Scriptures: Luke 10:25-37, Genesis 12:1-3, Micah 6:6-8, Jer 31:31-34, Mark 12:28-33
Sermon Outline:
The coming of law
Abraham’s call – whole world to be blessed
The laws of Moses – focused on the Nation of Israel, yet often broken
Jesus and the greatest commandment
Jesus’ call on other commandments
Who is my neighbour?
The significance of the Samaritan
Who is YOUR neighbour?
Introduction:
At the time of Jesus, Jewish religious authorities were pre-occupied with enforcing “the law” as written in their scriptures. As far as they were concerned, these laws were God’s law and any who failed to obey their interpretation of those laws were sinners. They were not particularly concerned about those who were not Jews as long as they did not interfere with Jewish religious customs. The nation was inward focused.
Jesus had quite a bit to say about their ideas and attitudes to the law. Are their interpretations and the underlying laws important to us? Should we seek to obey those laws, as Christians? What is important about the law anyway?
The coming of the law:
We are all familiar today with the idea of a legal code, the law. However, prior to about 2000BC we don’t know of any written legal code in the world. The law then was anything the powerful said and could change at any time.
How then should we regard the law today?
What is God’s law for us?
The oldest detailed legal code we know of was that of Hammurabi who ruled Babylon from about 1792 to 1750 BC, which is believed to have been shortly after the time of Abraham. Hammurabi’s law was inscribed on a stela in Babylon’s temple of Marduk and can be read today. Hammurabi’s Code was once considered the oldest written law in human history, though older, shorter law collections have since been found.
Those man-made laws were important steps for humankind and allowed people to know what the authorities expected of them. However, God wants us to apply His law to our everyday lives. We need to recognise the difference between God’s law and human law.
Mankind has always found it difficult to be obedient to any law, and the idea of God’s law makes it no easier. Our bible tells the story of how God gave his law to humankind and made it possible for Him to forgive us when his law is broken. This story begins with Abraham.
Abraham’s call – whole world to be blessed:
When God chose Abraham, when he was still named Abram, he told him (Genesis 12:1-3):
12 The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”
This promise was made on the condition that Abram left his native country and followed God’s advice. Through it, God intended Abram would be renamed Abraham and be the source of blessing to all peoples on earth. When the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel, later came into being, it was not to be an exclusive privileged nation. It was to bring blessings to all peoples on earth.
The laws of Moses – focused on the Nation of Israel, yet often broken:
In Egypt, those descendants of Abraham became the nation of Israel, and were led out of Egypt by Moses. God gave the nation a detailed legal code through Moses, and this became the base for Jewish law at the time of Jesus. A part of that legal code is directly attributed to God, through what we know as the ten commandments.
The laws established by Moses were to:
1. Establish God as the leader, guide and ruler of the nation of Israel
2. Make them a separate nation from the rest of the world
3. Make them an example the world could look up to as promised when God called Abraham
4. Organise Israel as a nation
5. Define codes of behaviour that would help Israel live in harmony
Israel gave only patchy obedience to their law over the centuries, and God punished the nation many times for its lapses. They rarely ever considered that they were God’s example for the world or that through them, God would bless all peoples of the earth.
By Jesus’ day, Israel had been reduced to Judah, and we know them as Jews.
God used the prophets to try and get Israel to obey the law. Long before Jesus, the prophet Micah (around 700BC) gave one of the clearest expressions of God’s feelings about Israel’s failings. This is what he said:
Micah 6:6-8
6 With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Then, about 100 years after Micah, Jeremiah gave God’s solution to Israel’s weaknesses, which we have seen fulfilled in the coming of Jesus.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “The time is coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
Jesus and the greatest commandment (Jesus’ call on other commandments)
We understand that Jesus was the source of this new covenant, and that this covenant was for all who believe, not just Israel. With the coming of Jesus, the need for an inflexible written form of God’s law as expressed by Jewish legal experts was over. Laws intended to distinguish Israel from the rest of mankind would cease to be relevant when God sought to bring all humankind to himself.
God’s law would be written on the hearts of His followers, and the promise made to Abraham could be fulfilled. All peoples on earth would then be blessed through Abraham. God’s law written on the hearts of His followers would keep their spirit in harmony with Him. The time of a physical nation of God was past, and his law had a new focus:
1. Establish God as the leader, guide and ruler of God’s people
2. Define codes of behaviour that would help God’s people live in harmony
Clearly this meant the old written Jewish law was superseded through this new covenant.
In his teaching, Jesus made a number of comments that gave examples of where the old written code was no longer relevant. Mark 7 records Jesus saying that all food is spiritually clean, and in Mark 2, he commented that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This implied that laws that were over interpreted could defeat their own purpose.
More specifically, Jesus took an opportunity to summarise God’s law. In Mark 12, we find the following incident:
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
The response to these two commandments was interesting because although the command to “love God” was clearly the foundation of Israel’s relationship with God, “love your neighbour” is only found once in the law given through Moses (Leviticus 19:18). Yet another Jewish teacher has agreed with Jesus about its significance. God’s law can be seen as the law of love.
Who is my neighbour? (The significance of the Samaritan)
A very similar incident was described by Luke (in Luke 10), that took this a step further, where its significance is made more obvious. This is the familiar story of the “good Samaritan”.
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 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.’”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
In this version of the story, we have one of the most important questions in the New Testament – “who is my neighbour?”. We under-estimate the impact of this story today, yet it is pivotal to our relationship to God.
In Jesus’ day, the Samaritans were the most extreme of all groups possible for Jesus to use for his illustration. They claimed descent from Abraham and practiced a form of religion that in some regards was closer to the Jewish ideal than the Jews practiced themselves. The Jews hated the Samaritans more than any other group. Yet the story had a Samaritan hero. This must have been hard to swallow. In Jesus’ day, Jews would only have looked to other Jews as neighbours.
If we wish to consider “who is my neighbour” in modern terms, we tend to under-estimate the significance of Jesus’ illustration. Today, here in New Zealand, we do not have any group that society could look on as the equivalent of the Samaritans. Perhaps we might consider bikie gangs, or Islamists, but fortunately we do not have any group that is so universally hated as the Jews hated the Samaritans in Jesus’ day. Elsewhere in the world we see groups who do not consider themselves neighbours. The classic illustration, particularly today, is Israel and the Palestinians.
Even the church has demonstrated an inability to recognise neighbours over the centuries, ranging from the crusades to modern day sects that refuse to associate with other groups.
Jesus however was being consistent, and other Jewish teachers of his day agreed with him, at least in theory. Their only problem was the question of “who is my neighbour”.
In the sermon on the mount recorded by Matthew, Jesus took the idea even further, when he taught that we should “love our enemies” (Matt 5:43). Even your enemy could be a neighbour.
Then, if we were to look at the laws of Moses in our bible again, we can see that “love God” and “love your neighbour as yourself” covers all of them. When we accept Jesus into our heart, God writes his law of love in our heart. With those commandments to love written on our hearts, we do not need the detailed list of things we should not do.
In our modern world, even our traffic laws can be recognised as helping us show love to our neighbour. After all, driving on the wrong side of the road hardly shows love for our neighbour!
Who is YOUR neighbour?
With Jesus’ teaching in mind, I ask myself: Who is my neighbour? Jesus tells me that anyone who is in need is my neighbour, even someone I hate, even my enemy. Can I love my neighbour that much? Do I follow the law written on my heart? Even with God’s law written on our hearts, we still find it hard to obey it.
It is comforting to read Paul’s comment on the law. He looked at how we should deal with the results of failing to keep the law. He expressed the difficulty of obeying the law very clearly, in his letter to the Romans (Rom 3:23) when he said, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
This highlights the impossibility of full compliance with God’s law. However, our failings do not exempt us from a requirement to try, even if we sometimes fail to keep God’s law. Paul went on to say that we are justified by the grace of God through the redemption that came by Jesus, so we do have a path to God beyond failure to keep his law.
Jesus is God’s answer to the limitation of human nature. Through Jesus, God’s spirit can be in our heart and teach us the law of love. If we fail to obey that law, God is gracious and loving, and is able to forgive our failures because Jesus, his son, died that we might be forgiven.
Loving your neighbour is not easy, but through Jesus, with God’s spirit in our hearts, we have God’s help and God’s forgiveness for when we are weak.
Who is YOUR neighbour? Is there someone you could help but find it hard to be a neighbour to?
Let us pray:
Our Father, you have written your law of love on our hearts. We know you require us to love you and love our neighbour. We find it hard to obey your law, and we want to limit our understanding of neighbour to people we are comfortable with. Please help us to recognise that our neighbour is anyone we encounter who is in need. Thank you for the love that sent your Son to us so that you are able to forgive us when we cannot keep your law. Amen.
Tawa Baptist 