The practice of love (Luke 10:29–35)
It's clear from verse 29 that the lawyer felt that, in spite of Jesus' apparently complimentary response, he had nevertheless somehow experienced a defeat. Perhaps there had been just an edge to Jesus' tone when he said, 'Do this and you will live', as if to imply 'but you don't really love like this, do you?' That certainly seems to be the implication of Luke's observation, that the man felt the need to 'justify himself'. That is, to put himself in the right. The moral challenge of Jesus' words had left him on the defensive. Though nothing explicitly disapproving had been said, he unaccountably felt as though he had been rebuked.
But isn't that how we all feel when someone challenges us with the command to love? G. K. Chesterton once said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting; it had been found difficult and left untried. That's about the size of it. As we said earlier, everybody agrees that 'Love your neighbour' is fine in theory, but when it comes to practice we find ourselves embarrassed by the unconditional demands such a rule makes upon our lives. Almost unconsciously, we seek to ease the pressure on our consciences, to convince ourselves that in spite of that nagging, uncomfortable feeling of self-reproach, we do love our neighbour as ourselves, don't we?
There are two classic ways in which we habitually seek to achieve this sense of self-justification. And it's the genius of Jesus' parable that it unmasks the essential hypocrisy in both of them.
a. The 'I don't do anybody any harm' technique
This first technique is quite simple. You turn God's positive command into a negative prohibition. 'Love your neighbour' is transformed into 'Don't do anybody any harm'. Such passive righteousness is far easier to handle. We can comfort ourselves, since we haven't stolen from, murdered or slandered our neighbour, that we have
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