Hear About Loving Our Neighbor
Texts: Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18; Luke 10:25-37
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church
September 10, 2023
We are continuing in this sermon series on the Shema. Shema means “hear” or “listen.” Moses told Israel that they were to hear that we are to love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength.
Jesus knew the Shema, would have said the Shema twice a day like any devout Jewish person, and he taught it. And when Jesus taught it he added another part of the Bible. Jesus said the first and greatest commandment is the Shema: to love God with all we are. But he said there is a second commandment that goes with it: Love your neighbor as yourself. There are a lot of other good things in the Jewish law that Jesus could have quoted, but he gives this one: love your neighbor.
By adding “love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus teaches that the same form of love for God is to be shown to our neighbor. We love God with all that we are when we love our neighbor. Disciples are not to apply a different or lesser love to others than we apply to God.[1] Think about that.
Which really torques me because I can convince myself that I’m loving God when I come to church, pray and read my Bible, and prepare sermons. But when I have to deal with others,
…particularly those that bother me or aren’t up to my standards,
…or who are in my path when I am bee-lining for something important for me to do,
…or who I may not really feel comfortable with,
…and I am told this is the measure of my love of God, well, it just deflates all my grand images of how spiritual and Christian I am.
“Jesus, I’ve got to love people, too?” “Can’t it just be between you and I?”
Mark Labberton, a pastor, in his book, “The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor” said, “If we say we love God and don’t love our neighbor, it turns out we don’t love God. In other words, our faith is only fiction.”[2]
Teresa of Avila was a Carmelite nun who lived in the 1500’s. She was a woman of deep prayer and mystic experiences. She said, “We cannot be sure whether we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believe that we are. But we can know quite well whether we are loving our neighbor.” In other words, if you aren’t sure if you are really loving God, then look at how you are loving others around you.
Which brings us to a time when a lawyer came up to Jesus to test him. How do you feel about lawyers? Should we start with a lawyer joke?
A rabbi, a Hindu, and a lawyer are in a car that breaks down in the countryside one evening. They walk to a nearby farm and the farmer tells them it’s too late for a tow truck but he has only two extra beds and one of them will have to sleep in the barn. The Hindu says, “I’m humble, I’ll sleep in the barn.” But minutes later he returns and knocks on the door and says, “There is a cow in the barn. It’s against my beliefs to sleep in the same building as a cow.” So the rabbi says, “It’s okay, I’ll sleep in the barn.” But soon, he is back knocking on the door as well, saying, “There is a pig in the barn, and I cannot shelter in a building with a pig.” So the lawyer is forced to sleep in the barn. Shortly, there is another knock on the door and the farmer sighs and answers it. It’s the pig and the cow.
The lawyer who walks up to Jesus to test him was a lawyer in the Jewish law. The lawyers we read about in the Gospels were religious lawyers. This man was an expert in the Bible, and people relied on people like him to tell them it’s meaning.
This lawyers doesn’t want to know how to pray or how to be more faithful to God or follow Jesus. We read that he wants to test Jesus. And he asks Jesus how he can gain eternal life, not really wanting to know how to gain eternal life but trying to trip up Jesus.
Jesus asks him what he finds in the Bible. The lawyer quotes the Shema: Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your strength and with all your mind. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5 actually says heart, soul and strength but the lawyer gets one more piece of us in there when he adds “mind.”) And then he also quotes Leviticus 19:18 that we are to love our neighbor as ourself.
Maybe he had heard Jesus add this part about loving our neighbor as well. Or maybe it was often added by teachers of the Bible. But he puts both of these together.
Jesus applauds him and says he got the right answer. Love God and love neighbor and you are on the right track. But the lawyer just couldn’t stop there. No, it says, he wanted to justify himself. He wanted to make himself look good, smart, maybe a little better than Jesus. So he asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” “How far do I have to go?” “Where are the limits?” The lawyer is looking for a loophole.
Jesus answers by telling the well-known parable of a Samaritan. Did you know that is where the parable comes from? It comes from a lawyer testing Jesus about the Shema. It is a parable we may have heard many times. I’m sure many a sermon has been preached from this pulpit on this parable. It is a parable perhaps we think we know. It is a parable spoken in response to what it means to love our neighbor.
It goes like this: A man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho and is mugged, robbed and left for dead. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a well-known road. I have walked part of that road, which is really a trail, and it was dangerous because there are cliffs and caverns where thieves could hide and easily attack their prey without anyone seeing.
The man is lying on this road beaten, bloodied, and vulnerable. Three people come along. The first two are Jewish, religious leaders, people of faith. They keep their distance and walk around the hurting man. The third person is a Samaritan.
This is part of the edge of this teaching. In the time of Jesus “neighbor” meant someone who was Jewish, but not Gentiles. That’s how people thought. There was deep prejudice against those who were not of the people, religion and faith of Israel. Samaritans were definitely not neighbors. They were social, political and religious adversaries of Israel.
Just before this Jesus sent his disciples ahead of him and into a Samaritan village to find a place to stay. But it says, “the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem.”[3] When Jesus approached the woman at the well, who was a Samaritan, she questions him saying, “Jews don’t have dealings with Samaritans.”
Samaritans? Uh-uh. No good. Bad people. Jesus makes the Samaritan, one of those who wouldn’t even welcome Jesus into their village, the hero of the story. The Samaritan is the one who tends to the man, takes personal responsibility, uses his own money, and gets him to safety.
Jesus ends the story by asking the lawyer who was the neighbor to the man who was left for dead? Did you see it? - Jesus never answers the original question: who is my neighbor? Jesus turns it around and makes it an issue of “are you a neighbor?”
Jesus ends the story by asking the lawyer who he thought the neighbor was. The lawyer again has the right answer – the one who showed mercy. Jesus says, “Go and do the same thing.” Do the same thing as that Samaritan, that person you despise, that person you consider unclean, that person you don’t think has any good in them.
Do what he did. Go and show mercy.
The Samaritan looked and came near. He didn’t play it safe. He had no guarantees about how this was going to end. Someone once said, “Love doesn’t sound so dangerous until you’ve tried it.” But though the Samaritan is a fictional character he is our enduring example of what it means to love and show mercy. We know the Good Samaritan, as its called.
Jesus implied that this Samaritan was loving God with all his heart, with all his soul and with all his strength.
The ability to love God depends on our ability to love others. And ability to love others depends a lot on how we see them. We will never be able to know who our neighbor is or be a neighbor until we lift judgments about people. We can’t assume we know what they are like.
Prejudices often keep us from loving. We all carry prejudices, and these lead us to judge people and what they are like. We have political prejudices. Our culture is running a special on these right now. We will not love that person because they have views that are conservative or they actually agree with the far right. We will not love that person because he or she is liberal, progressive, woke.
We have social prejudices. We will not give ourselves to someone who might be here illegally. You never know. We are not going to love the person who appears homeless, is of that race or ethnicity. We don’t approve of their orientation. We don’t like the way they parent. We don’t like how their family dynamics work. Their kids won’t shut up. They are always bickering.
We have economic prejudices. That person is too rich. Look where they live, what they drive. That person is too poor. Look where they live, and what they drive.
We can see people in these ways, or we can see all people as created in the image of God. We can see people loved by God. If we are going to love God we have to be willing to see what matters to the heart of God. People our world treats as invisible, God sees clearly. Only God can transform our hearts to see and respond to those who are very much seen by God and on his radar.[4] Wanting to know who should be loved and who should not be loved isn’t really love.
The Samaritan is the one who recognizes that when it comes to the question of who is our neighbor, it might be anyone. there are no rules. Our neighbor, it turns out, is anyone in need. Where does such vision come from? It apparently doesn't come from one's ethnicity, one's religion, ones training, or one's station in life."[5]
Our nation, our communities, our families, our world are becoming more and more divided. We have become tribal. Our suspicions and preferences have overtaken us. Large parts of the church have no idea how to put into practice what Jesus says about loving your neighbor. There are people using the name of God and are more concerned with power and sometimes even violence. As a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ I want to be different.
Elie Wiesel, the Jewish writer, theologian, and Holocaust survivor, tells the story of a woman named Maria. In the dark days of World War II, when Weisel’s family lived in Hungary, and knew it could be a matter of time before the Nazis came and took them away to the concentrations camps, Maria was like a member of the family.
She was a peasant woman and a Christian. During the early days of the war she still visited them despite the social implications, but eventually non-Jews were no longer allowed to come into the ghettos. It didn’t stop Maria. She found her way through barbed wire and came anyway. She brought the Wiesel family fruits, vegetables and cheese.
One day she came to their door and told them that she had a cabin up in the hills and that she wanted to take the children, of which Eli was one, and hide them there before the SS came. The family decided after much discussion to stay together as a family, although they were deeply moved that Maria would do this.
This is what Wiesel writes about her:
Dear Maria, if other Christians had acted like her, the trains rolling toward the unknown would have been less crowded. If priests and pastors had raised their voices, if the Vatican had broken its silence the enemy’s hand would not have been so free. But most thought only of themselves. A Jewish home was barely emptied of its inhabitants before they descended like vultures.
The Shema says to hear. And what we are to hear is that we are to love God with all that we are. And Jesus said along with this is loving our neighbor. Are we listening? This lawyer who confronted Jesus would have said the Shema twice a day. He knew the scripture. He knew “love your neighbor.” Let’s beware of knowing the Bible and not living it.
How we love may not take the courage or daring of a Maria. It will probably be a lot more ordinary. But it is no less love.
The wondrous thing is that God wants to work his love through us. He gives us the task of bringing his love to others. He is entrusting us with this. And his love can show through you and me. There’s something remarkable about this – that God uses us to show his love. And that it’s a way of loving him.
Biblical spirituality is about loving God. It’s not only reading our Bible, praying and coming to church. It is seeing other people. It is paying attention to other people. It is also bringing food to someone who is in need, visiting a hurting family, making our way to the hospital, tutoring children who struggle in school, welcoming an immigrant or refugee, listening to someone who just needs to be listened to, and doing acts of mercy to people who need mercy. We love God when we love our neighbor.
Let’s go and do likewise.
Prayer: God of love, open our hearts to our neighbor,
…to the person next door and the people under our own roof,
…to those on the streets and refugees here and in far away places,
…to children who have no support and the elderly who are lonely
…to the person who just needs a break, a word of encouragement, an act of mercy.
Help us to see you in the face of our neighbor. And to know that as we love others we are loving you, for it is pleasing to you when we do this.
And help us to do it with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all the strength that is in us.
To the glory of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
[1] James Edwards, Commentary on Luke , 319.
[2] P.30
[3] 9:53
[4] Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, p.77
[5] David Lose, Working Preacher, 2010