Hospitality has long been viewed in the South, and in other parts of the country, as a cultural and social way of life.  Being a good neighbor, not only on the street where we live, but in our community, in our Church, with the stranger, and people in need, is our calling as Christians.  This morning Jesus has a message for us about stepping up to a radical level of love by living radical hospitality.

  In his three-year ministry, Jesus is countercultural in the people he reaches out to, loves, and serves.  Jesus looks deeply within each person he meets to see their true nature.  He discerns what lies behind the mask people wear.  He searches their heart, mind, and soul hoping to find goodness, compassion, and love.  / Jesus accepts the hospitality of everyone he encounters regardless of their social status.  Jesus reaches out to those considered socially unworthy and unacceptable.  He approaches tax collectors, the poor, and others considered outcasts, with compassion, care, and love.  He never discriminates based on ethnicity or acceptability based on Jewish law and customs.  Jesus freely reaches out to and heals lepers, and associates with Romans and Samaritans, all considered ritually unclean.  He does not give difference or care what the rich and privileged think including the political and religious elite.  In Luke Chapter 10 Jesus teaches a strong message challenging the deeply engrained values of a people supported by the religious establishment in Jerusalem. 

  It is a message that challenges us today. 

  Luke 10:25-29:  “On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?  What is written in the Law, he replied?  How do you read it?  He 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 neighbor as yourself.  You have answered correctly, Jesus replied. Do this and you will live.  But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?”

  The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well-known parables of Jesus.  The setting for this story is the notoriously dangerous seventeen-mile journey from Jerusalem to Jericho.  The road runs through narrow passes offering hiding places for bandits known to terrorize travelers.  One of these victims has been robbed, stripped, beaten, and left for dead.  His attackers leave him with nothing to identify his status except his desperate need for help.  He could be a Jew or a Gentile, but the crowd would assume he is a Jew.  Jesus tells the story from this man’s point of view.  His Jewish audience can identify with compassion this innocent victim of random violence.

  The characters in this story, in addition to the victim and Samaritan, are a lawyer, a priest, and a Levite.  The lawyer is a Temple specialist in God’s Law, Commandments, and the Purity Code.   He stands up in the crowd to test Jesus, and possibly to display his learning and intellect.  He asks Jesus what he must do to enter heaven?   Jesus replies by turning the question back to him, and the lawyer quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18: we are to Love God and our neighbor.  When Jesus validates his response, the lawyer again tries to test him asking, “who is my neighbor?”  Jesus will answer in a story the important question the Lawyer could have asked:  “How am I to love and obey God, by loving and serving my neighbor?” 

  We will briefly examine the relationship between Jews and Samaritans to understand how a first century Jew and Samaritan would hear in the command to love one another.  In Judaic society there are boundaries with rules on how Jews should treat each other, and treat Gentiles including Samaritans, and how men should treat women.  Because these boundaries allow certain groups to establish position, power, and privilege, maintaining them is vital to social order.  These rules become a religious duty.  One boundary is treating Samaritans as ritually unclean.  They are descendants of mixed marriages from the Assyrian conquest of Israel 700 years earlier.  They worship the same God and observe the same Law and Commandments as their supposedly devout, pure-blooded cousins.