Luke 10:25-37 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Fifth Sunday After Pentecost Sunday, July 10, 2022 “Focus on Your Neighbor”
“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” That quote, which apparently has been attributed incorrectly to the Christian writer C.S. Lewis, is a fascinating quote. It makes an important point, one about which C.S. Lewis actually did write. Lewis said about a humble man, “He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.” And just a bit later, Lewis explained, “If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.” In our Gospel for today, we hear about a man who seems to fit that definition. He is a very conceited man indeed. He talks to Jesus about the law, and he rightly summarizes what the law says by talking about love. And this conceited man felt confident that he could love exactly as the law demanded. He could love God and he could love his neighbor. But he wanted to make sure, so he asked a question of Jesus that spurred a story, a parable. The man asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And the story Jesus told ended up saying to this man, “If you think you are loving, it means you are not loving after all.” That man’s focus was all wrong. Love does not focus on the individual who is loving. It focuses on the neighbor, the person who needs to be loved. So as we take a few minutes to reflect on his exchange between the expert in the law and Jesus, we’re going to take to heart the lesson about love that Jesus teaches: focus on your neighbor. The man in this account, the expert in the law, was out to test Jesus. We find a number of examples of attempts like this in the Gospel record of Jesus’ life. As always, Jesus passes the test. The test is this: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And the real answer to that question is, “You can’t do anything. You’ve already failed.” That is what Jesus tries to teach this man. That is what the law shows us. But the expert doesn’t understand that yet. When Jesus asks him what the law says, he also answers correctly. The law requires people to love God with their whole being and to love their neighbors. The expert basically quotes two passages, one from Deuteronomy (6:5) and one from Leviticus (19:18). Jesus agrees wholeheartedly that this is an accurate representation of what God demands in his law. But the problem is that the expert truly believes he has done this. Jesus tells him that if he has done that, meaning that if he has loved God wholeheartedly and loved his neighbor as he loves himself—and has always done these things and always keeps doing these things—that man can have eternal life. But the man really doesn’t want to leave it quite as broad as it is at that point. He asks his question, “And who is my neighbor?” It may seem like a reasonable question, but the expert asks it for a specific reason and a poor reason. He’s not trying to do his best at actually serving and loving his neighbor. He wants to justify himself. He wants to hear that he needs to love his parents and perhaps other relatives. He wants to hear that he should love upstanding religious leaders. He wants to hear that he should love his close friends. And he might be able to make a convincing case that he has done those things. But he certainly has not loved everyone. He clearly is not spending his life and his time and his effort focused on others. You can hear it in every bit of this exchange. This man thinks a lot about himself. His focus is firmly on him. That’s not a surprise to Jesus, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to us. That’s how we’re born, and that is how our sinful nature always wants us to operate. That is the temptation we fall into again and again. We focus on ourselves and then try to suggest that we have been loving others. It does take some soul-searching to realize and to admit this. You can probably all point to examples of how you have loved someone else. Maybe you even have a story that sounds incredibly similar to the one Jesus tells, only updated a bit for the 2020s. No doubt at some point you have focused on someone else, focused on your neighbor, and helped that person. But that’s not enough. That won’t do it. That won’t earn eternal life. That’s because all of those moments have been separated by other moments, moments when you did what was selfish or self-serving. Those were moments when the focus was squarely on you and your preferences and your comfort and your interests. That man could not justify himself by his focus on a neighbor, and neither can you. You can’t do it fully and you can’t do it enough. You’ve heard Jesus’ story. You have seen what he demands and how he answers the question about who is a neighbor. A neighbor is not the person who is most kind and loving to you so it is easy to love them back. The neighbor is a person who has no connection to you other than being a person you meet.