Luke 10:25-37 - Love Your Neighbor

In 1968, Mr. Roger’s neighborhood debuted on American public television. If you are a certain age this morning, you very likely are familiar with the show. It was an educational children’s series created and hosted by Fred Rogers. It was one of my favorite shows when I was young. For those that are familiar with the show, you may remember that it always began with Mr. Rogers singing a song. Now I don’t have an easy way to play the song for you, so I am just going to read it. “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine, could you be mine? … won’t you be my neighbor?”  In this song, Mr. Rogers is implying that being a neighbor to someone is a good thing. That’s why he would want you to be his neighbor.

Old Testament scripture also talks about being a good neighbor. Lev. 19:18 -  “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” Part of God’s law calls for people to love their neighbor as themselves. WSC question and answer 3 asks: “What do the Scriptures principally teach? The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man…Part of our duty as believers is to love our neighbor.”  We also see this principle taught in New Testament passages such as Rom.13:9 - 9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” and Gal. 5:14 - 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

A natural question from us then might be, well who is my neighbor and what does it mean to love them? In Luke 10, Jesus had a lawyer ask a similar question about loving his neighbor. In response, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable teaches us about being a neighbor.

But as we will see in this parable, much like the priest and the Levite, we want to limit who we call neighbor and therefore limit whom we show kindness and mercy and compassion. Our fallen nature causes us to show partiality when it comes to kindness and compassion. We certainly struggle to treat those who are different than us as neighbors. And especially those whom we may call “enemies” or “outcasts”. But that is not what Jesus teaches. God has always taught that his people should love their neighbors, even their enemies. The death of Jesus on the cross is the greatest display of love, and it was extended to those which Scripture called enemies of God. And because Jesus died to reconcile those enemies of God to himself, those who have received such grace and mercy can show love, mercy, and compassion to their neighbors. Jesus teaches that because believers have been shown love, kindness, mercy, and compassion by the grace of God through Jesus himself, we can and should show love and compassion to others, even our those who are different than us.

How do we do this? How can we love our neighbor as Scripture teaches? In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus uses the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach about loving our neighbor as ourselves. Look at the outline printed on page 6 of the WG. In order to display love for our neighbor that Scripture teaches, we must understand who our neighbors are and how we are to treat them. Let’s look at these verses together.

First, for a little context to our parable, let’s look at verses 25-28. Jesus is teaching when a lawyer asks him a question. The question the lawyer asks is significant, even if the lawyer’s intentions were insincere. He asked, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Notice how Jesus responds - “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” In other words, Jesus turned him to the Bible. As a side note, that is a good response that Christians would be wise to imitate when asked spiritual questions. “What is the Bible’s answer to that question?” or “What does Scripture say about that?”

The lawyer said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” To which Jesus replied, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

The lawyer summed up the law of God. He said all that is required of you to live eternally is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and so on. What could be more simple? But think about it, for a moment. As Dr. R.C. Sproul said, “There is no-one, not one person, who has kept the force of this commandment for the last five minutes, let alone for their entire lives. For to say that you love God with all of your mind, and all of your soul, and all of your strength, and all of your heart, really is to say that you never sin, because it would be impossible to sin if you loved God in this way.”

Imagine, if you will, that someone did actually succeed in loving God with all his heart, strength, soul and mind. Even then, he would still be only half-way home, because he would still have to fulfil the second part of the Great Commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. That, at times, is even more difficult than to love God, for God is altogether lovely. There is no just reason for us not to love God, but there are plenty of reasons why we would find it difficult to love all of our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. The point is, we cannot keep the law as God requires in our natural state. Rom. 3:23 tells us this. That is why we need Christ. He fulfilled the law on our behalf, in our place, so that by putting our faith in Him we receive his perfect law keeping in our place.  

It seems the lawyer realized this, knew he had not done it, and so tried to figure a way around it. So then, we get to the heart of the matter. The main thrust of this passage. Verse 29 states:  ‘But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” ’ This man wanted to show himself to be righteous on his own, without any need of assistance of divine grace, so again he tries to trick Jesus by asking another question. In response to the lawyer’s question about who his neighbor is, Jesus tells him a parable.

As a follower of Christ, do you ever struggle to love your neighbor? Maybe you would say, I think I do a pretty good job of loving my brothers and sisters in Christ. Ok, fair enough. But what about those who you would say are opposed to your views? Do you ever struggle to love them? We are called, commanded even, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus teaches us by way of the parable of the Good Samaritan, what the love of neighbor looks like.

Look at verse 30, A man is walking from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Most scholars agree this man would have been assumed to have been a Jewish man.  Two religious men, also Jews, come by but do not help.

This is part of the point that Jesus is trying to get across. Though these men were very religious according to the law, they knew the law and kept much of it outwardly, their hearts were far from God. They were not motivated by love of God, but by duty and self-centeredness. The Jewish religious leaders at the time drew lines and put limits around the command to love their neighbor. They defined neighbor as only a “Jew” or even some more specifically as a certain kind of Jew.  You would think as religious leaders these men would have felt compelled to stop and help.  They do know the law and would have been obligated by that to help. No one is apparently looking, however, and they walk on by.

Then along comes the Samaritan. Samaritan and Jews were not neutral in their attitudes toward one another. Jews especially disliked the Samaritans. They considered them half-breeds. This hatred stemmed back to the time of Rehoboam and Jeroboam when the nation of Israel split and those in the northern part of the kingdom formed the nation of Ephraim which later became Samaria. The northern tribe tried to establish a new capital of worship for God, other than Jerusalem. This led to great animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. The fact that the Samaritan was the one who stopped, who showed compassion for and cared for the beaten Jew would have been scandalous in Jesus’ time.

After presenting the parable, Jesus asked a simple question: Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? What does Jesus want us to see? The one who was a neighbor did not let the fact that it was someone who was different than him, one who normally who have hated him in fact, stop him from showing mercy and compassion.

[Ill] What if yesterday someone you know was using social media to attack Christians and everything you believe in, and the next day they are in dire need and you’re in a position to care for and show love to him or her.  How would you respond?

What if for months you have been unfairly treated by your supervisor at work, and then all of a sudden he’s in need, and you have the opportunity to show him the love and care of Christ.  How would you respond?

What if a stranger who looks different than you, dresses differently than you, lives differently than you, and acts differently than you is the person that God puts in your path?  How do you respond?

In this parable Jesus teaches us how we can display grace-endowed, or grace empowered, Christ-like love to our neighbor. First, we must realize that all mankind is our neighbor.

Dr. R.C. Sproul points out that the Bible never talks about a universal brotherhood of man. Only those who trust in Jesus alone for salvation are God's beloved children, so a non-Christian cannot, theologically speaking, be our brother. But the Bible does talk about the universal neighborhood of man. All men and women are our neighbors regardless of whether they are Christians. And we are to love them all. We are not to let differences with other people determine if we show them love or not. Who is our neighbor? All mankind. We are called to love others, no matter who they are. If God puts someone in our path who is in need of some sort of help or assistance, it is our duty as believers – those who have been shown mercy and given grace-- to extend that to others.

Yet, as the parable shows, this person in need was someone who God placed in the path of the Good Samaritan. Our love and compassion for neighbor must not stop at simply realizing this, it must move to action for those in need that God puts in our path.

To be clear here, this does not mean that there is never a time where wisdom and discernment would caution us to avoid a likely dangerous situation. For example – a young woman is driving home from work late at night and passes through an unsafe area of town and there is car broken down with a guy waving her down to stop. It is probably not wise for her out of her love for neighbor to stop and help. She can call someone to come and assist. Or another example would be a spouse who is in an abusive relationship. Duty of love for neighbor does not necessitate putting oneself in a life endangering situation unnecessarily. That abusive spouse may need to be shown mercy and compassion, but it does not have to come from the one being abused.
 
These scenarios are the exceptions, not the rule. Most times, we can extend mercy and compassion to our neighbor in need without danger. We don’t make the exception the rule. Generally, it is not danger that keeps us from loving our neighbor, it is prejudice, or partiality, or selfishness.

So how else do we love our neighbor? What does that look like in action? We also love our neighbor by how we treat them. We see this in verses 33-37. In verse 34, we read that the Samaritan ‘went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him’. He bound up his wounds, and used the provisions he had made for his own trip, to minister to the painful wounds of this man. Then he set him on his own beast of burden, and took him to an inn to care for him. Then, ‘The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have” ’.

Loving our neighbor involves compassion. In an article from Ligonier Ministries, compassion is defined as - being moved in the affections of our inner being when we see the distress of others, coupled with a subsequent outer movement of action in which we seek to alleviate that distress out of love for God and love for neighbor.  

What does this mean? The article goes on to say: First, compassion starts with seeing. Over and over in the Gospels, we read something to the effect of “And Jesus saw . . .”. His compassion was always preceded by seeing someone in distress. This may seem obvious, but it raises an important point as we seek to become more compassionate people: We can’t have compassion on people when we don’t see them in the first place.

Second, compassion involves an inner movement of our hearts in which we notice and sympathize with the grief of others, weeping with those who weep. As Christians, we groan as we witness the suffering that sin has produced in the lives of those around us. To be sure, we are varied in our emotional makeups and won’t experience or express that inner movement in the same ways as one another, but as we grow into the image of Christ, our emotional lives will grow into conformity with His.

And finally, compassion comes to fruition in an outer movement in which we act on behalf of people in need. It can be all too easy to see someone in need, feel an inner movement of sadness or concern over his or her predicament, and stop there, patting ourselves on the back because we noticed and felt badly for someone else. When speaking of Jesus’ compassion, the Gospel authors typically use language to the effect of, “And Jesus, moved with compassion,” followed by an action He performed that benefited the object of His compassion.

How might we seek to grow in the virtue of compassion? One way is to read through the Gospels, meditating on compassion in the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus. How did Jesus’ compassion change their lives? In particular, we can read and meditate on the parable of the good Samaritan, noting the difference between a false religious piety that justifies neglecting those in need and the true love of neighbor commanded by God. And as the Holy Spirit works through the Word, we go out, seeking to truly see the people around us in our churches and communities, obeying our Lord as He calls us to “go, and do likewise”.

Jesus tells us through the Samaritan’s example that as the Samaritan was a neighbor, we should go and do likewise. Jesus calls us to be a neighbor to those who have need, even if they are not like us, even if they are what we would call other or enemy. For believers, it may be those who are enemies of God, sinners who have not yet been redeemed. But remember 1 Cor. 6 tells us – “11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” And Romans 5:8 – “8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Because of Christ you can show love and compassion to others, and by the grace of God, you can be a neighbor. A neighbor who loves even the unlovely, even those who are different than you.

Let’s pray.