The Good Samaritan 5: Finding the Moral

And here is where we get lazy.

We've asked ourselves some good, challenging questions, all of which need to be asked, all of which God wants us to ask. We've wrestled with our desires, our motivations. We've gotten to the heart. But what's the point? What's the answer? What is Jesus really getting at?

What's the moral of the story?

We've seen our selfish excuses. We've seen the surprising, extraordinary, generous, compassionate of the Samaritan. We admire his act, and we can all agree we are to be like him, and not the like the Priest and Levite who choose not to help.

What's your point, Jesus? It seems obvious: "Go and do likewise" are his concluding words. Further, to make the connection with his introduction, he is saying, "Go and do likewise and you will live, you will inherit eternal life."

We rush to conclude and miss something, far too often without even realizing it. We heap on the guilt in looking at our excuses, we show the selfishness of the human heart, but in the end the only answer given is, "Go and do." In other words, "Try harder." Or worse, "Go be a better person." We've equated the point of the story with the moral of the story, as if Jesus were not much different than Aesop.

We address the heart, the interior problem, with action, exterior solutions. We try to fix character, the essence of who we are, with behavior, the mere overflow. A house is crumbling from a termite infestation, and we try to save it with new wallpaper and different curtains.

Even worse: we condemn the Priest and Levite for observing their religious rules and regulations, but we take their law (Don't touch half-dead people) and replace it with another (Help more, serve more, care more). It may be a more noble law in our minds, but it's a law just the same. Without even realizing it, we've replaced one rule for another and the burden of self-salvation tragically remains.

We are stuck with a cold religion of moral codes, working our way to be better people, and we hear it in the conclusions of sermons and Sunday school lessons everywhere: It was the Samaritan who acted according to the law, who pleased God. So you see, it's not just about knowing the law, it's about doing it. We need to serve more! We must be generous like the Samaritan!

It's not that those conclusions are untrue, it's that they are not the conclusions. They don't address the real problem. They drastically miss where Jesus was pointing. We think he's telling us to hire an interior decorator when he's actually telling us to call the exterminator.

And so we return to the problem with which we started: What is the only necessary thing?