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Luke 9.51-56. 10.25-37 - The Good Samaritan. Please remember these are only notes so don't expect correct grammar or good flowing English. (In the Luke 9 passage above we read of the hostile reaction of the Samaritans to Jesus because He was a Jew going to Jerusalem.)
Jesus is posed with an insincere question. - nevertheless it leads on to a discussion about love and then parable of the good Samaritan. ------------ Frequent use of love in music - Folk, classical, and old fashion pop. ---------------- We like to sing about it. We know it is the answer to the world's problems. We see what hate does to mankind.
`all you need is love' says the song.
We long for it in our own lives.
It is easier to sing about it than to always be filled with love.
2000 years ago the Jewish religious teachers knew from their scriptures - our O.T. - that love summed up God's will for us. but were they practising it?
We know it too. Are we practising it? ------------ One of them - a scribe - comes to Jesus and asks: `What must I do to inherit eternal life?'
Luke tells us that it was an insincere question meant to expose - what the scribe thought - was the ignorance of Jesus.
First let us consider the Q itself - especially the word `inherit'.
How do we inherit something? By earning?
No. Because of a relationship Eg: a son or daughter will inherit from a parent or parents.
How do we inherit eternal life? We cannot earn it. By being a child of God. Accepting Christ as our saviour and Lord and therefore God as Father..
Jesus turns the Q back on the scribe. · What do you read in the word of God? - the O.T. · Scribe's answer to Jesus.: Love God with all heart, mind, soul, and strength
William temple (former Archbishop of Canterbury) said that worship is: to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God. to feed the mind with the truth of God. to purge the imagination with the beauty of God. to open the heart to the love of God. to devote the will to the purposes of God This commandment together with the commandment to love our neighbour Sums up all the requirements of the law.
Jesus says you are right.
But the man wanting to justify himself asked: `Who is my neighbour?'
(implication is that I need to love some but not all types - especially foreigners)
What the scribe is saying - attempting to justify himself - is: ¨ `Do I really have to love all races of people or is loving just my own tribe enough?
Do you and I try to justify ourselves by making excuses for not doing what we ought? ---------------- We cannot justify ourselves before God.
Only he can justify us.
How? Come back to that. ----------- The scribe really wants to say: `Charity begins at home and I don't need to be kind to foreigners'.
The response of Jesus is the story of the Good Samaritan. --------- Jewish man - Jerusalem to Jericho.
Meets common criminals and is badly wounded by them.
Priest and Levite - fellow Jews - pass by - afraid.
I was reading of the ordeal of a lady in New York city. While shopping on fifth avenue in busy manhattan, this lady tripped and broke her leg. Dazed, anguished, and in shock, she called out for help. Not for two minutes. Not for twenty minutes. But for forty minutes, as shoppers and business executives, students and merchants walked around her and stepped over her, completely ignoring her cries. After literally hundreds had passed by, a taxi driver finally pulled over, pulled her into his taxi, and took her to a local hospital. A Samaritan from Samaria - a foreigner from the rival ethnic group - helps him.
He might well have suffered much criticism from his fellow Samaritans for helping a Jew.
Binds up wounds and pays the innkeeper.
To understand this story we must know that Samaritans and Jews were enemies.
In answer to the Q - is not charity just for my own people?, Jesus answers - the neighbour whom you should love includes those who belong to the enemy group. -------------------- Ruanda and Burindi are places of tremendous hatred and fear between Tutsis and Hutus Imagine: Wounded Tutsi helped by a Hutu. --------------- In this story Jesus makes the Sam the hero.
Yet Jesus was himself a Jew and for that reason had just been badly treated by Sam village. Luke 9:52 and he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53 but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. Yet now Jesus tells a story in which the Sam is the good guy.
It would be like a Tutsis telling a story to his fellow Tutsis and making the Hutu the good guy who helps a wounded Tutsi. ------------- The tragedy of the world is that it is drained of love.
Illustration of field in a drought. Cracks, and then more cracks - dividing continues.
Cracks appear in this world. Black and white people.
Within the black communities: tribe against tribe.
Within the white communities: tribe against tribe - Bosnia.
Within a tribe one family against another.
Within a family - brother against brother. Most of us know something of this.
Now it takes courage to reach across the cracks and help someone in the rival family, tribe, race.
The Good Samaritan reached across the crack and helped the Jew.
This concerns all of us.
Cracks are not just between one human being and another.
Within each human being there is crack.
War within each person's own heart.
He knows he ought to do good, but he keeps doing evil.
`the good that I would I do not ..' (Romans 7) Conflict and lack of peace.
Do you have that problem?
The biggest crack of all is the crack between God and us. Our sins have separated us from God.
That is the crack that must be bridged if the others are to be healed.
Is that crack between you and God healed? ------------- Everyone in the world knows there is a God - that is why there is so much religion.
But people do not know him and so, much religion, is man made and is actually harmful.
The danger is that we make up a religion claiming it is from God and then use it to try to justify ourselves as if we could cross the crack ourselves.
We cannot lift ourselves across the crack and get to God.
Attempts to do that lead to all the harmful religion that actually increases the cracks of hatred in the world.
So how is that crack bridged?
God himself comes across that crack.
Jehovah's witnesses - God did not come across the crack.
he merely sent a messenger - Jesus was a mere messenger.
if that were true we could still not really be reconciled to God.
In order to be reconciled to someone you must come face to face.
Gospel of Jesus Christ is that God has humbled himself and in the person of his Eternal Son stooped to our level so that we could meet him face to face.
Jesus is God come face to face with the human race that we might know what God is really like.
Its not messengers we need it is God himself.
Jesus was the real Good Samaritan.
He reached across that great gulf between heaven and earth to seek and to save those who are lost and bind up the broken hearted. Are you lost? Are you broken hearted because of your sins? ------------- But the crack goes even deeper. The Lord deliberately allowed us to break him and in so doing he carried all our sins in his own body.
Jesus's body was cracked and broken for our sake.
His blood was shed.
So as well as the Good Samaritan he was the wounded Jew. `He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.'
While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.
For God so loved the world... . That brokeness of Jesus is signified in the broken bread and the poured out wine. In taking it you are publicly saying: `yes Jesus died to justify me a sinner and I accept him' The religious establishment condemned Jesus by crucifying him.
Some of the worst hatred in the world is done by those who think they are propagating their own religion and therefore justifying themselves before God.
All they are doing is preparing their souls for hell.
Will you accept Christ? In your own heart.
The great public sign that your heart and mind are open to Christ is to take the bread and wine and eat and drink for they signify the true love of God for all mankind, - the only way we can be justified and saved.
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