Love Your Neighbour
Elaine Poproski Download: Audio
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Scripture: Luke 10:25- 37
An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Read more…
Looking to Sunday
by Elaine Poproski
There was this time when someone asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. I wonder why the man asked the question. Had he been diagnosed with a terminal illness? Was he very old and aware of his mortality? Had someone he loved recently died?
It was a weird question for the man to ask. He’d been raised like everyone else, schooled in the Scriptures. When Jesus turned the man’s question back to him, asking him what’s written in Scripture, the man gave the right answer. He quoted from Deuteronomy 6: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, and then he quoted from Leviticus 19: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Again, I wonder why the man asked the question.
Maybe he was testing Jesus. Lots of people did that. Some of them wanted to know if he was legit. Others of them wanted to catch him in a mistake. The way Matthew tells the story, the question was a test. Neither Mark nor Luke offer such an explanation, but it doesn’t matter. We don’t actually need to know why the man asked his question. That’s not the point. The answer is the point. And in Luke’s gospel, the answer leads into one of the most familiar parables Jesus ever told: the parable of the Good Samaritan.
One of the challenges with familiar parables is that we easily convince ourselves they have nothing new to say to us. We’ve read them, we’ve heard preachers reflect on them, we’ve participated in Bible Studies that included them, we figure we can skip over them and move on. But what if we were to slow down in our reading? What if we were to sit in silence, imagining the scenes of the story as if they were happening in our own city, in our own century? Who do the characters become? What does love look like in our context? As you prepare for Sunday, perhaps spend some time with this parable from Luke 10:30 – 37, imagining a re-telling in your own context. Might there be something new God wants you to hear? Might there be something familiar God wants to remind you of?