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Manageable Minimum
by The Rev. Canon Heidi E. Kinner
Year C, Proper 10, Luke 10:25-37
July 11, 2020
unedited
And the lawyer, desiring to justify himself said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
For many years I read this whole encounter, and especially this sentence, through the eyes of the lawyer. I couldn't understand why his question was a problem. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable and sensible question to ask when confronted with the somewhat amorphous command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” I thought that the lawyer was merely asking Jesus to define his terms, and surely there is nothing wrong with that.
However, by looking through the lawyer's eyes, I was missing the point – just as he was. And more than that, I was failing to understand the difference between law and grace.
The Lawyer, an expert in Jewish religious law, was well trained in the art of interpreting God's word, and in “defining the terms.” For many years, Jewish religious leaders, teachers, and lawyers intent on helping people keep God's law and live holy lives had been “putting a fence around the Law.” This meant that they added to God's basic commands and defined terms very narrowly in order to make it possible to keep the Commandments. And keeping the Commandments was crucially important, because if you didn't keep them you couldn't earn or keep God's favor and you couldn't achieve your salvation.
Keeping that fence in place, is what lies behind the lawyer's question, “And who is my neighbor?” When confronted with the summary of the law, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and spirit and love your neighbor as yourself” he immediately seeks to narrow the terms by restricting the definition of the term “neighbor.” This was not an unusual impulse in the context of the time, because for many years the teachers and religious leaders, especially the Pharisees, had argued about who one's neighbors were, and which strangers they were required to be kind to. In fact the earliest major translation of the Hebrew into Greek translated the term “neighbor” in Leviticus 19 to “fellow countrymen” and translated the term “stranger” or “sojourner” into ‘proselyte.' This meant that you only had to love your fellow countrymen, and only had to show kindness and hospitality to the strangers who were converting to Judaism.
The lawyer would have been well aware of this and was likely trying to see how Jesus' definition stacked up with the existing definitions. He was also trying to “justify himself.” Literally seeking to demonstrate his righteousness before God by seeking a definition of the word “neighbor” he felt he could actually keep.
But Jesus does not answer the lawyer's question directly and so avoids becoming caught up in legalistic and semantic hair-splitting. Instead, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, a wonderful teaching parable, and then asks the lawyer the question, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”
It was a challenging question for the lawyer.
It challenged him to see an old enemy in a new light, for the lawyer, like many of the Jews at that time, hated Samarians for both nationalistic and religious reasons. So for the lawyer to have to admit that the Samaritan was the merciful and good neighbor of the parable would have been galling. In fact, the lawyer cannot even bear to say the words, “the Samaritan proved to be the neighbor” but says instead, “the one who had mercy.”
Jesus' question was also challenging for the lawyer because it swept aside all of the religious legal semantics surrounding “neighbor” and went to the heart of God's intent – that we are all neighbors, struggling sinners together, and that we should treat all with compassion. It forced the Lawyer to understand God's word from a God-centered perspective rather than from a human-centered perspective. The lawyer is confronted by the fact that he cannot justify himself through narrowing the terms and definitions of the commandments because trying to make them manageable simply means they have not been kept.
And so the encounter ends.
But God's word is a living word, and so we are invited to step into the story.
And we have to admit that we are often very like the lawyer.
We try to justify ourselves by keeping checklists of what we think is good behavior.
As for the question at hand, like the lawyer, we prefer a narrow understanding of who our neighbor is, because most of us have a hard time loving our family and friends, let alone our enemies.
We try to justify ourselves by interpreting God's word to suit ourselves, and by shrinking His commandments to make them manageable.
But Jesus will have none of our manageable minimum requirements.
In this encounter and throughout the Gospels, Jesus is constantly showing us the overwhelming full intent of God's commandments and love. Rather than lowering the requirements, Jesus raises the bar to its proper height, showing us God's abundant holiness and His true standards of righteousness.
And it is right there when our manageable interpretations of God's word are exposed as shriveled lifeless rules, when we see that we cannot live up to the fullness of God's word and save ourselves, that we stand at the hinge between Law and Grace.
That hinge is the point where Jesus works.
It is to this point that Jesus was moving the lawyer – to a point of truth and dependence on God alone.
It is where Jesus meets us today.
When we reach that moment we see that Jesus not only shows us the full goodness of God's commandments, but that He Himself kept them and completed them.
Jesus Christ loved God with His whole mind, body, soul, and spirit, and He loved His neighbor, us, perfectly, dying so that we could live.
The rule keeping that we through was necessary to justify and save ourselves is over.
For when we stop trying to justify ourselves and finally turn to Jesus to save us, our lives are hidden with Christ in God, and we are justified by Jesus' fulfillment of the Law and presented as righteous by His work.
Curiously, the fact that we are freed from having to keep the Law turns out to mean that we actually begin to fulfill it.
When we are trying to love our neighbor to earn points with God, we are really just loving ourselves. The other person just becomes a means to our end.
When through grace, we know that Jesus has fulfilled the Law and secured our salvation, we can actually love our neighbor out of Jesus' strength, for Jesus' sake, and for the good of the neighbor.
In Jesus and through His saving grace we are freed from our fearful selfishness and our petty rule keeping.
We begin to love abundantly because we are freed from fear and know that we are loved abundantly by God.
“And who is my neighbor?” Thanks be to God that in Christ we are freed from this mean, shriveled question.
Now, may we stand with Paul who reminds us in Galatians 5, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'”
Amen.
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