A mother was making pancakes for her sons—Kevin who was five, and Ryan who was 3. The boys started arguing over who would get the first pancake. The mom thought this was a good moment to teach them a lesson about sacrifice. She said, “If Jesus were sitting here, He would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake…I can wait.” Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, “Ryan, you be Jesus!” We laugh, but at some level many of us think like that: “I love the idea of loving like Jesus…you go first.” We and our society wrestle with trying to understand who Jesus is and what Jesus wants, simultaneously drawn to Jesus as He welcomes and challenges, and at the same time, not really sure about how far to go with living like Jesus. Jesus gets that, and in our passage today, Jesus shows us a new way to live.
First, we know the right answer, but we often want to make God more manageable. When I was a senior in high school, I attended a leadership camp where they would bring leaders of character from all sorts of walks of life. One of their guests was a foreign correspondent for ABC News. After he finished speaking, he took questions. I asked, “How do you know how to keep yourself from being corrupted?” He looked me straight in the eye. He said, “You know,” and he held my gaze for a moment. In that moment, I was pierced by his gaze. In our passage, the lawyer gets it right—Love God and love your neighbor—but that’s not enough for him. So he wants to justify himself, to make sure that he’s checked all the necessary boxes. And don’t we do that too? “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” And we want to know…what does that mean?...because we know…we know…that loving God and loving our neighbor is more than just checking off boxes and then moving on. But we ask…and we hope that love will be simple and manageable.
Second, there are always reasons not to stop. A young and successful executive was traveling down a neighborhood street, going a bit too fast in his new Jaguar. He was watching for kids darting out from between parked cars. Then wham! Something smashed into the Jag’s side door! He slammed on the brakes and backed the Jag back to the spot where something had hit the car. There was a brick lying in the street. The angry driver jumped out of the car, grabbed the nearest kid and pushed him up against a parked car, shouting, “Just what the heck are you doing? That’s a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost me a lot of money. Why did you do it?” “Please, mister…please!” the frightened young boy cried out. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do,” he pleaded. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop...” With tears dripping down his face and off his chin, the small boy pointed to a spot just around a parked car. “It’s my older brother,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him up.” Now sobbing, the boy asked the stunned executive, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he’s too heavy for me.” Moved beyond words, the driver tried to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat, he hurriedly lifted the bigger, non-communicative, handicapped boy back into the wheelchair, then took out a linen handkerchief and dabbed at the fresh scrapes and cuts. Nothing too serious. “Thank you so much,” the grateful child told the stranger. Too shaken to speak, the man simply watched the boy push his wheelchair-bound brother down the sidewalk. It was a long, slow walk back to the Jaguar. The damage was very noticeable, but the driver never bothered to repair the dented side door. Are we driving so fast through our lives, that the only way to get our attention and help is for a brick to hit our car? In Jesus’ story, the priest passes by the wounded man. So does the lay minister. How many reasons did they have for passing by? Are we so focused on where we are going and getting there fast, on what we need to do, on the next box we have to check, that God struggles to get our attention?
Third, we are all neighbors—every act of compassion goes farther than we think. About fifteen years ago, in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, a mosque moved next door to a Christian church, named Heartsong. Steve Stone, pastor of Heartsong, writes, “We had been talking with them from the moment we knew they were moving next door to us. These were not enemies or strangers but neighbors, acquaintances, and friends. When they asked us if they could use our space [while they were working on their building]…what do we do? How do we respond? Our response has to be grounded in our love for Jesus and our commitment to follow only him…Jesus intentionally chose as the hero of [the Good Samaritan] one whom his hearers would most ‘naturally’ have feared and hated. He said that the one they despised out of hand is the very one who was the neighbor…The decision was based only on our understanding of the mission and nature of the church.” So they said, “Of course!” A couple years later, the anti-Muslim sentiments were rising, and CNN aired a piece about this church and this mosque, showing this pastor and this imam. Telling this story, Jim Wallis says, “You could tell by watching that these two clerics knew, respected, and liked each other…The reverend and the imam told the story of how their communities had come together…and even minister[ed] together in the community.” But the best part is the story that Wallis heard when he called up Steve Stone. “[Last night,] I got a phone call at two in the morning. ‘Is this the pastor?’ a voice said. ‘Yes, this is Steve Stone,’ I replied. Then the voice on the phone said, ‘We are a roomful of Muslim men, calling from Kashmir, Pakistan [one of the most conflicted places in the world], and we saw the CNN segment. We were all silent for a long time afterward. Then one of us said, ‘I think God is speaking to us through that pastor.’ Another said, ‘How could we ever kill those people?’ I must tell you what happened with another one of us because he can’t speak English to tell you himself. He went out to the small Christian church near our mosque and washed it clean with his Muslim hands. Now we are all back together to call you. Pastor, please tell your congregation that we don’t hate them, we love them. And from now on we will protect that little Christian church near us because of what you did.’”[1] The curious thing is that sometimes we are the neighbor who helps someone who is hurt, and sometimes we are the neighbor who is on the ground hurt and needing help. Who would have thought that acts of compassion and neighborliness in Memphis could forge relationships between neighbors in Pakistan!
Loving like Jesus did is way more than figuring out who gets the first pancake. Loving like Jesus did is more than a checkbox on our life’s to-do list—eternal life secured…check. What Jesus seems to understand about us is that we use checkboxes and reasons to keep God at arms’ length, to keep God manageable. What Jesus longs for is a relationship that’s much closer—to tell Him first about what we’re going through, to put Him first in our decisions, to ask Him first when we hit a rough patch, to seek Him first. We stop trying to manage God and let God manage us. When we do that, when we love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and when we love our neighbors as ourselves, change comes to us. We don’t just show gratitude, we become grateful people. We don’t just do kind things, we are kind people. We don’t just do loving things, we are loving people. Becoming. That’s who we are. That’s why we are here. To help each other down that road of becoming. That’s why we are here. To show compassion to neighbors who need it, to defend those who are bullied, to open our doors and our embrace as wide as Jesus has opened His arms to us, so our community can become. Loving like Jesus did means sacrifice and inconvenience. How will they know what loving like Jesus looks like? Only because we love like Jesus first. Grace has a way of traveling much farther and changing people more than we ever imagined.
[1]Jim Wallis, Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus (NY: HarperOne, 2019), pp. 40–42.