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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Jesus' point here is not that Levites are bad guys or that all professional ministers are jerks, nor is his point that Samaritans are cute and cuddly and full of gold coins. The point here is about the inversion of our expectation. The fact that our mental model of the world is not always an accurate predictor of outcomes. Today is the first Sunday of Lent. And if you come from a tradition that hasn't participated in Lent before, maybe you're wondering why I'm wearing purple right now, Lent is the season that marks out the sacredness of our participation and preparation in the celebration of Easter.
Jeremy Duncan:And, well, later traditions like Ash Wednesday and some of the specifics that some churches follow during Lent, those were developed over the centuries. Way back in March, at the very first council of Nicea, we get a reference in canon five to the forty days before Easter as a period of preparation so that, quote, all bitterness may be removed ahead of our holy celebration. Which means that for more than seventeen hundred years now, Christians have been using this period right now to think and reflect and repent and ready themselves for Easter. Now, maybe you're looking at the calendar and you're doing the math and you're like, Jeremy, I think you're a little early. There are more than forty days until Easter.
Jeremy Duncan:You're not wrong. Here's the thing about the church. Nothing is ever as straight war forward as it should be. And so, Lent is a forty day period from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. But the thing is, every Sunday along the way, and there are six of them, each of these are seen as a little mini celebration of resurrection on the journey.
Jeremy Duncan:And so, there's actually forty six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but six of them are Sundays, which makes today and each of the Sundays during Lent a little pause, a little celebration, a little bit of practice for what is coming with Easter. And so this year, we've chosen to use those mini celebrations each Sunday to talk about grace. So let's pray, and then we will first jump into our parable of grace. God of grace and of peace. As we begin this season together, become aware that there is perhaps bitterness in us that needs loosening or assumptions that need softening, maybe boundaries that we have drawn that you never asked us to.
Jeremy Duncan:And so would you slow us down, quiet the noise of our certainty and our uncertainty, Interrupt the stories that we tell ourselves about who belongs and who doesn't. Give us courage to let your spirit examine us today. And then where we are defensive, make us curious. Where we're guarded, make us generous. Where we have limited our love, would you stretch it wider than we imagined possible?
Jeremy Duncan:And then, would you teach us what it means to live, not someday, but here and now in the life of your kingdom. Wake us up to the grace that is already moving toward us and the grace that you long to move through us to your world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. The parables of grace.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, that's not an official category or anything. There are actually lots of different ways to break up or sort or maybe classify Jesus' parables. He told a lot of stories about a lot of different things. And depending on how you count, most of us agree there are between thirty five and forty parables littered throughout Jesus' teachings in the gospels. However, even that number is a little bit fuzzy because even what constitutes a parable is a little hard to nail down.
Jeremy Duncan:The Greek parabole literally means to place alongside. And so that would seem to include almost any short simile or metaphor anywhere that two ideas are contrasted or compared. So places where Jesus sends things like I am the vine, for example, could fit. However, in Hebrew, there's also a category called a Mashal. And Mashal, like parable life, simply means likeness or comparison, which is again pretty broad.
Jeremy Duncan:But in Hebrew practice, a Mashal was more than just the image or the metaphor itself. It was the story that revealed that likeness. And so this is why generally, when we talk about Jesus' parables, we tend to limit those to the stories that Jesus told to draw together the comparison or the likeness or importantly, sometimes the contrast between two ideas. And so for the season of Lent through Easter, we will look together at seven of these stories that illuminate something about grace for us. And today, that first story is the good Samaritan.
Jeremy Duncan:And so to cover that, we will talk about lawyers and tests and stories and neighbors. But might as well start at the start of this section. So this is Luke chapter 10 starting in verse 25 where we read, on one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Well, what's written in the law?
Jeremy Duncan:Jesus replied. How do you read it? And he answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. You've answered correctly, Jesus replied. Do this, and you will live.
Jeremy Duncan:But he wanted to justify himself, and so he pressed. He asked Jesus, and who exactly is my neighbor? Now, we haven't gotten to our parable yet. We will. It's coming.
Jeremy Duncan:I promise. But there is just so much fascinating stuff going on already in this interaction. And first, we gotta understand the scene that Luke is setting for us right from the start. In English, we read that an expert of the law stood up to test Jesus. Expert in the law is fine, but technically, the Greek term here is simply lawyer.
Jeremy Duncan:Don't misunderstand. This is not the person whose job was to get you off when you parked your camel a little too long in the wrong spot. This was almost certainly an expert in religious law, Torah. What's interesting though is Luke, in contrast to all the other gospel writers, likes to use this term, nomocross, to describe perhaps as a commentary on how some of these groups were interpreting and using religious texts. This was no longer God's word.
Jeremy Duncan:These were now legal texts to be interpreted and wielded. And so, perhaps to emphasize that, we get some very carefully chosen words in this opening section. In English, we read that he stood up to test Jesus, but this should probably possibly better be translated he stood before Jesus to test him. That posture, along with the honorific teacher, as he addresses Jesus, all of this is coded as very deferential. In fact, when Jesus meets a question with his own question, the man responds back with a quote from Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:Now to be clear, he is quoting scripture, specifically Deuteronomy six and Leviticus 19. But this is also precisely the formulation that Jesus gives in Matthew 22 and in Mark 12 and a paraphrase over in John 13 as well. In other words, dude has heard Jesus speak before, and he's been listening. And yet, Luke clues us in on an important bit of context right in the opening verse with a tiny two letter prefix. See, we read that this man wants to test Jesus, and I will grant, in English, that sounds kind of antagonistic right from the start.
Jeremy Duncan:But the root word here for test actually indicates something more like an honest inquiry. And the Jewish tradition is full of people testing and challenging and learning from each other. So testing's not a problem. It's actually a sign of virtue. What Luke does though is he uses that normal word for honest inquiry, and he prefixes this little word eck on the front.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, on its own, that prefix indicates separation or movement out of or away from. But what it does is it turns the meaning of this word from test into something more like tempt or maybe even entrap. And what that means is that when you're reading the story in Greek, right from the start, you get the impression that one, this guy is up to no good, and two, he is being exceedingly polite about it all. In other words, he's a very good lawyer. And so part of the tension that Luke is trying to build is that he's giving us, he's giving you a reader insight into the intention behind this question, but he's leading you to make out whether Jesus will see through it.
Jeremy Duncan:And pretty quickly, I think, we see that he does. In particular, I think his response is telling. What's written in the law, Jesus replied, how do you read it? And at first glance, I think our instinct is just to keep going, move through the story, get to the good part. But think about the implication here.
Jeremy Duncan:Jesus is saying that knowing what something says is not the same thing as knowing what it means. Jesus is implying the bible is not self evident. Jesus is reminding us that we are, all of us, always interpreting everything that we read. I think that's important. How many times have you heard someone say, well, I just believe the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:Or the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it. Or I've heard this one a lot before. We have to accept the plain reading of scripture.
Jeremy Duncan:Look. I'll be honest. I think if I ever tried that one, Jesus might look back at me and say, buddy, I love you. But there is nothing plain about reading a text that you can't even begin to make sense of without all your fancy grammars and lexicons. Like, let's be honest here, friend.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, that doesn't mean I think the bible is a lost cause or that we should leave it all to the lawyers. There's this old idea called the perspicuity of the scriptures. That means the scriptures are clear and they are intelligible. And I can get down with that. Absolutely.
Jeremy Duncan:Jesus himself tells us that the kingdom of God belongs to little children, no graduate education necessary. But what the perspicuity of scriptures historically has meant is not the scriptures are easy to interpret or plain or that the details are simple to negotiate. What it has meant is that the large arc of the story, the good news of Jesus and our welcome into divine embrace, anyone can pick up on that, even a child. It does not mean, however, that everything is simple or plain or easy to understand. In fact, you can absolutely affirm that the good news of Jesus is clear and simple, and yet acknowledge that we still have to ask each other all the time, how do you read it?
Jeremy Duncan:We are interpreting. However, there's one more thing we need to talk about here before we get to the meat of our story. The man opens with the question, how do I inherit eternal life? Jesus says, well, tell me what the scriptures say. The man replies, love God, love people, and I love that, by the way.
Jeremy Duncan:But then Jesus responds, good answer. Do this and you will live. Now, what I wanna point out here is that Jesus does not respond, do this and you will live forever. And this is one of the quirks of the English translation because we just don't have a great English word to translate what's really going on here in the text. The Greek word is aionios, and that has a range of meaning, which can include eternal.
Jeremy Duncan:But in a Jewish context, what Zoein Aionion is referring to is not eternal life. What it's referring to is the Olom Habah or the life of the age to come. Now understand, many Jewish people at the time of Jesus absolutely did believe that the life of the age to come would also be a life that would be devoid of death. Isaiah twenty five eight says, the Lord will swallow up death forever after all. So eternal life is fine as far as it goes.
Jeremy Duncan:The problem is it only gets part of the picture. The lawyer isn't asking, how do I attain life after I die? What he's asking is something more like, how can I experience a life that never ends? And those are two subtly, but I would say importantly very different things. One begins someday, at some point, down the road, when something unfortunate like a bus hits you.
Jeremy Duncan:Yeah. All about preparing for a future eventuality. The other, on the other hand, is about stepping into that reality right now. It's about living the kind of life that will outrun your death. That's why Jesus can respond.
Jeremy Duncan:Do this and you will live. Because he's not talking about life after death. He's talking about this man stepping into the kind of life that God wants for him today. And, that should inform how we read the parable that follows. Okay.
Jeremy Duncan:The man says, I love my neighbor, but how do I know how to draw the line? This is verse 30. In reply, Jesus said, a man was going down from Jericho to Jerusalem when he was attacked by robbers. And they stripped him of his clothes. They beat him, and they went away leaving him half dead.
Jeremy Duncan:A priest though happened to be going down the same road. And when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So to a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, he passed on the other side as well. But then a Samaritan, as he traveled, came to the place where the man was, and he saw him. He took pity on him.
Jeremy Duncan:And he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day, he took out two denarii, and he gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said. When I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you might have.
Jeremy Duncan:Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? Now, first of all, very familiar story. Even if you have never cracked a bible before, you likely know what a good Samaritan is all about. And for example, we even have good Samaritan laws in Canada that are designed to insulate you from lawsuits should you attempt a Samaritan like service for your neighbor. So problem is, that means we often have to do a little bit of work to reach below the surface of a story we think we already understand.
Jeremy Duncan:And for this one, there are some interesting things to think about. First of all, Jesus doesn't introduce this one as a parable. So, often he'll say something like, suppose you have a 100 sheep or the kingdom of God is like. Here he simply says, a man was going down to Jericho. And, actually, technically, if we wanna get specific here, what he says is a certain man was going down to Jericho.
Jeremy Duncan:And because of this, for centuries, people have wondered about whether I mean, is this a parable at all? Like, did this happen to someone? Did Jesus see this happen to someone? Did this happen to Jesus? That's probably not what is intended here.
Jeremy Duncan:It is interesting though that Jesus doesn't feel the need to tell this as a wildly speculative story. He decides to set this very much in the real world. This is a story rooted in a world where people get mugged, and people hurt each other, and, sadly, people ignore each other. I I think that's actually important for understanding the story. Like other parables, Jesus is not asking for a suspension of disbelief.
Jeremy Duncan:He's asking us to think about the world that's around us right now. And, again, I think that's important to understand the question of eternal life in its context. This story isn't about something you do now to earn something then. This story is about how you enter the life of the age to come right where you are in this world. So, how do we do that?
Jeremy Duncan:Well, let's look at the story here. A man was going down to Jericho. That's about a 30 kilometer walk from Jerusalem with a drop in elevation of about 3,000 feet depending on where you start and where you end up in Jericho. So a long trip, although certainly one that would take you outside the cities into less traveled places, certainly one that could be treacherous, but also at the same time, certainly a walk that was doable and at the time that people would have done reasonably regularly. Unfortunately, however, this particular man is traveling alone, and he's confronted by robbers.
Jeremy Duncan:He's beaten and left for dead. Lucky for him, here comes some passerbys. And this almost feels like the setup for a joke. Right? Like a priest, a Levite, a Samaritan walk into the bar, and the bartender says, what is this?
Jeremy Duncan:Some kind of parable? I don't know. What who knows? But what we actually get, of course, is this contrast in their responses. Now a Levite and a priest.
Jeremy Duncan:What's the difference there? Well, Levites were the tribe that the priests came from. The priests, though, were the direct descendants of Aaron. So the bottom line here is all priests are Levites. Not all Levites are priests.
Jeremy Duncan:However, both would have been highly esteemed, well regarded from birth, and expected to be model religious citizens. And yet, neither step in to help this guy. And it's been argued that there may be a good reason for that. Is he potentially a Levite, but certainly a priest? If they were going the opposite way, up from Jericho to Jerusalem, then it's very possible they would have been heading there to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people.
Jeremy Duncan:And that meant that if they touched a dead body or in some circumstances even contaminated themselves with blood, they would be ritually unclean for a certain period to offer said sacrifices. And, I mean, Jesus does say the guy is left for dead after all. If he is indeed dead, perhaps better to just continue on with what you're doing, particularly if what you're doing is in service of others. So maybe this is an obligation of duty kind of situation, not an ignore someone in need kind of moment. And I can certainly appreciate that as a rhetorical goal.
Jeremy Duncan:It helps to humanize these guys a bit. They're not heartless. I mean, they're just pragmatic. However, there are a few things that throw a wrench into that reading. First of all, Jesus uses the same word catabino to say these men are also going down the road.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, in English, that may sound like an indeterminate sentence. It's just an idiom. But in Greek, there's actually two very distinct words for going up and going down. And you can't go up from Jericho to Jerusalem. You have to go down just like the first man did.
Jeremy Duncan:In other words, they are all going the same way. So it's not that. And if that's not enough, there's also a teaching in Jewish thought at the time. It was called. It meant to save a life.
Jeremy Duncan:It would have been oral tradition around the time of Jesus. It was later recorded in the Talmud, but it very clearly states that actions to save a life take absolute precedence over religious prohibition. So religious pragmatism isn't at play here either. That's not what's going on. By the way, since we're here, sometimes as Christians, we get a little in our feelings about other religious practices.
Jeremy Duncan:Like, they seem kind of strict or legalistic, we might say. For one, ritualistic is not the same thing as legalistic. And second, the Jewish people may well have known the law, but importantly, they also knew when to break it. And that's something that any of us who hold ourselves to religious expectations should remember. As Paul says in Romans 13, ultimately, the law is love after all.
Jeremy Duncan:So if ritualistic purity isn't the problem here, then what is? And that, of course, is revealed in the identity of the third man. Because this man is Samaritan. Now, if you're not familiar with the Samaritans, they were a group of people who were essentially half Jewish. They were Hebrews that survived the conquest of the Northern Kingdom Of Israel by the Assyrians, and they intermarried with Assyrians and developed a syncretized form of Judaism.
Jeremy Duncan:However, important to understand that because of this, for hundreds of years, the Jewish and the Samaritan people did not get along very well. In fact, Samaria was in the middle of Judea, and a lot of Jewish people would often walk around an entire country just to avoid setting foot in Samaritan land. Thankfully, much smaller countries than Canada. So the idea of Jesus speaking with a Samaritan woman as he does in John four, or the idea of Jesus contrasting a Samaritan with, of all people, a Levi and a priest who are, in some sense, a stand in for Jewish religion here. This is incredibly loaded language.
Jeremy Duncan:And you just know everyone listening now is on the edge of their seat. I mean, it was tense before, but everyone was still being polite. Jesus has taken the lid off. He's not being polite anymore. And so Jesus tells about how this Samaritan man helps this guy, takes him to an inn, pays for his lodging, even promises to return and settle up if the tab goes over.
Jeremy Duncan:This is over the top, overboard generosity. This is as hyperbolic as the idea that a Levite and a priest would just walk by and leave a guy lying in the ditch for no reason, which is interesting. Because Jesus has taken us on a story that very much started in the real world, and then he's pushed it a little farther, a little farther until we reach the point that we all realize, oh, okay. This really is a parable. And actually, that's important to understand because Jesus' point here is not that Levites are bad guys or that all professional ministers are jerks, nor is his point that Samaritans are cute and cuddly and full of gold coins.
Jeremy Duncan:The point here is about the inversion of our expectation. The fact that our mental model of the world is not always an accurate predictor of outcomes. I really like the way that Joel Green summarizes this in his commentary on Luke. He says, the importance of the priest and the Levite is not about ethnicity, but instead raises much larger issues of a sociocultural variety. Priests and Levites shared high status in community, not because they were trained or they were chosen, but simply because they are born into the right family.
Jeremy Duncan:They participated in, and they were legitimated by a world with circumspect boundaries. They epitomized a worldview of tribal consciousness concerned with relative status in us versus them catalogs. They had become accustomed to being evaluated on the basis of their ancestry, not their actions. In other words, everything about their world told them they weren't like other people, and slowly they had started to believe it. And the problem is, once you start to believe that you are fundamentally not like someone, you will slowly lose your obligation to that someone.
Jeremy Duncan:You won't act like a neighbor toward them, and then according to Jesus, well, you'll no longer be a neighbor to them. See, Jesus' point here really is just that your neighbor is anyone you see as holding the same value as you. And the trick is that the more people we can allow ourselves to see that way, well, then the closer we will find ourselves to the life that God imagines for us. Now, the problem for me is that I may not be a priest, kinda close. I'm certainly not part of some special tribe, but I am actively being told right now that the circumstance of being born in Canada makes my concerns more valid than others, or that owning my house means I hold more stake than my neighbors.
Jeremy Duncan:I've been told my degrees give me more right to speak on behalf of God. I've been told throughout my whole life that being a white, straight, incredibly good looking man k. Not that one so much at the end, but you get the idea here. I've been told for a whole host of reasons that for most of my life, my voice and my opinions should be the starting point for almost every conversation that I enter. And every time I fall into the trap of believing that even a little bit, it gives me just a little more room for me to decide who I will be a neighbor to and who I will not.
Jeremy Duncan:And I think that's actually the point of the whole story. The man asks, who is my neighbor? Jesus says, wrong question, my friend. The question is who you will choose to be a neighbor to. See, in a lot of ways, the scope of our world is up to us.
Jeremy Duncan:But the more we choose to keep it like this, the more finite we make our world, the more we will exclude ourselves from everything that God is doing all around us all the time. And Jesus is suggesting that if we want to experience the life of the age to come, if we wanna live as the world will one day be, if we wanna touch a little bit of eternity right now, then sometimes all we have to do is simply broaden the scope of who we imagine we could be a neighbor to. It's as easy as that. Just a little bit. One angle of incidence at a time until slowly we realize that actually the walls were never there to begin with, and the world is so much bigger than we once imagined was possible.
Jeremy Duncan:Here's what I think. The grace in the story isn't for the man in the ditch. The grace is for those of us invited to wake up to what the world could be right now, simply because we allow our mental model of neighbor to be a little bit bigger than we thought it could be. You see the life of the age to come begins one new neighbor at a time. But if we want, it can start today.
Jeremy Duncan:Let's pray. God, thank you for this invitation in this season to move ourselves, to prepare ourselves for the celebration of resurrection. But in that, you give us this opportunity to reflect, to repent of the ways that we have made your world too small, and imagined that our place in it was too narrow. We have the option to dream bigger, to think wider, and to see all the ways that you have brought us into contact with your creation, your beloved children all around us. And in that, we have the opportunity to touch what is eternal, what is infinite, what will outlive this life and carry us into whatever comes next.
Jeremy Duncan:God, might that invitation somehow reach us more deeply than we thought was possible. And may we actually begin to touch the life of the age to come today in our interactions, and this week in the ways that we expound our boundaries, in the years to come as we see more and more of our neighbors as just like us, created and beloved and set free in this world to make it what you dream. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray, amen. Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information.
Jeremy Duncan:You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you.
Jeremy Duncan:Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.