matter how zealous he may be in his evangelistic endeavour, will face the judgment of Christ. For the seed of the kingdom is the Word, and that very Word demands social concern. Social concern is part of the fruit of obedience which is the evidence of our fertility as soil. John Stott is surely right, then, when he insists that we may not pursue Christ's great commission, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news,' to the neglect of his great commandment. 'My command is this,' he says: 'Love' (Mark 16:15; John 15:12).
There was a time, of course, when the Christian church was, indeed, renowned for its practical obedience to that injunction of the Master. Even unsympathetic critics have to admit that in nineteenth-century England, for instance, it was the Christian believers who toiled indefatigably in the slums for the relief of the poor and the marginalized in society. Would that that were the church's image today! I fear it is not. The virus of individualistic self-indulgence which infects our western society generally is very little resisted by the church today. Like the priest and the Levite, Christians are far more interested in the buzz they get from public worship than in the social responsibility which love demands.
The story of the good Samaritan is as compelling, then, in its relevance to the twentieth-century world and to the twentieth-century church as when Jesus told it 2,000 years ago. Many years ago, I did a Bible study with a small group of students, one of them from Latin America, on this very parable of the good Samaritan. His comment was, 'If only the church had told us this story and demonstrated to us this Jesus, many of my friends would never have become Marxists.' This is, without doubt, one of the most potent recipes for social change the world has ever heard: 'Go and do likewise' (Luke 10:37).
And yet the astonishing irony is this: that wasn't why Jesus told the story. Jesus did not tell this parable because
