“He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

Luke 10:27-29

The lawyer in our text was challenging Jesus. He posed the question of the ages, asked by all societies and cultures down through time. How do we find the afterlife? Can we live forever? Eternity belongs to God and so Jesus asked him what God’s law said. In the spirit of the old covenant, the lawyer answered well: loving God and loving our neighbor.

So Jesus tells the ‘good Samaritan’ story and asks the question; which traveler was the neighbor? The lawyer cannot even bring himself to say ‘the Samaritan,’ but his circuitous answer says more than he intended. Jesus shifts the question from the boundaries of legislated social interaction to the essential nature of neighborliness with a story that shatters the human boundaries of class and ethnicity. The duty of neighborliness reflects the love of God and of others. Mercy sees only need and responds with compassion. Those who show mercy show that they belong to the kingdom, because they exhibit the behaviors of the age to come, the qualities which are the mark of those on the path to eternal life.

CLOSING PRAYER

Merciful Jesus, you left heaven to pay my debt, to provide all that I need. Help me to love others with your kind of love, to meet the needs of anyone you place before me. Help me to gladly minister to others in your name—even without being asked and without thought of repayment.

(Edited from Encounter with God)