A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 2

by Roy Clements

²⁵On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. 'Teacher,' he asked, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?'

²⁶'What is written in the Law?' he replied. 'How do you read it?'

²⁷He answered: "'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, “Love your neighbour as yourself.'"

²⁸'You have answered correctly,' Jesus replied. 'Do this and you will live.'

²⁹But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbour?'

³⁰In reply Jesus said: 'A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. ³¹A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³²So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴He 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. ³⁵The 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."

³⁶'Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?'

³⁷The expert in the law replied, 'The one who had mercy on him.’

Jesus told him, 'Go and do likewise.'

Luke 10:25-37

Judging by the frequency with which the word is celebrated in the Top Twenty, it's quite clear that for many the single answer to the world's troubles is 'love'. And it's not difficult to agree with such a sentiment when you observe what hate does on the world's stage; all the misery it inflicts, the violence it perpetrates, the broken homes, communities, lives and hearts for which it is responsible. It's almost platitudinous to say, in the words of that Beatles song from the 1960s, 'All you need is love.' The problem is, it's one thing to sing about it, and another thing altogether to do it, isn't it?

We all know that love could bring enduring reconciliation in Northern Ireland; it could solve the tensions of the Middle East; it could heal the warring factions of Bosnia and Rwanda. In short, we all know that love could make the whole world go round a great deal more smoothly. The trouble is, we just don't seem to be able to inject enough of this miracle-working moral lubricant into the world's bearings.

Everyone gives assent in principle to the importance of love. But one despairs of finding any out of all the divided peoples of our globe where it is actually being demonstrated. This is nothing new, of course. Two thousand years ago, the thoughtful scribes of Judea had already identified the primary importance of love from their studies of the Bible. But in their case, too, there was a disappointing performance gap between theory and practice. And in Luke 10 Jesus tells a classic story to impress that very point on one learned rabbi with whom he discusses the matter.

The theory of love (Luke 10:25-28)

If you've ever tried your hand at public debate, you'll be familiar with the kind of person who stands up during question time, not with the aim of furthering serious discussion, but simply in order to make a fool of the speaker. When I was at school we had a mock general election, when various senior scholars stood as candidates for the major political parties. I was going through my anarchist phase at that time, so I declined to stand for office myself. But I did gain, I remember, immense satisfaction instead by interrupting every campaign speech I could by demanding in a loud voice, 'What about pig-rearing in the Shetland Islands?' None of the adolescent parliamentarians at my school, I discovered, had given much thought to this serious question. And not a few were reduced to total confusion by being asked to comment on it.

These days, unfortunately, I tend to be on the other end of such subversive tactics. In fact, any church minister who accepts speaking engagements at schools with a preponderance of 'A' level students quickly forms a list of old chestnuts of this sort. Who was Cain's wife? That's a good one. Did Noah have polar bears in the Ark? That's another. One soon learns that people who ask questions like this don't really want an answer, they just want to score points in an intellectual sparring match. It was Martin Luther who executed the most sardonic parry to such an enquiry. He was asked by one garrulous sceptic once, 'What was God doing before he made the world?' To which Luther is reputed to have replied (quoting his own mentor, Augustine), 'Making hell for people who ask stupid questions like that.'

When we read the gospels we discover that Jesus had to cope with a good many such insincere enquirers. Again and again the theologians of his day tried to trap him into making some injudicious comment by which he could be discredited. But it's interesting to observe the way that Jesus refused to be drawn into sterile, speculative arguments. He was, in fact, the master of turning such questions back on the interrogator.

In these verses we find a classic example of Jesus handling just such a would-be controversialist, an expert in the law, Luke calls him, or as we would say, an Old Testament scholar. He raises a query which on the surface sounds guileless enough. Indeed, the man seems to hold Jesus in considerable esteem. He stands to put his question and addresses him respectfully as Teacher'. What's more, the enquiry itself appears, superficially at any rate, to be rather promising. 'Teacher,' he says, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' But in order that we should not be misled, Luke tells us that his inner motive was rather more disappointing. He stood up, he tells us, to put Jesus to the test.

So this man was not a genuine seeker after spiritual illumination. He was one more of those hostile inquisitors from the Jewish Establishment who were looking for an opportunity to examine Jesus' theological credentials and, if possible, to expose his theological incompetence. No doubt he hoped that Jesus would make some wild messianic claim or utter some heretical statement which could be taken down and used later as evidence against him.

But if so, he was frustrated. For instead of volunteering some theological novelty for him to seize upon, Jesus invited the man to answer his own question from the Old Testament which he knew so well. 'What's written in the Law?' he asked. 'How do you read it?'

And the man was, not surprisingly, only too willing to exhibit the fruits of his biblical research. 'Love the Lord your God,' he said, 'and your neighbour as yourself.'

'You've answered correctly,' Jesus replied.

You may be a little surprised to find this man summarizing the Old Testament law in those terms. For Jesus himself, when asked on another occasion to identify the most important commandment in the Bible, could do no better than to cite precisely the same two texts which this scribe quotes here, namely Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, 'Love God. Love your neighbour. The entire moral teaching of the Bible,' he said, hinges on these two pivotal imperatives.' (See Matthew 22:34-40.)

So it says much, does it not, for the profundity of this scribe's reflection on biblical ethics, that he had come independently to exactly the same conclusion as Jesus on this point?

Well, actually, no. It probably indicates nothing of the sort. Almost certainly, the fact that the lawyer fastens here on the same two Old Testament quotations as Jesus implies rather that, contrary perhaps to what many of us assume, Jesus was not the first to distil out of these two commandments the essence of God's moral requirement. It seems likely that this scribe's answer represented the conventional wisdom of at least some of the rabbis of Jesus' day. If you had asked any of them, 'What's the essence of the Law? What is the cardinal virtue?' they would have all answered with one voice, 'Love God and love your neighbour.'

And that being so, I suspect this Old Testament expert may have been a little nonplussed when Jesus, this Galilean with such a reputation for radical ideas, applauded his very traditional answer and agreed with its uncontroversial orthodoxy. 'You've answered correctly,' Jesus replied. 'Do this, and you will live.'

Perhaps some of us too are a little disturbed that Jesus should seem to endorse this man's ideas so uncritically. Surely the whole point about Jesus was that he had something new to say about the way to eternal life, something fundamentally contradictory to the Judaism in which this man had grown up. But by replying to him in such a flattering and supportive fashion, it sounds for all the world as if Jesus wants to deny any revolutionary or innovative element in his proclamation of the kingdom of God.

Well, if that's how you're tempted to react, I have to tell you that I think you're making two mistakes.

First, you're misunderstanding the teaching of Jesus. For the New Testament never abrogates the moral demands of the Old Testament law. On the contrary, it everywhere insists that the new-covenant people of God can be identified by their obedience to the moral law which the Holy Spirit works into their lives. When Jesus says, in verse 28, 'Do this and you will live', he's not implying that loving deeds can earn heaven for us; but he is most certainly confirming that loving deeds are the infallible mark of a heaven-bound personality.

This ties in, of course, with the conclusion we drew from the parable of the sower in the last chapter: that you can tell fertile ground which has received the seed of the Word by the moral fruit of obedience to that Word which it bears. This man was effectively asking, 'How can I be certain I belong to the people of God, that I'm one of those who'll inherit the messianic kingdom of God when it arrives?' Jesus' answer is no revolutionary new concept. It is in Deuteronomy just as it is in John. It is in Leviticus just as it is in Romans. 'We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love' (see 1 John 3:14; Romans 13:8-10). Love is the divine requirement. Without it we shall not enter heaven, for heaven is a world of love.

This lawyer, you see, answered better than he knew. People who are going to heaven do love God and their neighbour. The law written on tablets of stone by Moses in the Old Testament, which this man knew so well, is the same moral law which is written on the tablets of the human heart by the Holy Spirit of the new covenant which Jesus had come to inaugurate. As Christ himself said, 'I haven't come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it' (see Matthew 5:17). And love is the fulfilment of the law. In that sense, Jesus is saying nothing at all contradictory to the general tenor of the New Testament when he says, 'Do this, and you will live.'

But I imagine some will still not be satisfied with that. They will object further. 'Oh, that may be so. Moral obedience is the evidence of a spiritually renewed personality. We all know that.' But it is certain that this scribe did not have such a New Testament theological perspective on things. It's quite clear he was spiritually astray, for just look at the way he frames his initial question, 'What must I do to inherit eternal life?' Didn't he see the contradiction in his own words? Nobody inherits anything by doing things, do they? An inheritance is something you receive by virtue of a relationship, not of an achievement.'

Clearly, like many Jews of this period and many nominal Christians today, this man thought of eternal life as something purchased by his own works of piety rather than given freely by God's grace. It was not a matter of 'What has God done for me?' but rather of 'What must I do for God?' He didn't see love of God and neighbour as the evidential fruit which the Holy Spirit produced in the lives of those who had received eternal life. He saw it as the moral duty which he, by his own unaided efforts, had to perform in order to gain eternal life as a divine reward. That was how his mind worked.

Surely Jesus should have corrected that legalistic self-righteousness underlying the scribe's words? But instead, Jesus seems almost to pat the man on the back and compliment him on his sound approach. 'Do this and you will live.'

'That's not the right answer, Jesus; not for this man! You should have pointed him to faith, not to works, just as Paul does in the letter to the Galatians.' If that's your response, it brings me to the second mistake I think you may be making. Besides perhaps misunderstanding the teaching of Jesus, you may also be underestimating his pastoral wisdom.

Think for a moment about the kind of man this expert in the law was. A professional Bible student, a man who had memorized Genesis to Deuteronomy, who had participated in seminar after seminar of learned debate, sharpening his arguments, clarifying his finer points. A man who had not only examined countless real legal cases but had dreamed up thousands of imaginary ones, so that he could feel absolutely sure that there was no conceivable ethical problem upon which he could not pronounce an authoritative opinion. In short, here was a man with all the answers. Such a person neither needs nor wants theological instruction. That wasn't why he came to Jesus. He had a mind stuffed to the brim with theological instruction, and given half a chance would be only too delighted to parade it for everybody's benefit.

Debate with a person like that is a pointless exercise. It might entertain the crowd, but it's most unlikely to change his mind in any way. Indeed, the philosopher Karl Popper may have been right when he argued that such debate only serves to cement the protagonists ever more securely in their rival positions. Even if Jesus had succeeded in confuting the scribe's theology, he would not have succeeded in converting his soul. He would have won the argument but not the man.

For this fellow needed not to be taught but to be humbled. That first-person pronoun, 'What must I do?' betrayed altogether too much self-confidence. He really thought he could love God and neighbour. That was his most fundamental error; not his legalistic theology, but his moral complacency. The only way this man could be really helped was if that over-confident veneer of smug self-righteousness was punctured by a little bit of old- fashioned conviction of sin.

But as every counsellor knows, conviction of sin cannot be imparted by lecturing people on the subject. When you're seeking to lead a person along the path to repentance, indirect methods are often far more effective than confrontational ones. Jesus, the master psychiatrist, knew that. He would show this man the inadequacy of his theology of good works. But not by scoring a victory over him in theoretical debate; rather, by touching his conscience with a very practical story.

And that brings us to our second parable.

The practice of love (Luke 10:29-35)

It's clear from verse 29 that the lawyer felt that, in spite of Jesus' apparently complimentary response, he had nevertheless somehow experienced a defeat. Perhaps there had been just an edge to Jesus' tone when he said, 'Do this and you will live', as if to imply 'but you don't really love like this, do you?' That certainly seems to be the implication of Luke's observation, that the man felt the need to 'justify himself'. That is, to put himself in the right. The moral challenge of Jesus' words had left him on the defensive. Though nothing explicitly disapproving had been said, he unaccountably felt as though he had been rebuked.

But isn't that how we all feel when someone challenges us with the command to love? G. K. Chesterton once said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting; it had been found difficult and left untried. That's about the size of it. As we said earlier, everybody agrees that 'Love your neighbour' is fine in theory, but when it comes to practice we find ourselves embarrassed by the unconditional demands such a rule makes upon our lives. Almost unconsciously, we seek to ease the pressure on our consciences, to convince ourselves that in spite of that nagging, uncomfortable feeling of self-reproach, we do love our neighbour as ourselves, don't we?

There are two classic ways in which we habitually seek to achieve this sense of self-justification. And it's the genius of Jesus' parable that it unmasks the essential hypocrisy in both of them.

a. The 'I don't do anybody any harm' technique

This first technique is quite simple. You turn God's positive command into a negative prohibition. 'Love your neighbour' is transformed into 'Don't do anybody any harm'. Such passive righteousness is far easier to handle. We can comfort ourselves, since we haven't stolen from, murdered or slandered our neighbour, that we have thereby succeeded in loving him or her. That was clearly the attitude of the priest and the Levite in Jesus' story. I've no doubt these two clergymen were well able to rationalize their decision to pass by on the other side in any number of ways. Just like this lawyer, they could justify themselves.

To begin with, they could claim that it would be foolish to stop. This injured man might have been a decoy to trap naive travellers who let their emotions get the better of their common sense. Then they could argue that it would have been unbiblical for them to stop. We are told that the man was 'half-dead', that is, unconscious. For all they knew, he might have been fully dead. If so, then the ceremonial law of the Old Testament forbade any member of the temple staff to go within 6 feet of him. If either of these clergymen had gone over to investigate, only to find they were dealing with a corpse, they would have become ritually defiled. And that would have meant not only going through an irksome procedure of ceremonial cleansing, but being ruled unfit to carry out their liturgical duties for a considerable period of time, to everybody's inconvenience and their considerable embarrassment.

But the chief reason they were able to defend their neglect of this injured man was that their interpretation of the law of love did not require them to do anything for him. A passive righteousness that simply refrained from inflicting actual harm on other people was all that was demanded, as far as they were concerned. They hadn't beaten the poor fellow up, had they? Therefore they were not responsible; therefore they didn't have to get involved. That was how their minds worked. Theirs was an ethic which took no account at all of sins of omission, and which could therefore ignore the man without suffering the slightest pang of guilt. 'Why,' they might have said to themselves as they continued down the road, 'he might not even have been a Jew, anyway!'

And that brings us to the second strategy of moral evasion.

b. The 'charity begins at home' technique

This technique involves setting limits on the extent of the application of God's command to love. It restricts the operation of that command to a particular group of people who are regarded as the exclusive recipients of the love of which it speaks. 'Who is my neighbour?' our scribe asks, the implication being that some people are my neighbour and some people aren't. He would have taken it for granted that 'Love your neighbour' meant 'Love your fellow Jew'. No rabbi of the day would have suggested anything else. The question in his mind was probably, 'Does that include Gentile converts to Judaism?' because we know that the rabbis were divided on that issue in Jesus' day. Perhaps he thought that by getting Jesus' opinion on that controversy he could generate the academic debate he was seeking. But he can scarcely have been ready for the bombshell that would fall at the very centre of Jesus' story in reply to this technical query.

To understand the emotional impact of verses 33-34 on Jesus' original audience, one needs somehow to get inside the feelings of contempt which Jews entertained towards Samaritans in the first century. The reasons for that contempt we needn't go into. Like all ethnophobia, it was thoroughly irrational. But seldom in the history of the world, I suspect, has there been a racist prejudice that was quite so extreme in the intensity of its mutual loathing.

Unfortunately, this dimension of the story is lost on us. We are so familiar with this parable that the very word 'Samaritan' for us has connotations of benevolence. We all know Samaritans are good. They are those good people who sit on the end of telephones all night long, waiting to counsel potential suicides. But such philanthropic associations were quite foreign to the first-century Jewish mind. On the contrary, in their culture there was no such thing as a 'good Samaritan'. As the American cavalry used to say of the Apaches, the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. And that's no exaggeration. Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues. Petitions were daily offered begging God to deny them any participation in eternal life. Many rabbis even said that a Jewish beggar should refuse alms from a Samaritan because their very money was contaminated.

Jesus could not possibly have chosen a hero more offensive to the sensitivities of his audience. It is not going too far to suggest that he displayed considerable physical courage in doing so. It would be like siding with a black at an Afrikaner brotherhood meeting in Johannesburg. Or like praising a UDR soldier in a Catholic pub in Belfast. If Jesus had made it a Jew helping a Jew, it would have been acceptable. Even a Jew helping a Samaritan might have been tolerable. Some, I'm sure, would have applauded if he'd made his story a piece of anticlerical propaganda, with the Jewish layman showing up the hypocrisy of these two members of the priesthood. But to suggest that two pillars of the Jewish Establishment should be morally outclassed by this mongrel heretic—why, it would have stung every Jewish patriot into hostile indignation! Yet that was exactly Jesus' suggestion.

At every step in the narrative, he makes the Samaritan fulfil the duty of love so conspicuously neglected by the priest and the Levite. Their hearts had been cold and calculating, but his bums with an extravagant compassion. Their oil and wine remain undefiled in their saddlebags, ready, no doubt, for later use in temple ritual. But his becomes a soothing and antiseptic balm to treat the man's wounds. They stay securely seated on their beasts, ready to gallop off should the man's prone body prove to be a decoy. He bravely dismounts, risking possible ambush, and walks the rest of the way to Jericho with the injured man slumped in his own saddle. They kept their money safe in their purse, congratulating themselves, no doubt, on the 10% tithe they had just paid. But he freely sacrifices a month's wages or more in order to secure the nursing care this man would need to make a full recovery.

And note very carefully: all this he did in complete ignorance of the man's racial identity. That is the significance, you see, of Jesus' observation that this man was unconscious and stripped naked. All the normal means by which the ethnic identity of somebody could be established were missing. His dialect and manner of dress were undefined. The Samaritan encounters this victim of criminal violence simply as an anonymous human being. Jew, Gentile, fellow Samaritan—he can't know which. Yet he cares for him. He rescues him. He provides sacrificially for his future welfare. The implication is clear, and Jesus pulls no punches in pointing it out.

The challenge of love (Luke 10:36-37)

You can see the lawyer swallowing hard, can't you, as Jesus forces him to answer his own question again. He can't bring himself to say 'the Samaritan', for that hated word would have stuck in his throat. On the other hand, he can't deny the moral force of the story he's heard. So he replies with embarrassed circumlocution, 'the one who had mercy on him'.

There must have been a glimmer of a smile on Jesus' lips as he observes his discomfiture. This man who had come for a sparring match now finds himself, not just defeated, but convicted. 'Go and do likewise,' is Jesus' call to him (Luke 10:37). And surely in those two imperatives, 'go' and 'do', Jesus unmasks the hypocrisy not only of his original enquirer but also of us all. It is so easy, isn't it, to engage in high-sounding generalizations about loving people. But this masterpiece of a parable grounds the practical implications of that moral theory in real life. How much are we really prepared to 'go and do' for love of neighbour's sake? it asks.

How much value does love place on a human being? The legalist wants to calculate that sum in very precise terms, so that he might know the limit of his moral duty. 'If I do this much, I have loved.' The effect of that kind of moral computation is to turn love into a very tepid thing; a vague, generalized benevolence which cannot possibly express the infinite preciousness of a human individual at all. We put our subscription in the famine relief fund, we buy our flag from the street collector, and we say, "There! I've done it. I've loved my neighbour. I've obeyed the command.'

'Rubbish,' says Jesus. 'You haven't even begun yet.' Have you noticed how very careful God is to express his command in the singular? 'You shall love your neighbour.' Love cannot be satisfied with charitable generalities. Says Charlie Brown indignantly in the Peanuts cartoon: 'Of course I love the human race, I just can't stand Lucy.' But Lucy is the measure of love.

Jesus is here concerned to show us that love requires an intensity of preoccupation with an individual. That is love's test. For the human race, we can do very little; that's why it's so easy to say we love them. But there is no limit at all to the lengths to which we might go in showing generosity to specific needy individuals who happen to cross our path, if we value them highly enough.

I'm not denying that the world today is in such great need that bureaucratic charity is necessary. Hungry people have to become statistics on pieces of paper that are passed around desks and offices and through computer memory banks. But be sure of this. That kind of de-personalized care cannot possibly fulfil our obligation to love as God sees it. Real neighbour-love can only flow in the context of a one-to-one, I-thou relationship. For only in such a relationship can the extravagance of love find practical expression.

The gospel of John recounts Judas' irritation when Mary of Bethany, overcome with devotion to the Lord, poured a valuable jar of perfumed ointment at his feet: 'Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?' asked Judas (John 12:5). Notice the phrase 'the poor'. Judas characteristically thought in such categories. Nice, safe, plural, generalized, collective nouns. 'The poor.' But Mary didn't think that way at all. For her, it was Jesus, an individual, a person she loved and would do anything for. Of course it was extravagant. But love is extravagant. In vain do you tell the lover, when he looks in the jeweller's window, 'You can't possibly afford that one.' Love sweeps such economic considerations aside. It goes the extra mile, it offers the cloak as well as the coat, it even turns the other cheek. To cold, calculating Judas this was unintelligible and wasteful. But Mary knew that love could not limit itself by degrees. Love is not interested in calculating 'What is the least I can do to fulfil my duty?' It sets such enormous value on a human individual that it must sacrifice anything on his or her behalf. Until it has been so extravagant, it is frustrated and unexpressed.

'Go and do likewise,' says Jesus. 'Next time, Mr Lawyer, you see somebody whom it lies in your power to help, remember my story of the good Samaritan and go and do likewise. Then you'll know what loving your neighbour is all about.'

Must he not say something similar to us? Has he not at a single stroke exposed the fallaciousness of all those clever excuses and rationalizations we use? 'I don't do anybody any harm.' What sort of neighbour-love is that? Such a love would have left this poor man to perish, and congratulated itself on its sound judgment. 'Charity begins at home.' What sort of neighbour-love is that? Had the noble Samaritan himself been the victim in question, such a love would have left him to die and congratulated itself on its moral discrimination.

Jesus' story dramatizes what our consciences already know, if we were only more honest with ourselves: that when God says 'Love your neighbour' he means a love which willingly engages in positive acts of care and extravagant gestures of self-sacrifice, irrespective of the race, colour or creed of the one in need. A love which refuses to ask, as this lawyer did, 'Who?' but insists on asking only 'How?' A love which is not interested in the possibility of evasion, only in finding opportunity for expression. A love which is not content to be merely applauded theoretically, but which demands to be demonstrated in practice. 'Go and do likewise,' he says.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how this world of ours would be turned upside down by such a love. It would work a social transformation far more radical than any economic revolution, whether from the Left or from the Right. Consider the 'charity at home' philosophy, for instance. Take your newspaper and spend a few moments identifying how many of the intractable conflicts, problems and hurts that disturb our world are caused by people asking, just as the lawyer does, 'Who is my neighbour?' We refuse to love with a universal willingness. We consistently adopt a clannishness that discriminates between 'them' and 'us'. Jew and Arab in Palestine, Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, Serb and Croat in the former Yugoslavia, resurgent nationalism in the former Soviet Union, endemic tribalism in black Africa, class prejudice and race prejudice here in Britain—the list goes on and on and on. It doesn't matter which comer of the world you live in, you find neighbour-love perverted by chauvinism and sectarianism into something which isn't love at all, but just an enlightened form of self-interest.

Or consider the 'I don't do anybody any harm' attitude. Hasn't it struck you how much appalling neglect of social responsibility in our modem world is justified by that phrase? Back in 1964, a classic example of this was acted out on the streets of New York. A woman in her late twenties was attacked on her way home by an assailant who stabbed her repeatedly as she screamed for help, and at least thirty-eight people peering through their apartment windows witnessed the crime. Not one even bothered to telephone the police. When they were asked later why they had done nothing, the answer was unanimous: 'We just didn't want to get involved.'

An isolated incident? I'm afraid it isn't. Here's a clip from the Daily Mail. 'Motorists slowed down to watch as a man raped a three-year-old girl in broad daylight next to a busy road, but no-one stopped to help her.'

This is the sick world we live in. Jesus' parable is real life today. But in our city centres at night, there are not many good Samaritans around to give the story a happy ending. Our western society has become so preoccupied with its individualistic and materialistic priorities that nobody wants to get involved in anybody else's problem. We just don't do anybody any harm. That's how we comfort ourselves. The victims of crime, of war, of exploitation, of oppression—what business are they of ours? These human tragedies that scar the world aren't our responsibility. So, just like the priest and the Levite, we pass by on the other side, defending ourselves all the time with the excuse, 'We don't do anybody any harm.'

'Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me' (Matthew 25:45). We have it, then, from the mouth of Christ himself that sins of omission are so heinous, so culpable in God's sight, that they can damn us. For love is the fulfilment of the law. Confronted by the spectacle of human need, love can never stand idly by and do nothing.

I said in the last chapter that it was possible for social concern so to dominate the Christian agenda that we lose sight of the priority of telling the good news of God's kingdom. I don't retract that emphasis. The seed of the kingdom is the Word. But any Christian who fails to demonstrate real social concern in a world like ours, no matter how zealous he may be in his evangelistic endeavour, will face the judgment of Christ. For the seed of the kingdom is the Word, and that very Word demands social concern. Social concern is part of the fruit of obedience which is the evidence of our fertility as soil. John Stott is surely right, then, when he insists that we may not pursue Christ's great commission, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news,' to the neglect of his great commandment. 'My command is this,' he says: 'Love' (Mark 16:15; John 15:12).

There was a time, of course, when the Christian church was, indeed, renowned for its practical obedience to that injunction of the Master. Even unsympathetic critics have to admit that in nineteenth-century England, for instance, it was the Christian believers who toiled indefatigably in the slums for the relief of the poor and the marginalized in society. Would that that were the church's image today! I fear it is not. The virus of individualistic self-indulgence which infects our western society generally is very little resisted by the church today. Like the priest and the Levite, Christians are far more interested in the buzz they get from public worship than in the social responsibility which love demands.

The story of the good Samaritan is as compelling, then, in its relevance to the twentieth-century world and to the twentieth-century church as when Jesus told it 2,000 years ago. Many years ago, I did a Bible study with a small group of students, one of them from Latin America, on this very parable of the good Samaritan. His comment was, 'If only the church had told us this story and demonstrated to us this Jesus, many of my friends would never have become Marxists.' This is, without doubt, one of the most potent recipes for social change the world has ever heard: 'Go and do likewise' (Luke 10:37).

And yet the astonishing irony is this: that wasn't why Jesus told the story. Jesus did not tell this parable because he believed it would change the world. Indeed, if he did tell it for that purpose he must be feeling thoroughly disappointed now, 2,000 years on, for it manifestly hasn't.

Now, Jesus is no utopian socialist. Recall again the question with which this whole incident began, for that is the key to it. 'Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' (Luke 10:25). Here, remember, is a man under the monumental delusion that he can earn his ticket to heaven by good works. And the ultimate purpose of this story is to show that man that he could not. The only reason this scholar could deceive himself into thinking that he could earn his ticket to heaven that way was that he interpreted God's law of love in such a reductionist manner. Once the full extent of his moral obligation is made plain to him, once he examines his life without the fig-leaf of excuses and evasions to hide his failure behind, he quickly discovers that he is not the great moral expert he thought he was. He knows the theory all right, but the practice just isn't there.

We could not be further from the truth, then, when we suggest that Jesus was confirming this man in his Judaistic legalism when he says, 'Do this and you will live' (Luke 10:28). On the contrary, the whole point of his conversation is to strike a hammer-blow at that moral complacency of his.

That's the real reason this story stands in Luke's gospel. We misunderstand it completely if we think its primary purpose is to teach us our moral duty. It is intended, rather, to expose to us our moral bankruptcy. The good Samaritan is Jesus' demolition job on the self-righteousness of those who dare to justify themselves. 'Face up to the performance gap in your life,' the parable says. 'You know God's standards of love, but you don't keep them. Go away and try to keep them if you're so sure you can. But once you stop rationalizing your way out of the full force of God's command, once you stop emasculating the demands of love with comforting cliches like "Charity begins at home", and "I never do anybody any harm", once you start comparing your loving with the extravagant generosity of that good Samaritan of mine, then you will realize what a moral failure you really are. You will not come to me then asking pompous, self-inflated questions like, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"'

No. Rather, like a man in the next story we shall be looking at, you will be found with your head bowed, beating your breast, saying, 'God be merciful to me, a sinner.' Have you got to that point of self-despair yet? Plenty of people come, like this expert, to have a debate with Jesus. Too few come to him seeking what he really wants to offer—a rescue.

Once we do get to that point where we know we need a rescue, however, we shall discover that there is yet a further dimension to this remarkable story of the good Samaritan; perhaps the most precious dimension of all.

In the last chapter I said that the parables were often abused during the Middle Ages, as a result of the allegorical interpretation of scholars. This story of the good Samaritan suffered more than most in that regard. A typical medieval reconstruction, for instance, tells us that the wounded man represents Adam, and that Jerusalem, from which he journeys, represents the state of innocence from which Adam fell. The thieves who beat him up are the devil who deprived Adam of eternal life. The priest and the Levite are Old Testament religion which passed by and could not help him. And the Good Samaritan, of course, is Christ, who comes to his rescue. The inn to which he takes him is the church; the two coins which are given for his care are the sacraments of baptism and the mass; and the innkeeper, self-evidently, is the pope!

Well, suffice it to say there is no evidence at all that Jesus intended his story to be understood in such a fashion. Yet those medieval scholars were not without their spiritual insight. For even if the good Samaritan was not intended to be an allegorical representation of the mission of Christ, it is true to say that Christ is the perfect fulfilment of the command to love, which the good Samaritan illustrates.

There is a man who travelled that Jericho road, but in the opposite direction: toward Jerusalem, not away from it, and with a cross on his back. And from that cross the Story-teller himself repeats to us that old commandment of love. Only, because he is saying it, it has somehow now also become a new commandment. 'Love one another,' he says, ‘as l have loved you' (see John 13:34). Moses could never have added that second clause, could he? Nor could the lawyer. But Jesus can. For he has turned the good Samaritan from fiction into fact. His is a love that does indeed break down the man-made barriers of race and tribe and class. His is a love that was not satisfied with mere passive goodwill, but insisted upon active, extravagant sacrificial service. 'Love one another,' he says, ‘as I have loved you. You can love that way, now; because, unlike Moses, I have not only brought you the command to love; I have brought you the power to love. My Spirit, poured out from heaven, will reproduce my love in your hearts. Go and do likewise.'

To those who, like this lawyer, think they can earn their ticket to heaven by good deeds, Jesus' words are a challenge to face up to their true moral inadequacy. You don't love like this; you can't love like this. You don't want to love like this. Stop fooling yourself.

But to those who have learnt that lesson, who have come to Christ in repentance and faith, confessing their failure and sin, the challenge of these final words comes afresh a second time and with even more force. 'Go and do likewise,' he says. 'Prove the quality of the Spirit-filled life which I have given you. All will know you are my disciples if you love one another as I have loved you.'