Today begins the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and our online sermon leads us into this week.

I’m sure most of us will be aware of the parable of The Good Samaritanh, a story which Jesus tells as part of his response to a lawyer’s questions. A lawyer approaches Jesus. But he wasn’t the kind of lawyer we think of today. He was an expert in the Old Testament laws and interpreted how they should be applied to society.

I like to picture him with a professorial grey beard and a flashy red tunic. We learn later in the story that he cares about how he appears to others. He was a bit of a showoff and so we can imagine him all dressed up in fancy clothes.

The scene is a confrontation. The lawyer has plenty of reasons to think Jesus is what young people today call, “sus” or suspicious. In nearly every page of Luke’s gospel leading up to this encounter, Jesus had violated Old Testament laws. He cured on the Sabbath, he proclaimed forgiveness of sins. He shared fellowship at the table with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. He let the disciples pick grain on the Sabbath and didn’t make them follow the prescribed ritual washings. And most curious of all, was how he hang out with and cured people outside of the faith.

The lawyer comes to set Jesus straight. Jesus’ followers must have held their breath in anxiety, wondering how this conversation was going to turn out.

The lawyer asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He wasn’t asking about how to go to heaven because that wasn’t a very developed notion until long after Jesus’ resurrection. No, eternal life had to do with a quality of life in this world. How do you have meaning beyond the present moment? How do you live a life that adheres to God, one saturated by grace? In other words, how does one live a good life?

Jesus does the typical rabbi thing by doing something they still teach clergy to do. He answers a question with a question. “What does the law say, and how do you interpret it?” Jesus recognises that its not helpful to simply quote lines from the Bible; you have to figure out a reasonable way to apply them to life.

Now this was actually an easy question. Every Jewish child had this answer memorised by the time they were five years old. “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Jesus says, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”

The crowd exhales. That was easy. Everyone agrees! But the lawyer hadn’t had his Hercule Poirot moment yet. So he baits the trap, “And who is my neighbour?”

To us it sounds like he throws an easy question back to Jesus. Everyone knew the passage from Leviticus about loving one’s neighbour. The context is about taking care of your people. Your people. The people who are like you, those with whom you have things in common. When we think of our neighbours, we think the same. Neighbours are people we share a post code with, a socio-economic demographic, maybe a similar culture and worldview.

The trap the lawyer set was to get Jesus to say that neighbours are like you. Share love with the ones who are like you, your people the ones around you. These are the people you are responsible for. If Jesus had given that kind of answer the lawyer could have said, “Then stay inside your circle Jesus. Don’t be messing with tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes, foreigners, and especially the stinking Samaritans!

Instead of giving the lawyer the answer he expected, Jesus did another typical rabbi thing. Answer a direct question with a story and more questions.

Jesus tells the familiar story about a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho – the story of the Good Samaritan.

And at the end of the story Jesus asked the lawyer, which of these three was a neighbour to the man in the ditch.

“The one who showed mercy.”

“Go and do likewise.”

The lawyer wanted to know what he had to do to have eternal life, a life worth living, a life that connects you with the Eternal One. The answer is love God with your whole self and love your neighbour but neighbour includes enemies, people in need, people who’ve made mistakes.

Our Christian ethic is rooted in this story. We are people who help. We are people who get involved to improve our neighbourhood. We also respond to Jesus’ invitation to expand the circle of who we consider our neighbour. Sometimes when we give money to people overseas, people will ask, “Why should we send our money to help those people when there are people who are hurting right here?” Part of the answer is that we remind ourselves that Jesus challenges us to widen the circles of our care. Our neighbours are those in need anywhere in the world.

We are connected to them in God’s eyes. When God looks at the world, our divisions and national boundaries are as nothing. It’s one world and if we are going to sense God, it means to love our neighbours. To help even those who aren’t like us, any who are in need.

Who has been passed by and left in the ditches today? Who can we help? I learned that over the past two years there has been a huge spike in the number of senior citizens living in fuel poverty and even becoming homeless. I think of children lost in the foster care system, those who have fallen into the cycle of addiction, those we have written off simply because their lifestyle, spending priorities or world view isn’t as we think it should be. We have each one of us, left someone in the ditch and walked on by.

Martin Luther King Jr. in his last sermon talked about this parable and said we should always be asking not, what will happen to me if I don’t help, but what will happen to them if I don’t help.

Over the years, I’ve often felt guilty and sometimes even lost sleep over not being able to help more people. With so much need in the world around us, how can we respond to all of it. There is after all only so much we can do. Taken too far the story might seem that we should hop out of our car every time we see a homeless person and give them our credit card.

There were times when Jesus had to walk away from healing people to go and care for himself.

And so we must do what we can.

As the Christian family in our part of the world, we must open our hearts and saturate Sutherland and beyond with the grace of God. No questions asked, no provisos, no catches – as the people of God who worship Him in His majesty and splendour, in our joyfully diverse ways, together we are called in Christian Unity to love and serve each and every one of our neighbours – to be an agent for positive change in people’s lives. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to serve? Or will you pass by on the other side?