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We find Jesus here in a conversation with a lawyer who is testing him, testing whether Jesus is just some charlatan, wanna-be Messiah/prophet wandering through grifting the people with charismatic teaching and magic healings and stuff. Jesus wasn’t from around there where that lawyer lived. He was from away, from the hinterlands of Galilee. On top of that, Jesus had sent 72 of his disciples out into the communities to prepare the way for him. They had been proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God just as Jesus had and were doing some of those magic healings themselves. The countryside was erupting with curious excitement, if not real hope that Jesus truly was the Messiah bringing in the Kingdom of God.
Yet, Jesus wasn’t from around there. He was just a-wandering through. I don’t blame the lawyer for playing protector. He put Jesus to the test just as Satan did at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He’s trying to trap Jesus with a loaded question. But we need to be clear here about what he meant by eternal life. Eternal life back then would not have meant going to Heaven when you die. It would have meant life in the Kingdom of God, here on Earth when it comes. Earthly life that was “filled with the knowing of the Lord as the waters cover the see” to quote Isaiah (Is. 11:9).
It’s a complicated question he’s asking. It hits at the heart of what it is to be a Jew living in that Land. All Jews understood themselves as heirs to the promise God made to Abraham to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation and to give them that parcel of land on which today the modern state of Israel shares with the Palestinians. By simply living in the Land of Judea as a nation they were receiving their inheritance, the fulfillment of that promise.
Yet, since the Babylonian exile in the 500’s BC there was a sense that they could lose their inheritance by not living up to the just, equitable, and peaceful way of life set out to them in the Law of Moses particularly the Ten Commandments. If they turned from the Law, they would cease to be a blessing to each other and to the nations around them and God would kick them off the Land just as God had done by means of the Babylonians five centuries prior.
The presence of the Romans in the Land put that Promise under jeopardy. At any moment they could lose their national identity and the Land due revolutionaries who sought to kick the Romans out of the land and secure God’s Promise to the Jewish people by means of violence. It did not go well for them when twice that happened. The Romans proved unbeatable in 70 AD during the Jewish-Roman War when due to Jewish revolt the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Temple and then again in 135 AD, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which resulted in a large dispersal of the Jewish people from the Land and the Romans changing the name of the Land from the Province of Judea to Syria Palestine. (The current Israel/Palestine situation has roots going back that far and further. It’s complicated and war is not the solution. Loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbour as yourself likely is.)
This lawyer here is testing to see if Jesus is trying to lead a revolt and he’s asking Jesus in a tricky, somewhat coded way, “Are you leading a revolt that’s going to get rid of the Romans and establish the Kingdom”; i.e., return national sovereignty in the Land to the Jews. If that’s what you’re doing Jesus, how do I get to be a part of that?” Remember inheriting eternal life here does not mean going to heaven when we die. It’s life in the Kingdom of God come here to earth, life here on earth filled with the peace of the presence of God.
Jesus gives an interesting answer. He puts the question back on the lawyer. He makes the Lawyer deal with the reason why centuries before God kicked the Jews off the Land and sent them to captivity in Babylon. “What does the Law tell you to do?” Jesus pushes back. The lawyer answers with what is basically the equivalent of the Apostle’s Creed for the Jewish faith at the time, the Schema. Schema means “hear”. It goes: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all heart, and with all soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” And, he also tags on to the Creed another commandment from Leviticus, “and your neighbour as yourself.” “You’ve answered well.” Jesus says. “Do this and you will live.”
I guess something must have hit the lawyer when he heard himself say The Creed, the Schema, because for some reason he felt the need to justify himself. I’m guessing he was having a bit of trouble with the requirement to love God, self, and neighbour and I’m guessing that the part he was having the most trouble with had to do with loving the neighbour. He asks: “And who is my neighbour?”
Well, I did a little research on who was considered to be a neighbour according to Israelite Law and I was surprised. A neighbour is anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who lives in your community. Strangers or aliens, people who moved to Judea and settled there were your neighbours too; even if they didn’t worship the God of Israel. Under that definition, the Romans, particularly the soldiers, who were there occupying the land and bullying the Jews, they were neighbours too. Therefore, the Law required the Jews to love them unconditionally (agape love) as they would another Jew. Interestingly, the only category of person not considered a neighbour was the person who was just passing through, you know, kind of like what Jesus was doing. You need to settle down in the Land if you’re going to be considered a neighbour.
Jesus answers that question with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We’re all very familiar with that story. The point of the parable isn’t to define who a neighbour is but rather to ask, "What kind of a neighbour are you?" There’s loads of irony in the parable. The Samaritan who was just passing through who did not fit the Law’s definition of a neighbour proved to be the better neighbour to the wounded Jew because he showed mercy. He showed mercy to one who was his nemesis by blood and by history. The priest and the Levite were legally neighbours to the wounded man but they were so concerned about keeping the Laws that pertained to being made ritually unclean by touching a corpse, that they didn’t even go see if the man was all dead, or just mostly dead. That’s not neighbourly. Our lawyer here would have been allied to them by professional association.
Showing extravagant mercy even to your enemy defines what it is to be a neighbour whom you must agape love, unconditionally love, just as you would yourself, just as you would love God. Showing mercy like that is a taste of Eternal life, life in the Kingdom when it finally comes to earth. I suspect that our Lawyer by now recognizes that Jesus is not a charlatan revolutionary cult leader trying to start an armed uprising to bring in a violent false imitation of God’s Kingdom by attempting to overthrow the Romans. The way this wandering Messiah prophet made this lawyer own his own baggage, well…there just might be life found in following this Jesus.
Well, here we are on Remembrance Sunday remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice to free the world from autocrats who sought to be kings and we do so in a world that is still plagued with war and autocrats seeking to be king of the world. This sermon may have brought your minds to the current conflict in Israel/Palestine. There are two peoples there who have historic claim to the land. By definition of the Law, they are neighbours. They are neighbours! Ghettoizing and attempting to exterminate your neighbour do not fit the biblical definition of being neighbourly nor does marauding and terrorizing your oppressor. In fact, these horrific acts only demonstrate a lack of love for self and especially a lack of love for the Lord their God who is indeed God alone. In fact, if we look at historical precedence, it is reason for God to cast them both off of his Land. But there are a lot of innocent people there, families with children just trying to live, just like us, but whose lives are being destroyed by men who would be king.
I was in Israel in May of 1995. Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli Prime minister and Yasser Arafat was leader of the Palestinian people. It was peaceful then because those two men had begun to see each other as neighbours, indeed more than neighbours, family. They ate in each other’s homes, played on the floor with each other’s grandchildren. November 4, 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a Zionist settler who didn’t want peace, who just wanted the land, and then hawkish men, the current Prime Minister among them, took over and returned to oppressive ways. The Palestinians lost hope and returned to terrorism. There’s been a peace plan for decades but there will be no peace until they accept each other as neighbours and love one another. Then they will live. So also us. Be a neighbour. Amen.
