The Good Samaritan

6 · Unpacks the lawyer's identity and motive—he is a Torah expert testing Jesus to make himself look smart, not genuinely seeking truth

Along comes this lawyer. Now, we think lawyer and we're thinking, right, like law school and law degree, maybe Law Order. I don't know what comes to mind when you think of lawyer. This is actually code word for a man who's a theological lawyer. He is an expert in the law. He's an expert in the Torah, in the Old Testament. Right? That's what lawyer means in this context. So he really is one of the wise and understanding that Jesus has been talking about. This expert in the Old Testament Scriptures stands up and he asks a question. It's a very common question that would have been discussed and debated in that day. It's a question people are still asking today. What must I do to inherit eternal life? The thing is, he's not so much asking Jesus a real question as he is trying to make himself look smart. He's asked this question in a very erudite and very proper manner, right? He's sort of peacocking for the rest of the people in the crowd. We've all been in a class where that happens, right? A person asks a question without really asking a question. They're trying to look smart. In front of the rest of the people. "Well, Jesus, as I was reading the Old Testament in the original Hebrew this morning, you know, and I was reading it and I was cross-referencing it with my Septuagint, I thought and wondered in the tense of this verb, 'What must I do to inherit eternal life?'" That's sort of what he's doing. And everyone else is rolling their eyes. Some people are impressed. "Boy, I wish I was smart like him." And Jesus sees right through it.

7 · Jesus refuses to play the lawyer's game and turns the question back on him

Jesus is on to his game from the start, and so he hits the ball back into his court. He won't play the game. He answers the question with a question. You tell me. You're a lawyer. You're an expert in this law. What does the law say? I would love to tell you what the law says. Love God? All your heart, soul, mind, and love your neighbor. To which Jesus gives a thumbs up. Correct. Do this and you'll live. And that could be the end of it. But the lawyer presses it further. It says he wants to justify himself. He wants to make himself look even better, and he wants to show that he's actually done this thing. Everything that's been prescribed, loving God with all of his heart, all of his soul, all of his mind, all of his strength, and loving all of his neighbors. Wanting to justify himself, he says, "Well, who is my neighbor? Who God is is obvious, but who is my neighbor, Jesus?"

8 · Makes a key theological move: the lawyer's question reveals head knowledge without heart transformation

What he doesn't realize is that he's just exposed himself. You see, the lawyer has just outed himself. As a man full of book learning but devoid of heart change, a man who knows the Scriptures inside and out but who has never been conformed to them, who has never applied them to his life. The expectation is that Jesus is going to give the stock answer. Neighbor is referring to fellow Israelite. It's Leviticus 19:18. And then he'll have some rebuttal about how He has been so gracious and generous to His fellow Jewish people, we would assume. But Jesus shocks the man when He tells the story of the Good Samaritan. He doesn't answer the man's question. Instead, He tells a story. What He's doing in telling the story is He's not just trying to rebut the man. He's telling a story and He's inviting him to experience the heart of the Scriptures. You, young lawyer, have learned the latter. Listen to this story and hear God's heart. I love how Jared Wilson puts it. When Jesus teaches a parable, he's not opening up Chicken Soup for the Soul or a fortune cookie, but a window into the hidden heaven. He's revealing a glimpse of eternity crashing into time, a flash photo of his own wisdom brought to bear. That's what this story is. That's what this parable is.

9 · Gives a straightforward summary of the parable's action—man beaten, priest and Levite pass by, Samaritan helps

Jesus tells the story of a man being robbed and beaten and left for dead on the road down to Jericho. That makes sense geographically because Jericho is lower in elevation than Jerusalem. So you would quite literally on the road go down to Jericho. You descend to Jericho. That's what's happening. Along passed a priest, right? Ancient pastor, leader in the community, upright moral person. And then along comes a Levite, and they both see the beaten man and they pass on the other side until he's finally helped by a Samaritan.

10 · Identifies the double function of the parable—Jesus answers not just 'who' is a neighbor but 'what' it means to love a neighbor

When Jesus tells that story, he's answering the lawyer's question. Who is my neighbor? He's actually taking it a step further. He's answering, what does it mean to love my neighbor? What does it mean to love my neighbor? Let's look at a few observations from this famous parable.

11 · First observation: we naturally define 'neighbor' as someone like us—same language, same socioeconomic class, same interests, same values

I think the first thing Jesus shows us is that neighbors break our molds. Neighbors aren't who we expect. When we think about neighbors, it is totally natural. We do it without even thinking. It's just inherently the way we do it. When we think of our neighbors, we picture in our minds people like us, right? Your neighbor, you just naturally think of as someone who's like you. And the simple reason for that is we tend to surround ourselves with people like us. We move into neighborhoods where people speak our language. Most of us, we want to be able to communicate. Can you get the leaves off my part of the yard? It's hard to do if you don't speak the same language. We tend to cluster around people from the same socioeconomic class. We do this naturally, and in part, we're kind of forced to do it, right? Unless you're a really wealthy person intentionally buying property far below where you could live, most of us are forced by just the rules of how houses are built to live around people who are of a similar income level, right? You take out where you live from the equation, who are your friends? They're people with common interests. People you can share things with, you can go and enjoy life with. We're drawn to people who like the things we like, people who share our values, who affirm our values. The point is, when we picture our neighbor, We're usually picturing a mirror image of ourselves to a certain degree.

12 · Unpacks the historical and theological background of Samaritan identity—the product of Assyrian conquest, forced intermarriage, and theological deviation

So as we said earlier, this theological expert in the law is fully convinced that Jesus is going to identify his neighbor as a fellow Jew. Instead, Jesus makes the neighbor a Samaritan. Oh yeah, Samaritan. What's a Samaritan? You see, 700 years prior, the Northern Kingdom after David and Solomon, right? The people of Israel, the nation of Israel is split in two. And you have northern kings and southern kings. And the Northern Kingdom, 700 years prior to this, is conquered by the Assyrian Empire. And what Assyria does— Assyria is brutal. And they come in and they carry off everyone of note in the Northern Kingdom. Everyone who's educated, everyone who's a part of the political class, everyone who's related to the king, everyone who owns land, who has any sort of wealth, they carry them off to Assyria. They just leave basically behind the widows, the orphans, the beggars, the poor. And then they repopulate the area with foreigners. They're trying to dispossess people of their connection to the land. And so suddenly the northern kingdom isn't made up of Israelites anymore. It's a sprinkling of Israelites and a bunch of foreigners who Assyria has settled there. And Samaritans are the descendants of those people, those Israelites who were left in the land who then intermarried with everyone else who was there, which the law says you're not supposed to do. And there's also a theological difference. Samaritans, because they're not part of the Southern Kingdom, because they don't possess Jerusalem, because they're not The sons and descendants of David reject anything that has to do with Jerusalem. They reject the temple being Jerusalem. They reject all of the Old Testament that relates to Jerusalem, which essentially means the only part of the Bible that Samaritans accept as being part of the Bible is the Pentateuch, the first 5 books. So they've got a weird theology and they're completely intermarried with the foreigners who are around them. That's who the Samaritans are. And Jesus makes the Samaritan the neighbor. The lawyer has never entertained the thought that a Samaritan was his neighbor. The Samaritans were his theological opponents. The Jews hated the Samaritans. There was an idiom that said, "Have nothing to do with Samaritans," which literally in the context of the day meant you don't even eat meals with them. Don't even break bread with these people.

13 · A series of contemporary analogies illustrating how Jesus picks the despised enemy as the neighbor—Syrian refugees for nationalists, settlers for Palestinians, hedge fund managers for socialists

If Jesus was telling the story and Donald Trump stood up, "Well, who's my neighbor? Who's my neighbor?" Get the lips up there, right? Thankfully I can't do the hair. Maybe Jesus says the neighbor is a Syrian refugee. And not a Christian one. To the Palestinian Christian, who's my neighbor? Maybe it's a Jewish settler in the West Bank. To the Occupy Wall Street crowd, who's my neighbor? It's the hedge fund manager. You see what Jesus is doing. He's picking out the very people these groups loathe, the very people they despise.

14 · The theological punch: shared ethnicity, class, religion, or politics does not define who is a neighbor

The bottom line, the point is, though, similar skin color, similar class, similar heritage or ethnicity, the same religion or political views, that's not what makes someone your neighbor. Neighbors, real neighbors, break the mold. Jesus knows the assumption of everyone here in the story is they are picturing in their mind a man getting robbed, and that man is a mirror of them. Them, that man is a Jew. The thing is, being a fellow Jew didn't make the priest or the Levite a neighbor, did it? Ed Copeland, pastor, said it perfectly: not all your skinfolk are your kinfolk, and not all your kinfolk are your skinfolk.

15 · A powerful contemporary illustration—Sasha, a Ukrainian pastor, crosses into Russia during wartime to minister to Russians struggling with addiction

That narrows in on the ethnic part of this equation. But it expands to all sorts of categories. The point is, Jesus is casting the net way wider than anyone expects. It reminds me of the encounter I had when I was in Berlin, when I was in Hamburg, Germany earlier this fall. Remember we encountered those believers who were there from Russia and from Ukraine? If you've been watching the news at all in the last 2 years, Russia, the bear, isn't being very nice to Ukraine. They're invading Ukraine. There's massive animosity between Ukraine and Russia. Russia is literally gobbling up chunks of Ukrainian territory. They're kidnapping Ukrainian pastors. They're walking in— these pastors told us— walking into Ukrainian churches identifying the family members of the pastors and taking their sons, and they never see or hear of them again. So if you're a Ukrainian, how do you feel about Russians right now? And then to encounter Sasha, this man from Ukraine who heard of a need in a Russian church for an associate pastor and a man to minister to Russians who are in the throes of addiction. I will go with his new bride. And he crosses the border literally into enemy territory to express the love of Christ, not to a Russian, but to his neighbor. You see how Sasha's heart has been formed by the gospel.

16 · Synthesizes the first observation into a clear propositional statement: neighbor is defined by need and by gospel obligation, not by similarity or proximity

The point of the parable is that your neighbor is not determined by degrees of similarity, ethnic, socioeconomic, or otherwise. Jesus calls us to love those beyond our circle of family and friends and colleague and race and politics and even physical proximity.

17 · Second observation: true neighborliness requires vulnerability and risk

We also see something else. Neighbors make themselves vulnerable. That's here in the story. You can't miss it. There's something inherently risky about being a neighbor. We don't think of that in suburbia, do we? It doesn't seem that risky. The riskiest that might happen is, "Gah, that guy keeps parking his car kind of in front of my lawn and not in front of his lawn. Wish he would stop doing that." But now here we see being a neighbor, being a real neighbor as Jesus envisions a neighbor, means you have to make yourself vulnerable. It's actually possible when the crowd hears this that they aren't shocked that the priest and the Levite avoid touching the man. You see, Luke even says he appears to be dead. He's naked, he's bleeding, at the very least it sounds like he's unconscious. So to interact with him, to even touch him, means you actually have to get down and bind His wounds. And that's going to make you ceremonially unclean. And that's a huge deal in that day. It says the priest, right, is riding his donkey. And where's he going? From Jerusalem. The assumption of the entire crowd to hear of a priest going from Jerusalem in that day and age is that this priest has just completed his annual 2 weeks of service in the temple. The priests would serve for 2 weeks and then they would go home and return. So they're assuming the priest is leaving Jerusalem, leaving the temple, and he's going home. He spent 2 weeks. He's as ritually pure as you can possibly get. This is more than just a risky proposition to help this guy. You just don't do it. The funny thing is no one thinks about this from the Samaritan's perspective, though, do they? He's just as likely to be tempted to think, "There is no way I can help this dying Jew. What will my neighbors think? What's my wife going to say when I come home from my business trip and I have to tell her, 'I'm sorry, I spent every penny helping this guy that was beaten on the street'?" "Do we know him?" "No, he's actually Jewish." What? The point Jesus makes is that if our priority is safety, or our priority is preserving our comfort, or our reputation, or a way of life, then we will never be good neighbors. Being neighborly is risky business.

18 · Affirms that the parable contains a genuine ethical imperative—Jesus intends for us to emulate the Samaritan

There is an ethical imperative in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus is telling this so that we would envision and see what a good neighbor is. And that's like, well, I'm glad I got that theological piece straightened out. Now I can answer better next time. He's telling this story so that we'll hear it and will desire to emulate it. There's an ethical imperative. We are to live and to love and to act like Jesus. Just a few verses prior, what did He say? Take up your cross daily and follow Me.

19 · The Ebola doctor illustration—a physician goes to Liberia, contracts Ebola, and is vilified by Ann Coulter for not staying home to serve 'his own

It wasn't that long ago that there was that Ebola outbreak in Liberia, right? Remember the stories? One of the things that happened was a Christian, a believer, a physician felt called by God to go to Liberia this place where there's this breakout of Ebola, Ebola, where 90% of people die, right? I think that's actually the disease from the movie Outbreak, right? Or something like it? In the end, the doctor who went there comes down with the disease. He actually contracts Ebola. And so Samaritan's Purse has to send a private jet, two separate private jets, to fly he and his nurse back to the States. And there was this huge uproar from people in the States. Like, what was he doing? He's getting lambasted in the press. Why was he going over there? What was this dolt thinking? One of the commentators, Ann Coulter, political provocateur, ripped him in an article. And the title of the article is Ebola Doc's Condition Downgraded to Idiotic. You get the sense of what people thought about what he was doing. Colter argued that those who go off to places like Africa to serve Jesus forget, and this is a quote, that the first rule of life on the riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream. In other words, if Dr. Brantley had practiced at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power broker to Christ, He would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. And then she pushes it further. Your country is like your family. We're supposed to take care of our own first. Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brentley left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County. Where he wouldn't have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless? What was he doing?

20 · Refutes Coulter's (and the lawyer's) logic: Jesus's point is precisely that real neighborliness crosses boundaries of proximity, safety, financial security, and reputation

To sum it up, you can still be a good neighbor in less risky ways that are closer to home and more benefit to your own peeps. But that's exactly the opposite of Jesus' point. The Samaritan helps a man who doesn't live near him. I can guarantee you they don't live in the same neighborhood. The HOAs of Jericho are not letting the Samaritans in. He puts his own life at risk by pausing on this dangerous road. I mean, a guy just got beaten nearly to death on this road! He puts his own finances at risk by helping him. He puts his own reputation at risk by helping a Jew, a man his whole community would have despised.

21 · Ties the ethical imperative to the in-breaking kingdom of God

The point of these parables is that they bring the wisdom of heaven near to us. And if you're getting a little uncomfortable, that probably means you're hearing the parable in the right way. The good news of the kingdom is that Jesus, that in Jesus, the sovereign power and the sovereign presence of God is now bursting into our broken world. God is now finally and fully working to reverse the curse that Adam and Eve brought about in the garden. God is coming near to us in Jesus. He's coming near to us, a world full of Samaritans, at great risk to himself. And he's calling us to go and do likewise.

22 · Third observation: neighbors are compassionate, merciful, and generous

Next thing we see. Is that neighbors are compassionate and they're merciful and they're generous. Those first two characteristics, compassion and mercy, they're explicitly used by Luke in the story. Jesus says, right, the Samaritan has compassion on the man. And then at the very end, the lawyer sort of begrudgingly can't even bring himself to call the guy a Samaritan. Who is the neighbor? I'm not going to call him a Samaritan. I'm not going to put that dirty word in my mouth. The one who had mercy on him, right? But compassion and mercy is something neighbors do. Generosity is a characteristic that simply describes how the Samaritan overextends himself. He's generous with his time. It's never convenient to schedule time to help a half-dead guy, especially when it's your naked enemy. That's never convenient. That never fits on iCal or Google Calendar. He's generous with his resources. It says he's binding up the guy's wounds. Right? Probably not because he's carrying a first aid kit. Probably because he's ripping his own clothes to make bandages. The reason the guy's laying there half naked is because in this day and age, your wealth, right, is usually contained in your home or the land that you own. In your purse and in your clothes. Clothes are like your calling card, your business card. You can tell in a second where someone falls in the social stratosphere by what they wear. And you carry wealth in your clothes. So when the robbers come, they don't just take his pocketbook and his change, they take his clothes. This is wealth. And by the same token, when the Samaritan comes and he's ripping bandages It's like he's taking dollar bills and tearing them up and making a fire. That's the image. And then he actually takes his money and he pays to cover every expense. The biggest difference between the Samaritan who stops and the pastor and the care group leader who walk on by See what I did there? Priest and Levite, pastor and caregiver. The difference is he's moved by the needs that he sees. The other two men seem to just see a major inconvenience. We don't know exactly what their internal motivations are. All we know is Jesus says they kind of start kicking their heels into the mule and making him trot a little faster. They're not stopping. That's all that we see. They have no empathy for their brother, their fellow Israelite. But the hated Samaritan sees his nemesis laying in the muck, and he doesn't, like, ride the mule a little faster, like, splash up more mud. He slows down and he gets off and he moves towards the man. He stoops into the mud and gives the most practical, merciful, and sacrificial care imaginable. You see, true neighbors shaped by the gospel are people of compassion, they're people of mercy, and people of every flavor of generosity.

23 · Fourth and fifth observations fused: (4) Good theology doesn't make you neighborly—the Samaritan heretic is the hero over the orthodox lawyer

We also see Good theology doesn't make you neighborly. Jesus juxtaposes two individuals in the story, but it's not what you first imagine. It's not the Samaritan compared to the priest or the Levite, right? It's not the Samaritan compared to the wounded man. It's the Samaritan compared to the lawyer. Right? On the one hand, the theological expert of God's law. He's got the right translation of the Bible. He's memorized all the verses. He knows all the good theology. He's so confident in his righteousness of theology and moral purity, he's trying to show Jesus he's done everything necessary to get to heaven. And on the other hand, you've got the Samaritan. Dubious ethnic heritage. He worships God with a deformed theology. He refuses to recognize the priority of Jerusalem and the temple. Jesus isn't using the Samaritan by way of saying his theology is correct. He's using it as an indictment of the lawyer who thinks that all that matters is having your theology correct. Jesus makes the Samaritan, the half-breed heretic, the hero. This is scandalous stuff. The point of the parable isn't that we should be nice to people who aren't like us. That's part of what Jesus is doing. That's there, but there's more to it. Jesus makes the Samaritan the hero. He makes the guy that there's all sorts of things we shouldn't commend The main point. It's not just that we should love the unlovable. It's Jesus driving home the point that all of us are unlovable. None of you are getting to heaven because you've done enough stuff. Your straight A's in Sunday school, as nice as the certificate looks on the fridge, aren't going to get you in. Which brings us to observation 5: Loving God involves loving neighbors. Now, loving neighbors is not the same thing as loving God. So this doesn't work in reverse. It's possible to love other people, even different people and difficult people, and have no love for God. Right? There are people that do that. But the inverse of this statement, according to Jesus in this parable, is not true. In other words, it is not possible to truly love God and have no love for your neighbor. That's Jesus's point. It's the exact point the Apostle John makes in 1 John 4:20. If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, He is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, who he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. It's not that loving your brother is now a work that gets you into heaven. It's that loving your brother is the natural product, the natural fruit of a heart that's actually been changed, of a heart that actually loves God for who he is, and so sees every single fellow image bearer— white, black, and brown, rich and poor, Republican, Democrat, independent, Tea Party, Social Democrat. I don't know if there's more we can keep going with there. Sees them all as fellow image bearers worthy of love because God created them. Great phrase I'll borrow from Mr. Dunn: unconditional love doesn't mean unconditional acceptance. That's not what we're saying, but there is a call to love.

24 · Exposes the lawyer's works-righteousness and the parable's gut-punch: the test is not 'Can you love like the Samaritan?' but 'Can you love the Samaritan?' Inability to love one's enemy reveals the absence of God's love within

The lawyer's rebuttal, his rebuttal question to Jesus is really telling. At the very beginning, "Well, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" In his mind, eternal life is earned and he's confident. He has lived in such a way that he's the quintessential, "Well, good people go to heaven when they die and I think I'm a pretty good person." Like that's who he is in a nutshell. It's that guy you're interacting with on the airplane or in the coffee shop. That's who he is. The parable teaches, though, that if we have no love for our fellow man and for our neighbor, then we prove that we have no true love for God either. And it's that reality that hits the lawyer like a punch in the gut. If you can't love like the Samaritan— no, more than that. It's not just if you can't love like the Samaritan. If you can't love the Samaritan, then you don't have the love of God in you.

25 · Signals the shift from ethical observation to gospel climax

The parable is really pretty straightforward, but Jesus actually pushes it further than that, right? Now go and do it. That's correct. Live it out. And if you're honest with yourself, your shoulders should sag a little bit there. It's not a hard parable to figure out, but we have to remember the parable in the broader context.

26 · Establishes the broader redemptive-historical context: the parable is told in the shadow of the cross

Remember last chapter in Luke chapter 9? This really significant thing happens in Luke's Gospel. Luke says what about Jesus? He sets his face to Jerusalem. It's Luke's way of saying he sets his face to the cross, and everything that happens from Luke 9 to the end of the gospel happens in the shadow of the cross. The story of the Good Samaritan is told as Jesus is on his way to the cross.

27 · Reconstructs the parable's emotional and economic stakes with vivid contemporary parallels (Troost Avenue, ER bills, debt slavery)

So who is the ultimate Good Samaritan? Well, as Jesus tells it, the Samaritan, the Good Samaritan, is a man who comes along and looks after a beaten, bruised, and battered man on the side of the road. A man he has no kinship for, right? A broken man who actually society would tell him is his enemy. That's who the Good Samaritan is. On a certain level, that's exactly what Jesus is saying. The Good Samaritan risks his life to help the man. It's obviously a dangerous road. The guy's getting beat up. This is like the dark alley in a bad part of the city. That's kind of how you picture this, right? Make it really contextualized. This is a broken man laying in a gutter on the wrong side of Troost in Kansas City. That's what's happening in this story. And to affirm all your fears, here's this man who's been nearly beaten to death on the wrong side of Troost. I told you this is a dangerous part of town, right? He's almost dead and he's naked. He's just in his underwear. That's how the guy is laying there. And here you are scurrying to your car trying to get your keys out because you're in a bad neighborhood and you're trying to get out of there as fast as possible. So make no mistake that the Samaritan is the guy who risks his life to save this man. And he looks after the man. He pays all of his expenses. You think it's enough to kind of pause on the edge of the dark alley and see him and then run to your car and then pull out your cell phone and lock the doors and call 911. He goes to the guy, right? He stays and he helps him and he binds his wounds and he pays for his medical expenses. He pulls out a couple of denarii. In our minds, what does that mean? Here's what it means. It means he takes this bleeding guy out of the gutter, he throws him over his shoulder, he hauls him to his car, he opens the passenger door, and he sits him muddy, bruised, and bleeding right on his nice upholstery. And he closes the door and he jumps in and he drives down the road to St. Luke's Hospital off of Warnall. And he throws the guy back over his shoulder and he walks into the ER and he sets the guy in the chair. Who is this guy? I don't know, he's got no wallet. How do we know he can cover what it's gonna have to be paid for? I don't know. Here's my card. Here's my credit card. Put everything on there. Every expense. Well, now the 2 denarii are a little different, aren't they? Ever been to the ER? Ever gotten the bill afterwards? And now you think of the context here. There's no— Chapter 9 bankruptcy or Chapter 11 or Chapter 13 or whatever the numbers are. There's no bankruptcy in this day and age. When this guy comes to days later and he realizes there's a bill to pay and he's got no wallet, he's wearing borrowed clothes, right? It's completely in the power of the innkeeper to say, well, now you're mine. You're working off that debt or you're just flat out my slave. That's how that society worked. That's how that culture worked. This is a massive thing. So this Samaritan is probably saving this man from slavery. He's beaten and naked and penniless and broken. And this man's kindness is what keeps him from ending up a debtor or a slave for the rest of his life. The man's compassionate mercy has saved him from death. And it saved him from slavery.

28 · The Christological climax—we are not the Samaritan but the beaten man

Who's being a neighbor? Now we go back and consider this parable in its context. Who is the true Good Samaritan? Jesus doesn't just want us to identify with the lawyer or the priest or the Levite. He wants us to identify with the beaten man. He wants us to see ourselves. This guy in the story might be half dead, but we are completely dead. Dead in our trespasses and our sins. And there is nothing we can do to inherit eternal life. The ultimate Good Samaritan who comes to broken people, who binds up their wounds, who clothes them, who cares for them, who saves people from slavery and death, is none other than Jesus Christ. That's the very point Luke is making. He has set his face to Jerusalem. He's going there for broken people. For sin-enslaved people, for helpless and abandoned, unconscious, nearly dead on the side of the road people. Jesus is going to the cross to rescue and to redeem and to restore. He's going to the cross to pay every debt that you owe. And then he's going to look to the Father and he's going to say, and whatever else they owe, charge it to my account. My account of righteousness will cover every one of their debts.

29 · Pushes the typology beyond the parable—Jesus doesn't just bind our wounds; he takes our place in the beating

But Jesus, on the way to the cross, will actually go further than the Good Samaritan in the story, won't he? He'll actually take our place in the beating. 39 lashes and a crown of thorns. He'll take our place in being stripped. He'll take our place as the priests and the Levites and the crowds reject him and mock him and scream for him to be murdered. And he'll take our place as he hangs from that tree, dying for our sins, all to save us from slavery and to rescue us from certain death.

30 · The ethical imperative flows from gospel reality, not as the means of justification but as the fruit of it

The gospel reminds us that Christ loved us when we had no ability, capacity, or even desire to love him back. Christ's love then frees us from having to love other people in order to get to heaven. That's not the point of the parable. You've got to love your neighbors or you can't get to heaven. No, Christ frees us from being enslaved to comfort and ease and risk-averse lifestyles. So that we can love as recipients of God's grace, as people whose own wounds have been bound by Jesus and whose debts have already been paid. Now go and do likewise.

31 · Closing prayer petitioning fresh conviction from the parable, help to live out risky love, and foundational recognition that we cannot justify ourselves—we can only hope in the true Good Samaritan, Jesus

Would you bow your heads? Lord, I ask that you would bring fresh awareness and fresh conviction from this parable. Lord, let us see the way that you are calling us to live, to love in this risky, prodigal, extravagant way. God, help us, help us to take on Matthew 6 and to worry about nothing and to trust that our Father knows, and to love our neighbors even as we love you. But before that, and under that, and around all of that, Father, help us to see and to recognize that there is nothing we can do to justify ourselves. We can only hope in the true Good Samaritan. Father, thank you for sending Jesus. Thank you for that greatest gift. In his name we pray, amen.