Introduction: Going and Doing the Gospel

“Go and do likewise.” Luke 10:37

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, a lawyer asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In response, Jesus distills the Jewish scriptures into two commands: love God and love your neighbor. The lawyer presses Jesus further: “And who is my neighbor?” To this second question, Jesus, as he often does, explains what he means through storytelling. The tale he tells is one of risk-taking, selflessness, compassion, and generosity. He then concludes by instructing the lawyer to “go and do likewise.”

Attention to the Greek verbs in this exchange is important for appreciating the significance of this story. In the lawyer’s question, “do” has the sense of a finite action, something that has been done once and in the past. By contrast, Jesus’ command to “go” and “do” describes an action that is continuously repeated: there is no predetermined end to the action.

The lawyer, one suspects, left a bit deflated. Perhaps he was hoping that a demonstration of neighborly love might be reduced to a finite mathematical formula that, if performed once, would secure his reward (“if I do x, surely I will receive y”). Jesus’ interpretation of the parable, however, is much more demanding. Our responsibility to help others, he suggests, never ends; our shared humanity compels us to help, again and again and again. Moreover, these actions should not be based upon our hope for personal gain, as the lawyer wished. Rather, as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, we should imitate the Samaritan, whose actions were motivated by one simple question: after encountering a man in distress, his first thought was, “what will happen to him if I do not help?”

To appreciate the significance of Jesus’ message, both in this story and others, Hilbert College students enrolled in “Jesus in Early Christianity” spent the Fall 2020 semester learning how ancient audiences heard Jesus’ words and exploring how his gospel could be lived out in a contemporary context. To investigate this latter topic, the students embarked upon a partnership with the Buffalo City Mission to complete two projects. First, they contributed to the “Mission Possible” food drive, collecting cans of food to aid the hungry and homeless in Western New