Our Gospel reading today teaches us what God considers the
highest and best life. That is important knowledge. Many kings and prophets
would like to know such knowledge, and here it is, right before our eyes. The
best life is the one where we love God with all our heart, all our soul, all
our strength, and with all our mind. We should love our neighbor as we love
ourselves. This is the highest ambition a person can have, and the best
possible life that a person can live.
But as a way of life there are very few who take it up. The
gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to eternal life, and few there
are who find it. Broad is the gate and easy is the way that leads to
destruction. The reason why loving God and loving the neighbor is hard is
because it is so contrary to the way that we are by nature. How we are by
nature is that all our love is directed inwardly instead of outwardly. We want
stuff for ourselves and for those who belong to us. Others can fend for
themselves. Our selfish desires shape and form our ambitions.
We should not think that these desires and ambitions are
obviously sinful. According to our reason and according to the world’s thinking
there is nothing wrong with self-gratification. Capitalists, for example,
believe that selfishness is what makes the world go ‘round. Squeezing your
neighbor for some extra profit is good business sense. Dumping some friends for
better friends is the way to move up the social ladder. Awards and honors for
one’s self makes people try and compete for the prize, and therefore is the
secret to success and progress.
Talking about this way of life as being bad might be
confusing to you, and that’s understandable. It’s what comes naturally to us.
Most people have never even considered the possibility that there is another
way of living one’s life. But there is, and we are taught that today by our
Gospel reading. What should motivate all our actions is love for God; love for the
neighbor. Instead of trying to please ourselves, we are to please God. God is
pleased when we do good things for other people besides ourselves. This is the
chief way that we can love God and serve him—when we do good for others. God
doesn’t need our good works. We can’t enrich him because everything is already
his! God doesn’t need our good works, but our neighbor does. Our neighbor needs
those good works very much.
“Who, then, is my neighbor?” This is the question that the
expert in the Law asked Jesus after he heard that his interpretation of the Law
was correct. Jesus said that he would live if he loved God and loved his
neighbor. But the expert in the Law wanted to know whether he was in good
stead. I assume that he thought that he had been pretty good to his family and
to his friends. But what about other people? “Who else am I required to help?”
he wondered.
Jesus answered his question by telling him the parable of
the Good Samaritan. The answer to the question of who the neighbor is, is whoever
happens to cross your path. And how much should be done for such people that we
happen to come across? The parable shows us that it is a lot. This parable
forces us to see that our notions of generosity are off base. If we came across
some miserable person and gave them a couple hundred bucks, boy, would we ever
feel like we had done our good deed for the day! But the Samaritan does so much
more than that.
He picks the man up, bandages his wounds, and tries to make
him comfortable. He puts the man on his own animal and walks beside him until
they find a place to stay. When they get there he checks into a room and stays
with the man. He nursed him along through the night. He probably didn’t sleep
well with the moaning of the injured man, and the help he needed to give him.
It wasn’t until the next day, after the hardest work as far as nursing is
concerned was over, that he continues on his journey. That’s when he gives a
couple hundred bucks to the innkeeper and gave him instructions for caring for
the man. He also, essentially, leaves a blank check behind. Whatever the
innkeeper should spend in addition to the couple hundred bucks, the Samaritan
would pay when he passed through on his way back.
At any stage during this story the Samaritan would have been
justified, according to our reason, to leave the man be. He could have given
him the money on the road and moved on. He could have helped him get to the inn
and moved on, instead of staying the night. Or, after doing all that he did, he
could have given the innkeeper the couple hundred bucks and moved on—not
leaving behind a blank check. And who could fault him for being unkind or
unloving—even if he had just given him money on the road?
The Samaritan went above and beyond our natural expectations
which have selfishness already baked right into them. In fact, that selfishness is so much a part
of the way that our reason works, that it will balk at the notion that such a
way of life should be required of anyone. It’s unreasonable that anyone should work so hard and sacrifice so much!
What would happen to a person’s happiness and leisure of such a thing were
required? Nobody would get any rest and relaxation! The whole world would be
plunged into misery! “Such thinking is wicked,” Reason says.
I’m not going to respond to Reason’s complaining. Instead, I’m
going to point out three important biblical truths. First of all, we are always
trying to avoid being labeled as sinners. When we think of our sinning we only think
of those ugly things that bother the conscience. “Fine, I did do those nasty
things, but otherwise I’m a pretty good person.” It doesn’t even enter our
minds that our day-to-day life, being dominated by selfishness, is sinful. It
doesn’t enter our minds that we should be loving God with all our heart, with
all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind, and that loving him
who is unseen means that we love our neighbor who is seen. If it weren’t for
God telling us so, we would never believe that we are a tenth as sinful as we
actually are. It is as St. Paul says in our Epistle reading: The Word of God
imprisons every single last one of us under sin. No one is righteous—no, not
even one—for we do not love. The direction of the energy in our life is towards
ourselves: “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” We are not occasional sinners. We are died in
the wool sinners. This is a crucial biblical truth that we should see here.
A second biblical truth is that a massive change is what is required
for us to be God’s people. Jesus says that we need to be born again, and even
entering our mother’s womb a second time—as extreme as that might be—wouldn’t
be good enough. We have to be born again by the water and the Holy Spirit, by
God’s own birthing action in baptism. The prophet Jeremiah says that we need a
whole new heart. The old heart will never do it. That would be like trying to
make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. That would be like trying to turn lead
into gold. That would be like trying to turn a heart made out of stone into a
heart of flesh that beat and moves and feels. All of this is to say that a
miracle is required. If our energies are to be turned outward, then God is the
one who must do it, otherwise we will only remain selfish.
A third biblical truth is that this life of love is the end
point of our salvation. 1 Cor. 13 is well known as the so-called “love
chapter.” We are familiar with its verses: “Love is patient, love is kind,”
and so on. What is not so well understood is that St. Paul is saying that love
is a spiritual gift that continues on and is perfected in heaven. “Now we
see in a mirror dimly,” he says, “then we will see face to face.”
Heaven is when the work of God’s salvation is completed by him making us like
himself. God is love. We will be made to love from the bottom of our hearts
when we are purified by the death and resurrection of our bodies. To be loved,
and to love in turn, is the best. We love, and will love completely in heaven,
because God has first loved us.
What we can see from all of this, then, is that as
Christians we are called to love. It is our highest ambition and goal. It is an
anticipation of our heavenly life. We have been given the first fruits of the
Holy Spirit. We have been born again. God has given us a new heart. That heart
has begun to love, even if it does so in great weakness because we must
struggle against the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh. For the sake of
Christ, God does not reckon our sins against us. He approves of us for Jesus’s
sake. Together with the forgiveness God gives us in Jesus he also sets our lives
on the right track. The right track is to love. The ability to love, the desire
to love, is something that can only be given to us by God as a gift.
I know that you have noticed how hard it is to do things
that you don’t want to do. When you don’t want to do something, everything
about the task is drudgery. You watch the clock and wonder when it will be
over. Without the desire to love being given to us as a gift, this is how our
so-called love will be. We will be wondering when we can quit living for other
people and start living for ourselves. We will always be looking forward to
when we can stop loving.
Notice how this is not the way that it is with the good
Samaritan. The only way that his actions can be explained is that this is what
he wanted to do. He wasn’t forced and
prodded along by whiplashes of the Law. If that were the case, then he would
have met the minimum requirement that was laid upon him and moved on with his
life, devoting it all to himself. No, he loved the man because he wanted to love
the man. Think of the stuff that you enjoy doing. Does anyone have to force you
to watch your favorite TV shows? Does anyone have to threaten and harass you to
do your hobbies? No, you gladly do the things that you enjoy doing because
those are the very things that you want
to do. Without the desire to love being given to us there is no way for us to
turn our lives around.
Left to our own devices even our interactions with God are
going to be driven by selfishness. We will try to follow God’s rules so that we
can be handsomely rewarded for our efforts. Unfortunately, we will never have
the confidence we want, though, because deep down we will know that we are only
doing it for ourselves. There is no love for God or the neighbor. There is only
love for one’s self. This is what can be seen with the expert in the Law’s
interaction with Jesus. It’s like he was looking at God and saying, “Now what
can I use you for? What are the right buttons to push to get what I want?”
God is not a vending machine for salvation. God is not even
a set of rules that is just itching at the chance to judge and condemn. God is
love. As the great Lover, who wants
to love, who goes out looking for it, he has come to from heaven and become
incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He saw us by the side of the road,
the victim of the fiendish devil. But we were and are far worse off than this
poor injured man in the parable. We have not just been stripped, beaten and
left half dead. The poison of Satan has settled right into our heart, soul,
strength, and mind. Jesus, when he deals with us, when he serves us, is not
helping someone who is grateful and good. What did people do to Jesus, the
greatest of the good Samaritans, who only helped and did all things well? We
crucified him. And yet, even from that very instrument of torture, he looks
upon those who are torturing him, and prays, “Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.” Jesus did nothing for himself. Everything he did and
does is for us and for our salvation.
The life of love is good. It is the highest good. And so it
is a worthy ambition and highest goal. “Beloved, let us love one another.”
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