The Test

​That is a packed Gospel reading! The great commandment to love God and neighbor, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the best known and loved parables of all. This morning we have an embarrassment of riches!
 
Perhaps oddly, given those riches, I want to focus on the opening exchange between the lawyer and Jesus, which has its own important lessons for us.
 
It begins when the lawyer stands up to test Jesus. Now, even if we didn’t know what was coming, we know that’s not going to go well for the lawyer. The lawyer may think he knows the law backwards and forwards, the lawyer may actually know the law backwards and forwards. Still, he’s not going to be a match for Jesus.
 
We see the mismatch right away. The lawyer kicks it off by asking what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. But immediately, Jesus takes charge of the conversation. Jesus doesn’t answer the lawyer’s question. Instead, Jesus turns the question back on the lawyer himself. Jesus asks, “what is written in the law? What do you read there?”
 
The man is a lawyer, so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that he gets it right. Quoting Deuteronomy, he says, “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” So far, so good. There’s more to it, but the lawyer gets the second part, too. Now quoting Leviticus, he adds “Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what the law says.”
 
It is a good answer, and Jesus praises the lawyer for it.  
 
That is where the conversation should have ended. The question is answered. Jesus and the lawyer are in full agreement. It’s done.
 
But this is where the exchange gets interesting. The lawyer can’t leave it there. Luke tells us that the lawyer felt the need to “justify” himself.
 
Now “justify” is a weighty word for Christians.
 
Start with the ordinary meaning of “justify.” We try to justify ourselves every time we feel the need to explain why we do what we do.
 
Here’s an easy example. When a friend invites me to lunch, all I need to say is yes or no. I will meet my friend, or I won’t. If the answer is no, I don’t have to justify that. As my mother says, “No” is a complete sentence.
 
But like the lawyer, I often can’t leave it there. When I say no, I almost always feel the need to justify myself. I almost always explain why I can’t join my friend for lunch. I do that not because my friend asks or cares, but because I feel guilty about saying no. Feelings of guilt are what drive us to justify ourselves.
 
Now come back to our exchange. Jesus has said nothing to challenge the lawyer, nothing to suggest that the lawyer doesn’t know or doesn’t follow the law. On the contrary, Jesus has agreed with him and told him to do exactly what he himself had said to do.
 
The fact that the lawyer felt the need to justify himself means he had a guilty conscience. Clearly, he knows that he doesn’t always do a very good job of loving his neighbor like he is supposed to.
 
At this point, the lawyer has choices. He could acknowledge his feelings of guilt and his failure to love, and then ask Jesus for forgiveness and help. Instead, the lawyer tries to justify himself.
 
And his attempt at justification tells us a lot. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?,” which is to say, “Who do I have to love?” And, by implication, “who is NOT my neighbor, and therefore who do I not have to love?” That’s the question of a man who does not love a lot of people he thinks of as non-neighbors.
 
Jesus responds with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. There is a LOT in the parable, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that, in the first century, Jews and Samaritans hated each other.
 
At the end of the parable, Jesus asks the lawyer, “who was the neighbor in this story?” The answer is, the Samaritan. The Samaritan is your neighbor. You should love the Samaritan, and you should love the Samaritan like he loves the wounded man in the parable.
 
I doubt the lawyer was happy with Jesus’ answer. Jesus’ answer is just as hard for those of us like the lawyer.
 
As Christians, we are supposed to love our neighbors, and it turns out that everyone is our neighbor, including people that are really hard to love.
 
I preach on this a lot, and that’s because it’s a message I need to hear a lot. We are supposed to love the people in our lives who really irritate us. We are supposed to love the people in our nation who disagree with us on issues that we consider really important. We are supposed to love the people from other countries, including countries we don’t like. We are supposed to love everybody.
 
We know that. But speaking for myself, I’m exactly like the lawyer. I don’t do a very good job of loving all those people. Worse yet, like the lawyer, I often I try to justify myself by acting as if the people I have trouble loving aren’t really my neighbors after all and so I don’t have any obligation to love them.
 
I don’t put it this way, of course, not even to myself, and certainly not in my prayers. But I often act as if God doesn’t really expect me to love the people I don’t want to love. It is as if I were to say, God, surely you don’t honestly expect me to love that jerk.
 
Our efforts to justify our failure to love are doomed to failure. As the Apostle Paul tells us, over and over again, we can’t justify ourselves before God.
 
Worse still, our efforts to justify ourselves are, in some ways, worse than our initial failure to love because every attempt to justify ourselves before God is also a rejection of God’s forgiveness, grace, and saving help. Paul’s language on this is scary. When we try to justify ourselves, then, says Paul, we “cut ourselves off from Christ,” we have “fallen away from grace” (Galatians 5:4).
 
But there is good news here, too. We don’t have to justify ourselves. It is true that we don’t love perfectly. It is true that we can’t justify our failures to love. But if we can let go of the impulse to justify ourselves, if we can honestly acknowledge our failures to love as failures, if we can turn to God for help, then God justifies us. God justifies us in and through Jesus Christ.
 
And then we get into a virtuous circle. People who have been justified by God get a little better at recognizing our neighbors, including the irritating ones, as neighbors, as people we are supposed to love. And that helps people who have been justified by God to do a little better at loving our neighbors.
 
So here is my invitation for this week. The next time you feel a spasm of anger at someone in your life or at someone in our world, pause for a moment. Remember that that person is your neighbor, and that God wants you to love that person. In that moment, don’t make an excuse for yourself or try to justify your first reaction. Just say a quick prayer. And then try again to love.
 
My prayer for us all is that we can be a little less like the lawyer who tries to justify himself, and a little more like the Samaritan who truly loves his neighbor. In Christ’s name. Amen.