The Good Samaritian

This Sunday our church dove into the story of the Good Samaritan. This story told by Jesus to a lawyer of the law I would say is known by more non-christians then most other stoires told by Christ. It might have to do with the fact that there are many people in this world that love to help others who are in Crisis. Think about it, a death in the family, the lost of a home to a fire or a the dreded sickness that starts with the letter "C". Beleiver or not, people gerneally responses in kind to crises.

But giving the context of the story and the back and forth diologe between Christ and the Lawyer, I think only one thing was being said and only one group of people God was calling out. So, what was the one thing and the one Group?

Well, simply said, He was calling out all beleivers to fullfull their directive from God to "Get R done" when it comes to helping people in crises.

This parable tells us that when we start with the law, we will never arrive at grace. But when we start with grace, we may well find that the law of love gets fulfilled simply and solely because of the kind of people we became after the grace of God lifted us up out of the ditch where our sin and the devil had left us to die.

Later in the New Testament, reflecting on his own conversion to faith in Jesus as Lord, the apostle Paul will say that the law brings death. That surely would have been the case for the man in the ditch in Luke 10. The law would have killed him, would have left him for dead no less than the thugs who mugged him in the first place. But grace saved him. Like a Samaritan stranger who shows up from out of nowhere, so grace always comes from out of a clear blue sky as a sheerly unexpected, undeserved gift.

We need that grace because if we are honest, we confess that on our own we tend to be pretty unloving a lot of the time. So how wonderful it is that, as it turns out, the only way to love God and neighbor is through the very same grace that also forgives our countless failures of love. But the more you get forgiven for being unloving, the more loving you want to be in return. So our question is not the lawyer's question of "What must I do to be saved?" Our question is "What did Jesus do to save us?" If you can get a good answer to that question, you won't need to hear Jesus say, "Go and do likewise." Grace will so fill you with love that you will want to go and do as Jesus did. You won't have to. You will want to.