In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dear friends in Christ, the wildfires of the past couple of weeks have left many people with nothing but the clothes on their backs, but thanks be to God that at least everyone's basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter have been provided by the generosity of family, friends, and even strangers. Many who have suffered loss will tell you of various kindnesses that others have done for them, and it is impressive to see the amount of effort exerted by people to serve their neighbor in need. Perhaps this support even reminds us a bit of the story Jesus tells this morning about the Good Samaritan who went to extraordinary lengths to help a complete stranger in desperate need.

Jesus commends such merciful service to us when He says to the lawyer, "Go and do likewise," that is, go and be a neighbor to people in need. So acts of mercy are necessities in the lives of God's children because He commands them, they are His will for us. However, it's easy to carelessly assume that the moral instruction of the Good Samaritan story is the main focus of Christianity, and from that misunderstanding, many people have concluded that Christians and the Christian Church are supposed to make charity and service their primary mission in life. While such service is part of the Lord's purpose for us here, in the scene after the story of the Good Samaritan Jesus provides another story that makes sure we have our priorities straight. St. Luke tells us that the narrative about Mary, Martha, and Jesus goes like this:

"Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, 'Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.' But the Lord answered her, 'Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, 42 but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.'"

The point is clear: when Jesus is in the house teaching, you need to drop everything you're doing because listening to Him is the "one thing necessary," or "one thing needful," as the older translation has it. And Jesus Himself comes to our Divine Services right here to speak through His Word and Sacraments, and so the most necessary thing in our lives is to open our hears to what He has to teach us. As St. Peter put it, there is nowhere else to go besides Jesus, since He has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). Jesus is your one necessity when it comes to everlasting life.

And today's Gospel reading takes us beyond any talk of earthly necessities and into the vastly more important matter of eternal life (which is the opposite of everlasting death, punishment, and torment in hell). As we sit at the feet of Jesus and hear His Words in the story of the Good Samaritan, we also learn from Him that eternal life cannot be earned by our acts of mercy or any obedience to God's Law, but everlasting life can only come by believing in the mercy of Jesus Christ toward us.

But a common idea in Jesus' day, and still popular today, is that you can earn heaven by being a good person, kind to your neighbors and loving toward your family. The lawyer who puts Jesus to the test has such an attitude. He asks the question, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" The lawyer was asking what law he could obey that would gain everlasting life for him.

Before we actually look at Christ's response, we should note that Jesus could have answered the question this way: "You can't do anything to inherit eternal life because an inheritance by definition can't be gotten by your own efforts; instead, an inheritance has to be given to you." That is actually the Old Testament's answer to the lawyer's question, as St. Paul explains in our Epistle (Galatians 3:15-22). Long before God gave the Law through Moses, God promised salvation to Abraham and all believers in Jesus Christ, completely as an unearned gift, as an inheritance. Abraham was justified by faith, not by works, just as all God's children are. And the Law of Moses was only given 430 years after the promise of Christ, but that Law wasn't given as a way of earning eternal life but as curb for outward transgressions and to expose sins of the heart.

St. Paul says, "If a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe" (Galatians 3:21-22). Since God's Law condemns all of us as sinners, the only way we can be saved is by the work and promise of Jesus Christ, who died for all of our sins on the cross and rose on the third day to open to us the way of eternal life. Jesus is the only way to the Father's eternal heavenly home, and that is Good News, because He tells you, "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). And on Judgment Day, Jesus will take His righteous believers into eternal life, saying, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (Matthew 25:34). Nothing can earn that inheritance; it's all a gift.

So Jesus could have taken that approach, but He knows that the lawyer is too proud of his own self-righteousness to hear the Gospel. Since the lawyer was seeking eternal life through obedience to the Law, Jesus wanted to reveal to him how impossible that is for humans to achieve. So in answer to the question, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus responds with another question: "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And the lawyer answered, "You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said to the lawyer, "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live."

At first blush, it seems like Jesus is setting up a way of gaining eternal life by way of works rather than by faith alone in Him. "Do this, and you will live," Jesus promises. "If you want to have eternal life, the necessity is that you love God and neighbor." But if you take a careful look at the phrase, "Love the Lord your God," this excludes our works completely. If the Lord is your God it is only because He has chosen you to belong to Him. Only God's chosen people can fear, love, and trust in Him as their God.

And loving the Lord with all of one's faculties and loving the neighbor as oneself are things that God's chosen believers God would automatically do, if they were perfect and had no sins at all. One who trusts God with all his heart is also one who is at perfect peace with God and so loves God completely and the neighbor selflessly. In other words, a sinless, perfectly righteous person is one who keeps the First Commandment by fearing, loving, and trusting in God above all other things, and that person would naturally love his neighbor as himself without even having to be told. He would spontaneously do all that the Law requires, but he still wouldn't earn eternal life by doing that. Rather, the doing would flow from God's election and from the perfect faith that the perfect believer has in God, just as good fruit is produced by a good tree.

Of course, the hypothetical perfect believer doesn't exist. If you take a quick look at yourself, you can immediately realize that God's Law sets up an impossible standard for us sinners. But Jesus is the only One who could ever love God perfectly and His neighbor as Himself. On the other hand, we are so corrupted by original sin that we could never be a perfect believer and lover of God and neighbor. We selfishly look out for ourselves before we think of our neighbor, we rely on our own strength and earthly possessions rather than on God, and we want to do things our own way rather than following God's commandments.

If you don't yet believe how corrupt you are, let's examine briefly what Jesus means when He tells us that we must love the Lord with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind. This means that when God tells us to do something, in order for our response to be true obedience to this commandment, not only do we have to actually do what God tells us, but we have to really want to do it, in fact, we must love doing it. We would rather be doing nothing else than exactly what God has commanded us to do.

But consider this analogy that I'm sure you've either experienced as a parent or participated in as a child. The other day I gave one of my children, let's call her "Child A," an instruction to help me with something. She says, "But I'm playing right now, I don't want to." So I say rather sternly, "No way, when I tell you to do something, you do it right away." And she responds with a tone like this: "Oooookaaaaaay…I'll do it." Now I think we can all agree that it was better for her to relent and actually follow my instructions rather than face punishment, but it's clear her heart wasn't in it; she was reluctant and was motivated by fear of punishment rather than by the simple delight of obeying God's Fourth Commandment that requires obedience to parents.

God's Law tells us to love Him with our whole being, not to do things simply out of fear of punishment, grudgingly, reluctantly. Of course, from a practical standpoint, reluctant obedience is better than disobedience. Even when we don't really want to, it is better that we go to work, take care of our families, and come to church, even if we have mixed motivations and our hearts aren't completely in it. But in God's sight, any unwillingness in our hearts is damnable sin.

It's clear that the lawyer, mired in self-righteousness, doesn't really get any of that. When he responds to Jesus, he skips over the radical demands of the commandment to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and immediately tries to justify himself by asking, "And who is my neighbor?" In other words, he's trying to determine which people he has to love and which ones can he exclude. Clearly this man doesn't have a willing heart for love of God or love of neighbor, because one who is motivated by love doesn't need to ask, "Who is my neighbor?" Rather, one who loves God and neighbor is constantly asking, "Where is the next person that needs me to be a neighbor to them?"

Love does what is necessary for the good of others without thinking about it—to ask "Who is my neighbor?" shows that the lawyer's heart isn't motivated by love but by justice and self-interest (he is seeking to justify himself, to show he is in the right). And one who completely loves God doesn't seek to justify himself, because he knows that only God can justify. So Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to the lawyer in order to show him the level of love that God expects, and to reveal to the lawyer how far he was from living up to that standard. The Good Samaritan shows a kind of love and compassion for a perfect stranger that was totally foreign to the lawyer's mindset, and that is very rare in our own lives.

Now examine your heart. Are your actions and motivations any better than the lawyer? No, even if we acted like the Good Samaritan every day in our dealings with our neighbors, that wouldn't change the fact that we are all imprisoned under sin against God, and because of our sin, we are as good as dead in the sight of God, just like that poor man lying beaten, bloodied, and robbed in the ditch in the story. Satan has invaded this creation and made it captive to sin and death, from which we cannot free ourselves. There is nothing that we can do to overcome sin and inherit eternal life.

But here is the wonderful surprise of the Gospel: you have a Good Samaritan named Jesus, for He is the one who came down into the ditch to save you from sure and certain eternal death. For Jesus was always merciful toward His neighbor, as His Father is merciful, and He also loved God with all His heart, soul, and strength. He kept the commandments perfectly, and He went to the cross to rescue His enemies from eternal death. Yes, Jesus is even more merciful in real life than the Good Samaritan was in the story because Jesus comes to save not just strangers but actually His enemies. St. Paul wrote, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life" (Romans 5:8-10).

Now that Jesus has kept the Law perfectly and answered for all of your sins, He comes down with mercy to you who were dead in sin and grants you everlasting life in Holy Baptism, as His Word and Holy Spirit is poured over you with the water. When you have sinned against Him and recognize and confess your guilt, He comes to you here in the Church and pronounces Holy Absolution, "I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." And He comes not merely with oil and wine to bind your wounds, but He comes with the Medicine of Immortality, His own true body and precious blood, under the bread and wine, to deliver forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation into your very mouths.

Yes, the Good Samaritan has taken care of all your necessities, so that you may have life in Him now and forever in heaven. He richly and daily provides you with all the physical necessities of this earthly life, but most importantly, He fills your most pressing need with His own righteousness, for He has reconciled you to God and set you free from sin so that you may live under Him in His Kingdom, loving your Savior with your whole heart and your neighbor as yourself. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.