Deuteronomy 23:1-25:19, Luke 10:13-37, Psalms 75:1-10, Proverbs 12:12-14
Today is April 3rd. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It is my pleasure, just a joy to come around the global campfire, come in out of the cold, come in out of the dark, throw another log on and gather together and let God’s word wash over and speak to us as we just step away from whatever else the chaos of life may be bringing our way and center ourselves in this space in this time and hear from God through His word. So, we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week and our next step forward will take us back into the book of Deuteronomy. Today we’ll read chapters 23, 24, and 25.
Commentary:
Alright. So, in the gospel of Luke today Jesus told a very famous story, the parable of the Good Samaritan and oh gosh this parable is so loaded and so pertinent to our lives it’s remarkable. So, just quickly understanding who Samaritans were is a little bit helpful but at this point in the year it’s not completely apparent because all the stories that lead us to who Samaritans are haven’t been told yet. So, briefly, the children of Israel are going to make their way into the promised land. You probably know that and they’re gonna settle the promised land. You probably know that too and there’s gonna be seasons that are good and seasons that are not so good, which will eventually lead them to having kings, which will eventually lead them to split into two different nations known as the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. The northern kingdom of Israel, which is 10 tribes, will eventually be conquered by the Assyrian Empire and they will be carried away into exile. This is the way the empires built the empires or one of the ways. They would conquer a people and then relocate them forcibly into another part of the Empire while moving other conquered peoples into the land that was previously vacated, like, moving people around, mixing them all up so that over the course of a generation or two people would stop remembering who they used to be and only know themselves as part of the Empire. So, when Assyria conquered the northern kingdom and displaced a lot of them and moved a bunch of other people in, what came in was a lot of different religious practices and idolatry. So, the people are worshiping however they’re gonna worship but there’s problems with that. And, so, they request that a priest of Yahweh be brought back to teach them how to worship the God of this land. The problem is that the priest that they bring back…like the priests of the northern kingdom have already been practicing a very, very skewed version of the worship of Yahweh, of the worship that’s happening in Jerusalem in the Temple. This is because the first King of the northern kingdom, his name was Jeroboam. He built two temples and put a golden calf in each one of them and had the people worship this golden calf as Yahweh. And, so, it just got all messed up as you can imagine. So, by the time we get to Jesus time this land is very different and the people are worshiping very differently, and they become Samaritans because the northern kingdom’s capital and its land was known as Samaria. So, those being Orthodox and true down in Jerusalem, they never looked at the Samaritans as anything but, you know, people to not be trusted, people who had a very, very strange way of trying to practice the same worship. And, so, they avoided, they looked down upon, they stayed away from the Samaritans. So, getting back to the story Jesus is telling, there’s the man saying, “what do I need to do to have eternal life”? Jesus asks him a really, really interesting question, “how do you read it? In other words, here’s God talking to a person and asking him how he reads the Bible or the Scriptures. Fascinating. And the man says, “what is true, if you love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and you love your neighbor as yourself then you’ve fulfilled the law.” That’s still true today. That’s, what we’re supposed to be doing. And Jesus affirms that. And then the man’s like, “who is my neighbor?” That’s what launches Jesus into the story of the good Samaritan. And this road between Jerusalem and Jericho, this is a very, very ancient road still visible today and it winds through a very, very deep, dark valley, very dangerous place to be. And even today, you can see many parts of that and kinda, from different angles, begin to understand, yeah, that's…there’d be all kinds of…there’s nowhere to run and lots of places to hide. So, very dangerous road indeed. So, Jesus is kind of critiquing the religion of the time, the Hebrew religion, by placing a priest and a Levite who step around a very injured man and he makes the Samaritan the hero of the story, which is so counter cultural and, like, such a disruptive message at the time because these were people that were not trusted, people that shouldn’t be the heroes of the story. And, so, in effect Jesus saying, to love your neighbor as yourself is to look around you and see anyone whether they’re your perceived enemy or whether you don’t understand them or whether their people group is foreign to you or whether they’re worshiping in a completely different way from you. If you find a human being that it is in your power to help in some sort of way even if that’s just a smile, then you should do it. That would be loving your neighbor as yourself.
Prayer:
Father, there are endless opportunities for this. It just forces us to be aware because we are so focused on the obligations and responsibilities of any given day that we’re just trying to maintain our lives and we don’t really have time to be paying attention to anything else. And, so, we’re recognizing again, even as we continue to move through this season of Lent that we are humbling ourselves before you, laying all of the obligations and responsibilities of our lives before you and asking you to reorder and reprioritize us, removing things that don’t need to be in our lives anymore, putting things in that do belong so that we can have a life that is something that can be maintained while still having the freedom to follow your Holy Spirit and be observant about loving our neighbors as we love ourselves because it’s not just about people with cardboard signs on sides of roads. It’s anyone, anywhere, anytime that is in need when we observe it. So, come Holy Spirit. And during this season of Lent we commit to paying more attention to this but what we’re asking is for a life that has space to live, space to actually be your hands and feet in this world instead of just space where we’re just juggling all of the balls trying to keep them in the air, trying to maintain an oversized life when there is freedom waiting for us and an adventure with you if we would simply allow you to show us what is a priority. Come Holy Spirit into these issues we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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I was thinking about this parable and just thinking about how many different vantage points of seeing this rift. It’s basically…it’s the Kidron valley that runs through Jerusalem and the valley runs, winds all the way down to Jericho. And yeah, it’s a treacherous place. There’s a longer conversation about this parable and about what we’ve just been talking about today, an entire chapter is devoted to this story found in my book Sneezing Jesus, which is available wherever you can get books, including dailyaudiobible.com or audiobooks, wherever you get audiobooks. It’s worth it…it’s worth it to listen to a read if you want to go deeper into this story and that resource is available at dailyaudiobible.com or pretty much anywhere.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.