s clear from James’s context, as well as its original context in Leviticus, that the “royal law” really does mean to love your neighbor, your fellow human being, in a way that is second only to your love for God. And so to the expert in the law in Luke 10, the one who by his question was hoping to have the concept of neighbor shrunk rather than expanded, Jesus shot down any possibility that the teacher would be able to exclude someone from the second-greatest commandment. There are no free passes that let you ignore a person in need.
I have been doing a lot of traveling and haven’t gotten a chance to think through your comments even though I read them some time back. I like your conclusion that there are no free passes that let you ignore a person in need (yet we all do it all the time so that bothers me)..
This is a case of all of what has been said by both of us being Scriptural and being teachable from other passages in the Bible. So there is no disagreement in doctrine. But every passage has an interpretation and an application or maybe applications. So I tend to think you are giving the application while my comment that the Lord is the Good Samaritan and that we are to do “likewise” or “according to the parable” means that we are to do like the man who fell among the thieves who would have loved a man that his nation rejected. A man that by nature should have passed him by. And I base that on the fact that we obtain eternal life that way.
But maybe I am making the application.