Sermon Tone Analysis
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Whenever we talk about this idea of ‘love your neighbour’, there’s an unspoken assumption that drives our motivation.
So let’s just throw this one out in the open.
When we’re talking about loving people - we ask,
What does the other person need to look like before we love?
Because if you think about it, that’s what this guy is asking.
He knows who his honest to goodness neighbours are (or at least, he’s not expecting Jesus to answer THAT question)- his question is more than that.
But this guy says, OK, you want me to love my neighbour - now which people exactly is it that I should be showing love to?
Now, jumping ahead a bit - i do believe jesus is saying a lot more than just ‘be nice to the people immediately bordering your property or apartment’.
And I think this guy knows that too.
But the scriptures say, he asks the question in order to justify himself.
That means - he expects the answer to mean ‘he’s already doing the right thing’.
And as an expert of the law, his life is laser focused on the israelite people.
He sees himself as the pinnacle of humanity, God’s chosen people on earth.
And I bet he’s expecting Jesus to say, ‘make sure you only love the people who are following the law fully.
Who know how to actually act right’.
But, to respond to this guy, Jesus tells a story.
The characters are a priest, a levite and a samaritan.
Now, Jesus chose his characters VERY well.
Because with the three characters, Jesus dives down to the very heart of what’s really going on here.
The priest and the levite, their lives were dominated by the answer to the question:
How can I stay ritually pure?
Their concern was on losing their own ‘holiness’ by being infected by the problems of something or someone else.
To the expert of the law, these guys were the big heroes.
They were the good examples.
They represented the idea of following the law, of purity and holiness by the standards they understood it.
It’s important to understand - the jews WERE a compassionate people.
They had rules and laws for taking care of widows, orphans, slaves.
But the jews at the time,
They were putting the cart before the horse in many situation
The sabbath was meant to simply be a time of rest - the religious rulers and experts made it a crushing weight.
The law was meant to inspire awe and reverence, they made it into an ironclad set of chains to bind and restrict people.
Jesus accused them of this later on:
He says - you get the little bit parts of the law, and ignore the big picture.
They were good at following the rules, and terrible at following the reasons behind them.
Now, I think there’s two things going on here with the priest and the levite:
First,
They were more concerned about their purity than about their love for others
Here was a situation where two holy characters were confronted with something that offended their sense of personal purity.
I won’t go as far as saying that they were legalistically prevented from helping - I don’t believe that’s true.
There may have been a conversation about purity - would they be unclean until the evening or not.
But the law doesn’t say, don’t help.
So they could have, it just would have been inconvenient.
But they looked at this situation, and they saw a naked person, half dead, probably covered in blood - and they thought, but what about MY purity.
I can’t risk MY cleanliness.
And if we’re honest with ourselves - how much is that our movation?
How many times have we looked at somebody else and said ‘they aren’t doing things right, and i don’t want to be around that because what if it rubs off?
What if God judges me and them at the same time?’.
Maybe it’s something simple like, they don’t know proper etiquitte for how to act in church, or they like things that we don’t approve of.
Maybe it’s something bigger like, they run their mouths, or they’re rude, or whatever.
But how many times have we sat down and said, ‘i’m not gonna do this, because I don’t want to catch their badness’.
I don’t want it to rub off on me.
And don’t get me wrong, there can and should be personal lines.
Recovering alcoholics really shouldn’t be putting themselves in social circles with practicing alcoholics.
But it’s one thing to say THIS IS MY STRUGGLE
And it’s another to say I DON’T AGREE, SO I DON’T WANT YOU NEARBY BECAUSE IT MAY RUB OFF
Jesus didn’t just spend time in proximity to sinners - he ate with them, he hung out with them.
Jesus touched lepers - that was a big no no back then.
Know yourself, and your problems, and your limits.
Know when being in a situation will honestly lead you into direct sinful behaviour.
but
God’s purity is more powerful than the world’s problems
We worry about infection spreading inwards.
So we keep things the same,we keep them familiar.
We know these things are safe and clean, so that’s all we let into our lives.
Jesus didn’t come to hide the righteous - he came to heal the sick.
He didn’t dig a hole and put all the righteous in it - he brought the amazing power of God and went out into the world to try and bring the sinners and the broken and the sick back to wholeness in God again.
And when our sense of personal holiness is so weak that it dies when we’re around sinful people - we tell the world that God just doesn’t have the power that He did in the bible.
God intended His power and his truth to go out into the world and change darkness to light.
But when we start drawing lines about who to love and who is welcome, what we’re doing is we’re hiding that light in a box to make sure that the darkness can’t come near it.
It SOUNDS like we’re protecting the truth from being corrupted but all we’re really doing is preventing the truth from being spread.
Jesus touched a leper.
That SHOULD have meant Him getting sick - but it meant the other person getting well.
That’s how God’s power works.
The Second thing that’s probably going on with the levite and the priest,
Their motivations were probably not pure
It’s reasonable to say, at the end of the day - they just didn’t want to.
They may have been trying to maintain their personal purity - but their motives were anything but.
And again, Jesus calls them on this:
And remember, jesus is telling this story to a person trying to prove that they’re already doing the right thing.
And it’s obvious these guys didn’t do the right thing.
Jesus is pointing out to this expert of the law, when he’s saying, ‘who is my neighbour’,
He’s not trying to find MORE reasons to love someone else -
He’s trying to find more reasons to NOT have to love someone else
The underlying statement here is - ‘I just don’t want to’.
He’s not asking this question to try and have an excuse to help even more people.
So what about us? what’s our motivation?
When we start judging, start coming up with reasons why someone isn’t welcome or shouldn’t be loved - Maybe we’re actually trying to find a reason to not have to love.
Maybe we’re thinking about a difficult person, or an immoral person, or whatever, and we’d be relieved to hear Jesus say, ya, just leave that guy on the side of the road.
You’re good.
We talked last week about how we need to start with love.
Starting with love here means, we try to love everybody.
All the time.
Our first and most powerful motivation still needs to be ‘loving our neighbours’.
And then we make course corrections along the way.
Sometimes, God steps in and says ‘ok, ok, right here, i want you to do something differently’.
STORY - youth pastor friend who didn’t spot someone else to go on a trip
But
always be loving first
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