More great material from our trip last week. We visited a wonderful church in Kansas City, Mission Road Bible Church, and heard a thought-provoking sermon on the parable of the good Samaritan, or, as the speaker (a young man named Adam Bueltel who seemed wise beyond his years) called it, “The Lost Parable.”(The previous link will take you directly to the audio player for the sermon in its entirety. To read the passage used, follow the link to the website Bible Gateway.) If you’ve ever attended Sunday School as a child or looked through a Bible picture book you know about this story that Jesus told. A man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho and is attacked by robbers who beat him and strip him and leave him for dead. Two religious men come by but don’t help him; instead, they deliberately cross the road to get away from him. I got rather tickled at Bueltel’s point that scholars and preachers have uselessly tried to figure out the motivations of the two men. Why didn’t they stop? Were they just hypocrites? The truth of the matter is that they weren’t real people; Jesus made them up. He made up the whole story. The point of the parable isn’t that church leaders don’t practice what they preach; it’s a story about love. Who was the victim’s true neighbor? The one who showed love and compassion towards him, who happened to be from Samaria, an area populated by people who were looked down upon by the Judean Jews because they weren’t “pure.” (It’s kind of ironic that nowadays when we hear the word “Samaritan” we automatically think “good”; in Jesus’ day that term would automatically imply “bad.”)
Five attributes of true love were listed in the sermon:
1. It is undeterred by inconvenience. The Samaritan was probably on a trip of his own; it was almost certainly a big fat pain for him to interrupt his journey to care for the man in the ditch who had no claim on him and could not possibly reproach him for his neglect or repay him for his aid. (Although here I am, falling into the same trap as those who’ve tried to plumb the personalities of the Levite and the priest. Still!)
2. It is driven by compassion. Compassion is not the same as pity, by the way. “Pity” implies that you feel bad for someone else (or maybe for yourself) but you don’t necessarily do anything about it. Compassion means to feel with someone and usually means that you are moved to relieve that person’s suffering. People often say, “Don’t pity me,” but I don’t think they ever say, “Don’t have compassion on me.”
3. It is marked by sacrifice. If you’re familiar with the story already or if you read it through the link above, you’ll note that not only did the Samaritan give of his time; he also gave of his money and put himself on the hook for future obligations. He took the wounded man to an inn, paid for his stay in advance, and then promised to return and pay any additional expenses. It would have been much easier to pay the innkeeper and walk away for good, but he didn’t do that.
4. It is carried to completion. The Samaritan finished the job.
5. It is awakened by God. We only love because we have been given that capability by our Creator.
So what’s the answer to the question at the beginning of this post? Who (or whom) do we really love? As this pastor pointed out, there’s one person we all love like this: ourselves. What’s the biblical command? Love your neighbor as yourself. Or, as the good old King James Version of the Bible says in the New Testament, Ephesians 5:29: “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it.” It’s so simple, and so obvious, and so difficult: what would I want someone to do for me in this situation? That’s what I should do for the person in need. Think of the last time you were really in a pinch. You wanted someone to stop and show you compassion.
There’s a great Good Samaritan story in the book on diabetes I wrote about in the previous post. James Hirsch, the author, was driving with his son in the back seat when his blood sugar got so low that he became disoriented and lost control of his car, running off the road and flipping at least once. Some woman stopped, called 911, helped him and his son out of the car and over a ditch and then stayed until the police and the ambulance came. He was enormously grateful, most of all that she refused to leave until she was sure he was being cared for. She also refused to give Hirsch her name, so he was never able to thank her. And how does she feel when she looks back on her actions? I’m sure she feels . . . happy. She acted in accordance with how she was made.
Do you act with compassion, doing what needs to be done, or do you simply feel sorry for others?