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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
In today’s Gospel Reading, someone thought to be an expert in the Old Testament law put Jesus to the test, saying, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” After leading the man to summarize correctly the First and Second Tables of the Commandments—love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself—Jesus told him, “Do this, and you will live.” And, after leading the man to identify as a “neighbor” the Samaritan who showed mercy to the man who fell among robbers, Jesus similarly told him, “You go, and do likewise.” Although certainly not with the same referent with which our Lord used the words, the theme for our consideration primarily of today’s Gospel Reading this morning is “Do this, and you will live”.
To be sure, from the Entrance Psalm to the Gospel Reading, all of today’s appointed Scripture passages emphasize what should be our love of our neighbors. The Psalm sang of caring for our poor neighbors and brothers and the promise of resulting blessings (Psalm 41; antiphon: v.1). The Old Testament Reading gave concrete and graphic examples of our care for our neighbors that should set us apart as the people of God (Leviticus 18:1-5; 19:9-18). The Epistle Reading held up the Colossians’ example of compassionate love (Colossians 1:1-14). And, the Gospel Reading provided maybe not so much a “parable” but a realistic illustration of a man who loved his neighbor as he should (Lenski, ad loc Luke 10:30, p.603). (On the Readings’ “neighbor” theme, see Hamp, CPR 26:3, p.35.)
The Gospel Reading’s thought‑to‑be‑expert in the Old Testament law was right in the idea that if he could keep the law then he could live—we heard it in today’s Old Testament Reading—but he certainly was wrong in apparently thinking that he could keep the law, at least the way that it needs to be kept—perfectly and completely. The Divinely‑inspired St. Luke tells us that the man was trying to justify himself, maybe to limit the number of neighbors he had and to make it seem like he had kept the law. We might try to do the same thing, thinking that, if we can reduce the number of neighbors we have from the more than 7‑and‑a‑half‑billion people in the world, then we maybe have a better chance of keeping the law.
People in need of compassion on the other side of the world certainly are in some sense our neighbors, and to some extent we can help them, and certainly we can pray for them. But, Jesus’s realistic illustration of a Samaritan who loved his neighbor in the Gospel Reading can be taken to indicate our neighbors are more‑properly those half-dead people whom God lays across our roads, whom we have to take steps to avoid, as the priest and Levite did (Roehrs-Franzmann, ad loc Luke 10:25-37, p.69). There are plenty of such people whom we fail to help, to go to in order to bind up their wounds and take care of them ourselves or through others. And, then there are the people we hurt, and all of our other sins against our neighbors and God under the Second Table of the Commandments, and that is not even to mention our sins against God under the First Table of the Commandments.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus tells the man to “do this”, to love God and his neighbor perfectly and completely, in order to live, but no doubt what Jesus really wants him and us to “do” in order to live is to repent and believe. God’s call to such repentance and faith, whether through Jesus in the Gospel Reading or through our pastors today, itself brings us from the death of our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1, 5) to spiritual life, in which we are justified not by ourselves with a righteousness of works, but we are justified by God with a righteousness that is by faith in Jesus Christ (Romans 10:5-6; Galatians 3:10-12; confer Braun, TDNT 6:479‑480).
Better than anyone else, the God-man Jesus Christ loved His neighbors, including us. Jesus kept both Tables of the Commandments perfectly and completely, and Jesus went to the cross to suffer the consequences for our failure to do so. On the cross Jesus died in our place the death that we otherwise would have deserved. Out of God’s great love, mercy, and grace, the righteousness of Jesus’s having actively kept the law for us and the righteousness of Jesus’s having suffered in our place is freely given to us when we repent and believe. When we repent and believe, then God forgives our sins against our neighbors and Him under the Second Table of the Commandments, and God forgives our sins against Him under the First Table of the Commandments. When we repent and believe, then God forgives all our sins, whatever our sins might be. God forgives our sins in the ways that He chooses to forgive them, namely, through His Means of Grace, His Word and Sacraments.
God’s Word is read and preached to groups such as this, and God’s Word is applied to us individually with water in Holy Baptism, with a pastor’s touch in individual Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood in the Sacrament of the Altar. In these ways God creates faith, forgives our sins, and strengthens and preserves us in body and soul unto life everlasting. God’s work is that we believe in Him Whom He has sent (John 5:28-29): unless we reject Him, God makes it so that we repent and believe. After being baptized one time, we regularly and repeatedly “do” these things—hear His Word, privately confess the sins we know and feel in our hearts for the sake of individual Absolution, and come to receive Christ’s Body and Blood—and receiving these things in faith, we live! And, that new life that God creates and sustains by His Means of Grace at least wants to keep, if not also begins to keep, both the First and Second Tables of the Commandments.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther said well that we are saved by faith alone but that faith is never alone: good works necessarily follow. Not only the God‑man Jesus Christ and the Samaritan of His realistic illustration but also others in Holy Scripture loved their neighbors. For example, King Saul’s son Jonathan is, to my knowledge, the only one whom Holy Scripture explicitly says loved another as himself, in his case, soon‑to‑be‑King David, whom Holy Scripture says Jonathan loved as his own soul (1 Samuel 18:1, 3; 20:17). In most cases telling people to love their neighbor “as” themselves is probably a good comparison, though, despite what St. Paul says elsewhere (Ephesians 5:29), some people may hate their own flesh or themselves in some other way. Of course, as we live every day with repentance and faith, God forgives our sins of failing to love ourselves, our neighbors, and Him.
In considering today’s Gospel Reading this morning, we have realized that we “do this” and “live”—not perfectly and completely love God or our neighbors, but we repent of our sin and believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sin, receiving His forgiveness through His Means of Grace, and then at least trying to if not actually succeeding in loving God and our neighbors, especially those whom God lays across our roads, whom we otherwise would have to take steps to avoid. This past week I had the privilege of helping with monies from our “Titus Fund” one such person in need who presented herself to me, and she was quite thankful for our congregation’s help in her time of need. May God continue to bless us to be blessings to others until such time as He blesses us by removing all such needs in the provision of His glorious presence for all eternity.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +