Recovering the Message of Scripture
In this special section of our "Rightly Dividing the Word" issue, nine pastor-theologians help shed light on some popular texts of Scripture that tend to lose their true redemptive-historical significance in a culture of interpretive narcissism.
Would you cross the street to help someone you didn't know? How about to help a rival? A sworn enemy? These are the sort of questions often asked at the beginning of sermons about the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). A man is beaten, stripped, robbed, and left by the side of the road. A priest and then a Levite coming down the road see him and cross to the other side, not wanting to defile themselves. It was a Samaritan who gets involved, who takes it upon himself to care for the beaten man, to bandage him, and to pay for his rehabilitation.
Jesus tells this parable to an expert in the law who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus gets the expert to give the answer: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and, love your neighbor as yourself" (v. 27). The expert in the law, though, wants clarification: "And who is my neighbor?" It is in response to this that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.
It is Jesus' conclusion to the parable that leads to its common misinterpretation. Jesus asks the expert in the law which of the three men (priest, Levite, or Samaritan) was a neighbor to the injured man. The expert in the law replies, "The one who had mercy on him." And Jesus finishes it off: "Go and do likewise." This forms the structure of much of the preaching on this passage: Which man was the righteous one? Which was obedient to the command of God? Go and do likewise. In other words, be like the Samaritan.
This interpretation (be like the Samaritan) falls prey to the single greatest error of such exhortational preaching: the lowering of the bar of the law. When a preacher or biblical interpreter divines a set of marching orders from Jesus' teaching, he or she must necessarily modify them until they are possible. As noted atheist Christopher Hitchens said in a recent Vanity Fair article ("The New Commandments," April 2010), "Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey." Preachers, should they ask their congregations to do the impossible, will soon find themselves preaching to empty pews. Like the rich young man (Mark 10:17-22) who asks Jesus the same question as the expert in the law, people will "go away sad" when the law is presented to them in its full, merciless form. So, feeling this weight, preachers lower the bar.
"Love your neighbor as yourself" becomes "be charitable." "Sell all you have and give it to the poor" becomes "volunteer in a soup kitchen." While still being "good deeds," these requirements are pale shadows of God's law, and as such cannot be the answer to the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Musician Derek Webb asks in his song "A New Law," "What's the use in trading / a law you can never keep / for one you can / that cannot get you anything?" Indeed, when Jesus' command to "go and do likewise" from the parable of the Good Samaritan is turned into a lowered-bar exhortation by preachers and biblical interpreters, we trade a law we can never keep (love your neighbor as yourself) for one we can (be charitable and helpful) that cannot get us anything.
So what, then, is the proper interpretation of this parable? What is Jesus' goal in telling it? In the same way that he tells the rich young man to sell everything he has in order to show him his avarice, Jesus commands that we emulate the Good Samaritan in order to show us our resistance (and ultimate inability) to do just that. The true paradigm of Christianity is one of death and resurrection, not of hard work and improvement. In Romans 5:20, Paul claims that the law was added, not to keep humans from sinning or to provide a path to betterment, but "so that the trespass might increase"! Jesus' command, his law-giving, is not designed in the first instance to show us how to love our neighbor. It is designed to show us how short we fall of God's "love your neighbor" standard! We must submit to the crushing weight of the law, die, and be resurrected (Rom. 6:3-4). It is this new creation clothed in Christ's righteousness that can "love our neighbor as ourselves." In the aftermath of the rich young man's interaction with Jesus, the disciples are horrified. They ask each other, "'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God'" (Mark 10:26-27).
The disciples might well have had the same reaction to Jesus' parable of the the Good Samaritan. Who on earth can live up to this standard? Be a neighbor to people who have culturally rejected you? Called you an outcast? This is more than turning the other cheek–this is actually crossing the road to help! This parable is the second of the great commandments in narrative form: Love your neighbor as yourself. As we interact with it, we cannot lower the bar of its requirement. If we do, we create a new law–one we can keep but cannot get us anything. We must recognize that it is beyond us–that with man, with us, it is impossible. This is the true nature of the law in its first use. It is impossible and was added so that the trespass might increase. With God, though, we are promised that all things are possible. This is the gospel: that Jesus Christ gives his righteousness, his law-keeping, to us, and takes our sin, our law-breaking, onto himself. Jesus is the Good Samaritan because we cannot be. Hearing this word of grace, we can go out into the world, secure in our righteousness that comes, not from effort expended to "go and do likewise," but from the Savior of the world.
