In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Gospel for this 13th Sunday after Trinity begins with Jesus’ statement about how everything the disciples had seen was what the prophets and kings of old wanted to see, but didn’t get to – that is, they didn’t get to see the ultimate fulfillment of God’s saving work for fallen humanity. Then comes Christ’s account of a lawyer – a teacher of God’s Law – who was trying to catch Jesus in a theological error: putting Him “to the test”. The lawyer realized that he’d just walked into his own trap and tried to free himself by asking Jesus to tell him just who his neighbor is, and Christ’s response was the parable of the Good Samaritan.

One aspect of this conversation is that of our responsibility. All of us are responsible before God. Jesus sums up the entirety of God’s Law for us in two simple commands – “Love God” and “Love your neighbor.”

Jesus then goes on to give us a crystal-clear definition of who our neighbor is and what it means to be a neighbor, so that none of us have any excuse or means of hiding from our responsibility under God’s Law.

We can’t escape God’s Law. It’s true for eternity, and it’s the duty of all people: even us Christians. The Law is God’s will and it’s His will that we should live according to it. And the Law demands love: love for God from the depths of our inmost being, and love for our neighbors that equals our love for ourselves. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind” (Lk 10:27).

It’s God’s will that we love Him. We should love God with our emotions: regulating our feelings in accord with a sincere love for Him. We should love God with our wills: regulating all our desires in accord with our love for Him. We should love God with all our strength, that is, our actions and deeds: doing the things that God calls us to do, and not doing anything that is contrary to God’s will. And we should love God with our minds, that is to say, we are to use our reason and intellect to grow in the knowledge and wisdom of God and to turn from all that is evil: regulating the use of our minds toward loving God in thought, word, and deed more and more throughout our earthly days.

But all that we should do, we repeatedly fail to do. The specifics of that are unique for each of us, but it’s true for us all that unholy thoughts enter our minds, unholy words come from our mouths, and unholy actions are done with our bodies. We are sinful and naturally love our selves, our comforts, our desires, and our personal feelings much more than we love God and our neighbors. This is the hard truth of who we are. And it should cause each and every one of us to reflect on how we have not loved God and our neighbor – and to repent: acknowledging our wrongdoings and laying our sins at the foot of the cross where Christ’s blood was shed to atone for them all.

Jesus spoke clearly about loving God and loving one’s neighbor to the lawyer and the lawyer knew his sin – he knew his failings – just as each of us does. Yet he still tried a last ditch effort to justify himself by some crafty word-play, asking “who is my neighbor?”

It’s to this question that Christ teaches the lawyer and us with the parable of the Good Samaritan.
A priest and a Levite – brothers in the faith and in the household of Israel with the wounded man – leave that wounded man to die. These are good, religious men, but they take care of themselves and avoid their brother-in-need on the side of the road.

The only one who is decent to the man is a Samaritan. Now, the Samaritan’s were non-Jews, living in Jewish lands and worshiping God, but not in the temple in Jerusalem and not according to the ceremonial laws of Judah. So, the Samaritans were hated by the Jews for who they were and where they lived.

So, it’s a striking feature of Christ’s parable that one of these hated Samaritans stopped to help a Jew, when none of the good, religious Jews would. And not only did he help, but he went out of his way and spent his own hard-earned money on the man. The Samaritan showed the kind of decency that we’d hope to find in someone if we were in such a desperate situation.

Then Jesus asked, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Lk 10:36). When the Lawyer was forced to admit that this Samaritan was the sort of fellow that we should all be, Jesus told him to “go and do likewise.” In saying that, Jesus gave us a comprehensive definition to the word ‘neighbor’ and what it means in God’s eyes to be a neighbor to someone.

There is no getting out of it. We’re commanded to love God to such a degree and in such ways as are beyond our ability as selfish, sinful people. And then we’re told to love our neighbor, that is, anyone who has need of us or whom God gives us the opportunity to serve.

How can we bear all of that with what we know about ourselves … about how selfish and unloving we really are?
The answer is this: we, like the disciples, have seen things no one else has seen and we have heard things that no one else has heard, namely, we have heard the fullness of the Gospel. The saving truth that God loves us to such a degree that He’s given us His Son. Christ died for us, precisely because we cannot love God the way that we should … because we are selfish to the core and don’t love our neighbors nearly as well as we should. But Christ does love God and neighbor perfectly, and because He died to pay the penalty for our sins, we are forgiven in Him.

Of course, the Law of God still applies to us. God’s ‘yes’ is still God’s ‘yes’ and God’s ‘no’ is still God’s ‘no’. Right is still right and wrong is still wrong, and as the people of God – who’ve been given the gift of the Holy Spirit by baptism and faith – we now want to do what is right and good and holy. You are baptized into Christ, you’re the adopted children of God. When sin beats you down and causes you to stumble, Christ – the Good Samaritan – is there to bind our wounds, forgive our sins, and strengthen us with His means of grace in the inn of His Holy Church. Our salvation and our love for God and neighbor depends entirely on Christ, and what He has done: His holiness – for us. Healed and strengthened by His saving gifts we are freed to pursue loving God as He ought to be loved, and loving our neighbors the way they ought to be loved.
And pursue these we must. There is no doing away with the command and will of God. But there’s also no doing away with the love of God which is ours in Christ.

Are we always the sort of people that God want’s us to be? Not even close. Is that a good excuse? Should that prevent us from striving for godly lives – with the help of the Holy Spirit – in order to be more of what we should be? St. Paul says something about this in our Epistle Reading: “Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law” (Gal 3:21).

So the Law – those 10 Commandments we all learned – is God’s will, it’s just that we cannot make ourselves righteous before God by keeping them. We’re not justified by works of the Law.

But there’s more to God’s will – the Gospel (what St. Paul calls God’s promise) – for God also wills to forgive us and save us from our repeated breaking of His commands. We, who fall so far short of loving God and neighbor as we should, are rescued, saved, forgiven, and welcomed into the very household of God, on account of Christ and His innocent suffering and death: the fulfillment and perfection of all of God’s saving work that the Old Testament promised and pointed forward to as St. Paul says: “But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe” (Gal 3:22): a promise that is given to you, even now, as Christ the Good Samaritan restores you and gives you new life – eternal life – by the saving medicine of His Word and Sacraments.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Pr. Jon Holst