• "Who is My Neighbor?"
• Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
• September 14, 2003
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

In the gospel, a lawyer asked Jesus the question we all want answered: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus, in typical rabbi fashion, responded to the question with a question: What does the Torah, or Law of Moses, say one should do? The lawyer then gave what we call the Summary of the Law. In short, love God with all your heart, soul and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.

Elsewhere in the New Testament (Mk. 12:28-34, Mt. 22:34-40) the Summary of the Law is given by Jesus directly in response to a question. In the gospel today it is recited by a Jewish religious leader in response to a question from Jesus. This suggests that it was a widely accepted interpretation of the essential purpose of the Law of Moses.

The Summary of the Law is not new to the New Testament. The command to love God with heart, soul and mind comes from Deuteronomy 6:4. The command to love one's neighbor as one's self comes from Leviticus 19:18. These two passages sum up the law by turning prohibitions into positive injunctions. If, in motive and action, we love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as ourselves, we will obey the individual commandments as a by-product.

Nonetheless, the Summary of the Law presents an intractable problem. We talked about this last week. It is easy to say that the law is summed up in two relatively brief and attractive commandments. It is much harder to actually obey these two commandments and so, in terms of today's gospel, fulfill the law and win eternal life.

We want to love God with our whole being, but our affections and idols get in the way. It sounds well and good that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, but, quite frequently, we don't. Thus, if "doing" this is the pathway to eternal life, we might need to find some loopholes and hope that God grades on a curve.

The lawyer in the gospel understood well the difficulty. He went for the loophole. "And who is my neighbor?" For if we can pare the definition of neighbor down to those we are naturally disposed to like, at least this half of the commandment might be brought a little more into play.

Jesus closed the loophole with a story, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It says, in essence, "That is the wrong question to ask!" You don't fulfill the commandment to love your neighbor by trying to exclude people from the definition of neighbor. You fulfill the commandment by loving. The question is not, Who is my neighbor? The question is, "Who was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?"

When the lawyer understood the extent of the commandment to love-when his loophole was taken away-he realized that he could not be justified by his obedience to the law. For it is likely that he would not have done for a despised Samaritan what the Samaritan in the story did for the wounded Jew. If that is what being a neighbor meant, then the lawyer could not stand before God and justify himself by saying he had loved his neighbor as himself.

Once we realize the full intent of the law, with all of its behavioral implications with regard to God and man, we have two options. We can commence a lifelong search for exceptions and loopholes so that we can justify ourselves and be set free from the sting of the moral law. Or we can acknowledge the guilty verdict that the law brings upon us. And we can turn to Jesus in repentance and faith and be saved.

For the answer to the lawyer's question, What shall I do to inherit eternal life? is that there is nothing you can "do" to inherit eternal life. . Eternal life is a gift given by God through Jesus Christ to those who are prepared to receive it with repentance and faith. As Romans says, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord" (6:23)

Of course, once we have received the gift of eternal life, we enter the school of love. God gives us his Holy Spirit in baptism. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we can do what fallen human nature cannot do. Romans says that Jesus "condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (8:4).

The Holy Spirit puts within us the desire to love God and neighbor. The Holy Spirit within us strives against the contrary influences of the world, the flesh and the devil. The Holy Spirit purifies our motives, convicting us of sin and leading us to repentance and renewed behavior. We realize that we fall short of perfect obedience, we realize that we are works-in process. Yet we strive to grow in our capacity to love. We pray with the Psalmist, with Christ, "I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart" (40:8 NKJV).

In the school of love, the Parable of the Good Samaritan provides a warning against false religion. Both the priest and the Levite had a religious justification for passing by the half-dead man. The Law of Moses says that if a priest or Levite touches a dead person, he is ritually unclean and, thus, unable to fulfill his duties in the temple for a period of time. The justification would sound something like: I would like to help, but if I did I would not be able to fulfill my religious duty.

It was precisely this habit of finding religious ways to skirt the true intention of the law that caused Jesus to attack the religion of the scribes and Pharisees. We must beware of repeating this very human habit in our own lives. For it is hard to love and it is easier to find excuses not to love.

Each week we hear the Summary of the Law in the liturgy: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind... And... Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The summary stands at the beginning of the liturgy to reveal our sin and lead us to confession and to the remedy for sin provided for us in the Word of God and in the Sacred Gifts.

But the summary also stands as the goal, or end, of the liturgy. It is the behavioral standard for the new life we live in the Holy Spirit. Having received the pledge of eternal life in the sacred gifts, we go forth as new people to do all the good works that God has prepared for us to walk in. We go forth to be a better neighbor to those we find wounded by the road.