LOVE AND LIVE John M. Buchanan
Luke LO:25-37 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 25, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

"Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal Life?" Not a bad question, that,
In fact, it is the question asked from time immemorial. The New Testament means
two things when it uses the phrase "eternal life", Sometimes it seems to indicate
the reward God pives to His people after they die, This is the view which has become
the popular definition of the phrase: eternal life means heaven, But there is
another meaning, Sometimes the New Testament seems to be pointing to a current
reality. Eternal life is a quality of life: it is a gift people may enjoy now! it
breaks into the finite life of the world on occasion like a Lark singing at night.
"Eternal life", like "the Kingdom of God" is both future and present: death no
longer defeats it: God's people know it in part in their Lives, and will know it in
its totality later, it is fullness of life, It is depth in the midst of super-
ficiality: it is living to the fullest extent of one's potential, It is what, to
season the sublime with the ridiculous, the Schlitz people were getting at with the
phrase "You only go around once in Life, so grab all the gusto you can get,"

How do I find that? How do I live a meaningful, satisfying life? How can T
get rid of this relentless suspicion that I'm missing something: that real life is
passing me by? That's the question philosophers have tried to answer for centuries,

It is the haunting question that drives the poet to write, the artist to paint, The
emergence of the cults in our day is evidence that the question is being asked with
anew urgency, The powerful appeal of cult religion is that it provides an immediate,
simple and clear answer,

“WHAT must I do to inherit eternal life?" Not only a good question, but
perhaps the best question anybody ever asked,. It is, as you know, what a lawyer
asked Jesus one time, The answer Jesus gave is one of the most precious stories in
the literature of the human race; the Parable of the Good Samaritan,

The lawyer's job was to know and interpret religious law, Luke says he wanted
to test Jesus which could mean that he wanted to see if Jesus knew the law, or that
he wanted to catch Jesus in some deviation from strict orthodoxy, I think he was
asking the same question each of us asks, The trouble is, you see, he knew the
official answer to his own question, In fact, he was probably wearing at least a
portion of it in phylactery which dangled from his wrist, It had been generations
since the Rabbis condensed several statements from Deuteronomy and Leviticus into a
summary of the meaning and purpose of life in covenant with God, "What's the law
say?" Jesus asked him, The lawyer responded in the only way he could, "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind - and your neighbor as
yourself," And Jesus ~- who has curiously become the tester said, "Do that and you
will live,"

Now, there were some other people listening to this exchange and the lawyer,
feeling a need to show that his purpose was legitimate, asked a second question,
Who is my neighbor?" It was another good question, Tribal mentality prescribes
one kind of behavior toward fellow tribe members and another form for outsiders,

At its best Judaism defined neighbor as "fellow human being’, But at its narrowest
Judaism defined neighbor as feliow Jew, The first century was one of the narrow
times, Under the stress of foreign occupation, official Judaism had become vigid,
chauvinistic, "Neighbor" was a rather limited idea,

- 2 -

And so Jesus told His story in response te a question - "Who is my neighbor?".
but actually He was illustrating His answer to the first and fundamental question,
‘Teacher, how shall I inherit eternal life?"

The story is a brilliant piece of work, "A certain man”, not identified as
to race, religion or nationality is on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, Jerusalem
is a city on a hill: 2,000 feet above sea level, Jericho, just seventeen miles away,
near the Dead Sea, is 1,000 feet below sea level. The road, therefore,is down, rocky,
steep, treacherous, Until very recently it was no road to walk alone, The "certain
man" in Jesus'story was attacked, beaten, robbed and left to die by the roadside,

A Priest, traveling on the same road, saw the man and made a wide circle around
him, passing on the opposite side, A Levite, a minor religious official, did the
same thing, Finally, a Samaritan discovered the man, bound up his wounds, took him
to an inn and paid for his period of convalescence, For centuries the Jews nurtured
an aversion for Samaritan people, The Samaritans had lost their racial purity through
intermarriage with the Assyrians hundreds of years before, In addition they believed
in only a portion of Holy Scripture, They were unclean racially and heretical theo-
logically, And because they were really cousins the feeling between Jews and Samar-
itans had a bitterness about it which characterizes family feuds, No one was less
likely to be used as a model of godly conduct.

The people who heard the story knew that the Priest and Levite had broken no
law by walking by the man lying in the ditch, As a matter of fact, they may have
precipitated a legal crisis had they stopped, The law prevented a man who had
touched a dead body from participating in a religious ceremony for seven days. The
man by the ditch probably looked dead, That possibility reminds me of the problems
we have had with people suing those who have stopped to render assistance in emer-
gancy situations, Until recent Good Samaritan laws were enacted there appeared to
be legal reason not to offer assistance particularly if you happen to be a doctor,

In any event there may have been legal and religious reasons why the Priest
and Levite walked by the man. Besides, one of the oldest highway tricks in the
book is to stake out a decoy and when someone stops to help, attack and rob the un-
suspecting victim, Beyond that, these two were probably no different than you and
I in a thousand similar circumstances, They were, quite simply, on their way some~
where else, to do important business, They didn't have time to stop, There aren't
many days in my life when I don't make a decision very similar to that one. I've
never been comfortable with self-righteous tirades aimed at the callousness of ‘the
Priest and Levite,

The Samaritan, on the other hand, "had compassion", Jesus said, That is, he
saw a bleeding human being in the ditch, not an inconvenient interruption, He felt
something besides annoyance, And he net only felt - he acted. He heiped, person-
ally, thoroughly, physically and lavishly, He quite simply stopped whatever else he
was doing and gave his undivided attention and resources to another human being who
needed him,

Notice that, once again, Jesus has failed to respond with precision to the
lawyer's question, "Who is my neighbor?" The Parable answers that anyone who needs
you is your neighbor, But the statement the Parable really makes has to do with
being a neighbor, "Who", Jesus asked the lawyer, “was neighbor to the man?'' Even
though that isn't what he wanted to know, the lawyer had to answer, "the one who

-~ 3-

showed mercy,'' Again Jesus said, "Go, and do likewise", and I believe He was still
answering that initial, radical, fundamental question, "How shall I inherit eternal,
life?"

The magnificence of this little story is in the fact that it has so very much
to say to us still, two thousand years after the fact, Just as it forced the
Lawyer to conclude that his neighbor was anyone who needed him, so the point is
made, and must be made, in our generation, And just as the story forced the lawyer
to confront his own racial and religious arrogance by posing a Samaritan as a true
neighbor, so the Parable forces our hand as well, It wasn'e Long ago, after all,
that some were seriously proposing that hungry children in Communist countries were
the problem of their Marxist rulers, not ours, "Neighbor", according to Jesus, was
not necessarily the person near you with whom you share a common race, religion,
style of life and political persuasion, Your neighbor is whoever needs your help,

fhe story holds up compassion as the essential characteristic of discipleship,
The Samaritan saw the man and felt something, One of the dilemmas of our Life has
to do with the very bigness of our cities and the institutions which we have created,
Urban life, as everyone knows by now, is impersonal, We are a "lonely crowd": we
become numbers on credit cards, digits in computer systems, The electronic wizardry
by which we intend to propel this civilization into the future cannot cope with names
and faces and feelings, Compassion is a fading virtue: it thrives in small communities
where everyone knows everyone elise, Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan writes:
"Who is my neighbor? He may be my neighbor in the sense in which we now onderstand
the word, the person next door, the person who occupies an apartment in the same
block as mine, Jesus says I am to love that person, The truth is that very often
we don't even get to know them! That is why a city can be the loncliest place on
earth,,,"’ (Great Words of the Christian Faith, p, 47,

In cities human problems become sociological data, . The size of the problems
necessitates large, sophisticated solutions, Someone has to deal with the causes
of hunger, illiteracy, unemployment. Those are complex problems, requiring the best
intelligence and the most effective structures our community can provide, But some-~
one, at the same time, has to remember and remind the rest of the community that
"hunger" is not only the average nutritional level in the inner city: its real
meaning is four little children who haven't eaten for three days: that unemployment
means a thirty year old man who has no marketable skills and who has filled out so
hany applications and been turned down so many times that he has no ego left and finds
his only solace and escape in television; that poverty, against which we declared
a war ten years ago with our fingers crossed, and Lost - is more than a socio-~
economic phenomenon: what it really is - is a mother of four whose apartment rent
and gas bill exceed her monthly welfare check, and who can't get the attention of
the Welfare Department because her telephone has been disconnected and when we call
for her, she is told that her case worker resigned and she hasn't beon assigned to
another one yet, Someone has to remember that illiteracy is not simply never reading
Shakespeare or the Bible: it means not being able to read job applications, or the
bus destination, or street signs or instructions on the back of food packages. Some-
one must hold on to human compassion for dear life, even when and if it means bear-
ing the cynicism of those who sneer "Bleeding hearts", Someone must remember how to
laugh and to ery for the human condition,

The power of the story is, finally, in its connection with the original
question, It suggests that Life is available to those who know how to Love.We know

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a secret which we have been hiding from the world, If you want to live - really
live - you have to love, Part of the reason we hide that secret is that_we are
terribly uncomfortable with the idea that there are rewards in religion, We dis-
covered some time ago that rewards for good behavior tend to become ends in them-
selves - and that the reason for the behavior is often forgotten, ZT used to memorize
Bible verses - not out of love of God but to win more stickers than the boy next to
me, At our most analytical we have discovered that even the most noble human sacri-
fice sometimes feels good. We have been shocked by the psychological suggestions
that some of the martyrs frankly enjoyed being martyrs, Our Reformed theologians
have told us that salvation is a gift we can't earn: that God's love cannot be won:
that we deserve nothing and the minute we try to deserve something we get ourselves
in more trouble, We are sensitive to the hypocrigy which is possible in a religion
that promises rewards for good behavior, All of which I believe and endorse, But
in the process we miss, sometimes, one of the most profound teachings of Jesus;
namely, that full life is the reward for loving: and that it's all right to love -
that is to behave lovingly - precisely because you want to live fully,

We keep trying to base our deepest social concerns on unselfish, altruistic
humanism, I bristle at the suggestion that social concern is Marxist, But we should
learn that the system which sets out to liberate the masses from oppression is almost
totally devoid of humanitarianism on an individual basis, In fact, it makes the
individual expendable for the larger good of the state, Social humanism keeps going
bankrupt, I believe, because there is a limit to our capacity for altruism, Some~
where the individual has to be convinced that it is good - feels good - to be kind,
generous and compassionate, I understand that the idea borders on heresy - that it
could easily become rampant selfishness,

Jesus invites us, I believe, to love the neighbor in need, because it is the
way to experience eternal life: real, full, complete life the way God intends it to
be lived, He said elsewhere that the way to gain your life is to lose it, That is,
He did not suggest losing it as an end in itself, but rather for the reward of
finding real life,

The culture in which we live needs our secret, desperately, I believe: our
culture which continues to portray real life in terms of the proper deodorant, the
best scotch, and the classiest automobile, Acquisition - buying, owning, using,
accumulating is how this culture proposes to achieve eternal life. Jesus offered
a secret - love your neighbor as yourself and you will live,

The world needs that secret, Consumerism must stop for some very practicel
reasons, Our six percent of the world cannot contine much longer consuming thirty
and forty percent of the world's energy, If we are to survive Americans must
discover an alternative to the going definition of real life, It is perhaps the
most important task of the Christian Church in our time to explain and demonstrate
that alternative - its secret that real life is in loving God and neighbor with
kindness and generosity and extravagance,

~%-

And to us ~ the Parable makes a deeper suggestion that faith in Jesus Christ
is authenticated and experienced only in acts of love, Helmut Thielicke writes:
"May I give you a few altogether practical precepts? You will never learn who
Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship in a
virgin birth or miracles, Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned,
hungry, distressed brothers, For it is in them that he meets us," (The Waiting
Father, p,.168).

Jesus Christ meets us in the neighbor who needs us, He also, in a very real
way, is the Good Samaritan, Our deepest faith is that He has come onto the road
of life: that when all others have walked by He will not: that He has loved and
healed and bound up our wounds and provided for our safety. "All loving." Thielicke
writes, "is a thanksgiving for the fact that we ourselves have been loved," We are
called to love the neighbor in need, not as duty, but in the gratitude of love.
And in the promise that in loving we are given the gift of life.

Amen,

Father we confess that we have walked by those who need us, Forgive us.
Forgive us for neglectir, ww Live fully and help us to love without counting
the cost, Through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,