Sermon Tone Analysis

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I’m going to begin this sermon the same way I began last week’s sermon.
Le test du bon samaritain
Last week I said that I grew up hearing certain things about the gospel, and about salvation.
I grew up hearing that on the cross Jesus made it possible for us to be saved, but that it was up to us to make the right decision and accept that gift of salvation, and that everyone is able to do this.
So when I read my Bible, I would occasionally come across texts like the one we saw last week, and have no idea what to do with them.
Last week we heard Jesus say (in v. 22),
I grew up hearing that on the cross Jesus made it possible for us to be saved; but that it was up to us to make the right decision and accept that gift of salvation.
So when I would read my Bible, I would occasionally come across
…no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
So it’s impossible to know God unless the Son reveals the Father to us.
That, we can handle.
But just before, in v. 20, he tells the disciples to rejoice that
your names are written in heaven.
And in , we are told that if our names are written in heaven, they were written there before for the foundation of the world.
These truths are all over the Bible.
The Bible tells us:
that human beings are all totally unable to come to God, because we are dead in our sin ();
that before the foundation of the world, God sovereignly chose those he would save (, );
it tells us that those whom God chose to save, he absolutely will save, because the work of Christ purchased their salvation (, );
it tells us that those whom the Father draws to himself will irresistibly come to him ();
and that those who are saved will stay saved, because God will cause them to persevere until the very end ().
When I finally discovered these truths around the age of 25, all these texts that confused me before made sense for the first time.
I welcomed these truths, and I love them still, and I was a joyful Christian for the first time in my life.
But then I kept reading, and I got confused again.
Because as I read there seemed to be other texts—the texts I had heard all my life—that seemed to go in the other direction.
Today’s text is one of those texts.
It’s one even non-Christians know well—in today’s text Jesus is going to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Since the parable is well-known, we’re going to do things a little different today.
We’re going to read the text from beginning to end, and then we’re going to look at it in three different ways.
We’re going to talk about how people usually understand this text; then we’re going to ask ourselves why Luke, the author of this gospel, made the choices that he made when writing this text; and finally, we’re going to talk about what it actually means.
The Text (10.25-37)
s
25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law?
How do you read it?”
27 And he answered, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”
28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.
31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side.
32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.
34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.
Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.
35 And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’
36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”
And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
How People Usually Understand It
No big surprises there; it’s so simple a child can grasp it.
People think they know the story.
A man asks Jesus how to be saved; Jesus reminds him of the two major components of the Law; and he illustrates it by talking about a man who is beaten and robbed, then two of his fellow countrymen—pious men at that—who pass by without helping him, and a Samaritan—the mortal enemies of the Jews—who helps him and cares for him.
And Jesus says, “You go, and do likewise.”
So here’s what people usually understand, in a nutshell: loving other people is more important than believing in any particular faith or obeying any particular religious code.
Love other people, and you will prove the good in your heart, and God will accept you for that—because that is what the Good Samaritan did.
And on first reading, that does seem to be the drift of what Jesus is saying.
He does say, “Love the Lord your God,” sure, but in the story—the example he gives—he doesn’t talk about God at all.
And his conclusion to the whole thing, after the lawyer recognizes that the good neighbor in the story is the one who showed mercy, is to say, “Do the same—show mercy to others.
Love your neighbor.”
Unbelievers love this text, because it gives them a reason to say that Jesus was a wonderful moral teacher, and the problem with Christianity lies in what Jesus’s believers have made of him.
They say that to be a true follower of Christ, then we need to do what he did: love other people.
Take care of those who can’t take care of themselves.
As important as it is to do as Jesus did—to love others, to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves—that’s not what this parable is saying.
This is not a way for us to “earn” our salvation through altruism.
If you want that to be the message of this parable, you have to take this text entirely out of the context of everything that comes before it and everything that comes after it.
So what’s the alternative?
Luke the Theologian
Let’s take a step way back to talk about the way the Bible was actually written.
In , Paul tells Timothy:
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
When Paul says that all Scripture was “breathed out by God,” what he means is that the Holy Spirit divinely inspired human authors to write exactly what he meant them to write, while allowing them to use their own methods and personalities to get his message across.
It’s the ultimate partnership.
Human authors, with their own brains, under the inspiration of the Spirit, writing exactly what God wanted them to write, in exactly the way he wanted them to write it.
So when we read Scripture, it’s important that we not only ask, “What is God trying to tell us in this text?”,
but we must also ask, “What is Luke trying to tell us in this text?”
William Taylor helpfully reminds us that as he was writing the gospel, Luke was not simply an author recording what happened; he was a theologian.
Luke is our guide for interpreting his gospel.
He was writing what happened, but he was also writing it in a specific way, so that we would understand something specific about God and about the gospel.
And anyone who reads knows that that’s how books work: the order of events in a book is often just as important as the events themselves.
If the author recounts a story from a character’s past in the beginning of a book, it may not make a lot of sense or seem that important.
If he recounts the exact same story at the end of a book, it can take on a whole new meaning because of everything that has come before.
So here’s the question we need to ask ourselves, before we can dive into what Luke is trying to tell us: Why did Luke choose to record this event here, just after the passage we saw last week?
The passage we saw last week puts a lot of emphasis on God’s sovereignty over salvation, as we saw before.
He always wrote what happened, but he often chose to bring up certain event at certain times.
...you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
...you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
Jesus rejoices that it was God’s gracious will to hide these things from some and reveal them to others.
...no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
If we come to the Father, it is only because the Son chose to reveal the Father to us.
you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.
And then we come to v. 25, and Luke doesn’t change subjects—in last week’s text, Jesus talks about how salvation works, and in this text he does the same thing: the question the lawyer asks Jesus concerns how salvation works, how to inherit eternal life.
Given what came last week, we would expect Jesus to say, “If you want to inherit eternal life, I have to reveal the Father to you.”
But that’s not what he says.
He asks the lawyer (v.
26), “What is written in the Law?” and in v. 27, the lawyer gives a summary of the Law (v.
27):
“You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.”
And Jesus says, “Yes, that’s right.
That’s how you inherit eternal life.”
Did Luke forget what he wrote just before?
Did he simply overlook this glaring contradiction?
Of course not—God does not contradict himself.
When you come across two texts that seem to be at odds with each other, you don’t accept one and reject the other.
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