SERMON
After the death of King Solomon in the 10th Century BC, Israel split into the southern kingdom of Judah, which retained Jerusalem as its capital, and the northern Kingdom of Israel, with its capital of Samaria. It is this northern Kingdom, in the 8th C BC, that is the setting to today’s Old Testament reading. Under the reign of King Jeroboam the second, the northern Kingdom of Israel was booming! It was a time of great success, strength and wealth. All key indicators pointed to Jeroboam being a fine leader and great king.
Except for one thing.
The king was appointed by God to serve as his agent to rule the nation. The king was the custodian of God’s word for the nation and was expected to observe God’s covenant and laws and lead the people to do likewise. The king’s life and rule were meant to reflect of God’s own. They were to rule the people with justice and righteousness according to God’s will.
But over the years many of the nation’s kings turned aside from God’s word and led the people to do the same. There were many wicked kings—and Jeroboam the Second was one of the worst. Jeroboam stopped the people in the Northern Kingdom from going to Jerusalem to worship God in the Temple. He made two golden calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan. He said to the people: “Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” And the people went there to worship them. Jeroboam built shrines on high places and appointed priests from people who were not from the tribe of Levi, the divinely ordained priestly line (1 Kings 12:31). That might seem a trivial thing because it might seem better than a shortage of priests. But appointing priests who were not Levites went against God and violated his established order.
With prosperity came luxury, idolatry, immorality, corruption, and oppression of the poor throughout the kingdom. If the hearts of the people were one with God’s, they would love their neighbour as God loved them, instead of exploiting others for selfish gain. But this was at pandemic levels in the kingdom under Jeroboam’s rule. For all this, God spoke against Jeroboam: “You have done more evil than all who lived before you. You have made for yourself other gods, idols made of metal; you have aroused my anger and turned your back on me.” (1 Kings 14:9). In time, Samaria became a demeaning label for the whole northern region, and those in the north were despised and viewed as heathen by those in Jerusalem.
Rather than representing God and shepherding people to God, Jeroboam had set himself up as a rival to God. So God sent a shepherd named Amos to prophesy to Jeroboam, warning of coming disaster. The vision is of God holding the plumbline. God is the king. He sets the standards…and the house of Jeroboam has not measured up. It is not true to plumb—not in alignment with his word. There is only one thing possible for a house so crooked as this. It will be knocked down. Through Amos the Lord said:
“Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel;
I will spare them no longer.
The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.” (Amos 7:8b-9).
Amos spoke God’s word to an audience who didn’t want to listen. The priest Amaziah was more concerned with sucking up to Jeroboam than pleasing God. Amaziah sent Jeroboam a message claiming Amos was trying to undermine him. Then Amaziah told Amos to get out and go home—this was the king’s sanctuary. It was Jeroboam’s temple. King Jeroboam set the rules. Amos’ message was a foreign one and didn’t fit with what the king had decreed.
Amos responded with a prophecy of God’s judgment on this corrupt priest: Amaziah’s estate would be divided up among foreigners, his wife would be forced to live in the city as a prostitute, and his children would die by the sword—that is, Amaziah would die in a pagan land, with no spouse, no children, no estate. And a final part of this prophecy Amos spoke also came true: “Israel will certainly go from its land into exile.” Jeroboam II’s son Zechariah was assassinated just six months into his reign, and the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and carried away by the Assyrians in 721 BC.
To forget God and set oneself up as one’s own ruler—justifying oneself by calling evil good and good evil—has devastating consequences. Yet this is not just a Jeroboam problem. It’s not a Samaria problem or Northern Kingdom problem. It’s not an 8th century BC problem. Its human nature, right back when
- Adam and Eve set themselves up as king against God,
- when Cain set up himself as king against Abel and murdered him in the field,
- when the people sought to enthrone themselves as king, building a tower to climb up to heaven,
- when the kings repeatedly refused to listen to God and sought to silence the prophets permanently by stoning them.
The issue is the human heart, human will and desires that drive all kinds of evil and makes people hostile towards God our Saviour. We see that human nature of opposing God in today’s Gospel reading. An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
What must I do to inherit eternal life? Notice the contradiction? An inheritance is a gift. But like all human beings in our natural state, his whole outlook on blessing and divine favour for eternity is based on doing, on his performance, on measuring up.
This was the framework of all the religious leaders of the day. They created 610 man-made rules which they applied in life situations to supposedly help them not break God’s commandments, consequently teaching obedience to human traditions rather than God’s word. They frowned upon anyone who couldn’t—and didn’t—fit into this legal box, as unworthy of being in their pure moral religious community, and they shut them out. You might remember the man born blind in John 9, who was thought to have sinned in some way to have that disability. “You who were steeped in sin at birth! How dare you lecture us!” The religious leaders bellowed—and they threw him out.
So for these southerners in Jerusalem who were so proud of their religious efforts and their perfect outward performance, the Samaritans north of the border were more or less damned to hell. The hatred towards them was that intense.
And it was towards Jesus also. Jesus came, welcomed sinners and ate with them, associated with those who were unclean, teaching grace and forgiveness instead of writing people off. That’s not the way of the law. That’s not the way of their moral code, which this Jesus was undermining. He is not the king. They were. And so this expert in the law sets himself in opposition to Jesus: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” There’s something of Jeroboam in that question…do you see it? He came to test Jesus. He’s the ruler, the final authority. He has set himself up as the king of his life. He is a rival to God’s Son.
Jesus answers with his own question: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”
The expert answered, “‘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, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Well, there you have it folks! All we need to do to have eternal life is “‘Love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind’; and, ‘Love our neighbour as ourselves. That’s the plumbline. That’s the standard. The problem is…we can’t. We don’t.
The expert in the law knew that. That’s why he asked: “Who is my neighbour?”. He wanted to water down God’s standards to fit into a framework he could achieve. He sought to justify himself. Anyone who is opposed to Jesus will not want Jesus to justify them. They will seek to justify themselves…against their own ideas of what is right and wrong. And guess what…we humans always make ourselves right, and everyone else wrong. That’s crowning ourselves king of our own kingdom.
Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus teaches that God’s compassion is for everyone, without distinction. Jesus uses the character of a Samaritan from the hated north to teach the expert of the law that it is mercy and compassion, not judgment that is needed. Everyone is our neighbour and so one is to show loving concern to all people, without distinction.
That’s usually how we focus on the parable and it’s not necessarily wrong. But that focus is just more law…what we must do. I think Jesus tells this parable for a second reason—to give us hope in a merciful God. Because it is Jesus who has come as the plumbline not only for God’s law, but also God’s compassion. And God’s compassion is the Good News. God loves a world that does not love him with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, or love our neighbour as ourselves. He showed that he is wholehearted towards all people, when he sent his one and only Son, who came to those who could not help themselves and showed them mercy, raising up those who were chronically ill, demon possessed and even dead. Jesus is the one who loved his Father with all his heart and who perfectly loved his neighbour as himself. And so Jesus did not come to do away with the law but bring it to its sharpest point. His is the only life that is perfectly in-plumb and true. Yet the Father brings judgment on Jesus as if he were as wicked as Jeroboam!
In today’s parable, Jesus gives a glimpse of God’s own merciful help for you. The man who was beaten came into town on the back of the Samaritan’s donkey. Jesus rode into town on the back of a donkey too, into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Like the beaten man in our text, Jesus was also beaten, bloodied and bruised, stripped of his clothes. Jesus was not just left for dead like the man in the parable, but was killed on the Cross. Jesus paid the penalty for sin; a price far higher than the two denarii paid by the generous Samaritan.
The price Jesus paid for you was not just silver or gold but his own holy and precious blood. We don’t have to work at justifying ourselves anymore. By trusting in Jesus’ good works alone, God the Father justifies you. That’s the thing—even though we don’t pass the plumbline test, God says that in Christ, you do pass the plumbline test. You meet with God’s approval. You can be sure of his favour and mercy in Christ. You are innocent in Christ. You have every heavenly blessing in Christ. For you are clothed in Christ, covered over by his righteousness, as if you had lived as perfectly as Jesus yourself. You have been freed by him because of his mercy alone, to show his mercy to others. So we can say: “All this he has done that I may be his own, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, just as he is risen from the dead and lives and rules eternally.” Amen.
