Live love?

The Good Samaritan by Paula Modersohn-Becker

     The gospel lesson this week is a well-known story, and even gets several pop-culture references (though I'm not sure anymore if people know the root of the reference or if they just know the idiom).  It is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is the story of a man, who on a journey, is stripped, robbed, beaten, and left for dead.  The first two people who come upon him are people you might expect to stop and help - a priest and a caretaker of the temple.  These two, however, knowing that their religious law prevents them from touching naked sickness without themselves being made ritually impure.  So the two likely suspects walk on the other side of the road.  The twist to this story comes with the third person who comes along.  This third person doesn't even belong to their religion, the third person is never clean and people who live the 'right' way don't associate with them.  Yet they stop.  And they go above and beyond the 'call of duty' for someone they don't know.  They pay for the victim to recoup at a local inn, promising to return and pay whatever else the man uses to care for this stranger.  We are all fairly familiar with the story, and we are familiar with its common usage now to mean someone who does something nice for another person they don't know.
     What we may be a little more unfamiliar with, however, is the reason Jesus told this parable to begin with.  In Luke 10, the parable begins with a lawyer questioning Jesus about eternal life.

'Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He 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 he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ Jesus replied, 'There was a man...

...and the parable of the Good Samaritan ensues.

It would seem then, that loving the Lord means more than just following the rules, since in the parable the two Jewish men did follow the rules but the non-Jew got it right.  This makes following Jesus all the more harder - are we supposed to follow the rules in the Bible, which are good, or are we supposed to break them and hope that doing so results in love and eternal life?  If we can't look to the scriptures to figure out what to do, how are we to know what kind of life is okay to live?  This conversation between Jesus and the lawyer seems to muddy the waters of salvation by grace through faith, if for the lawyer inheriting eternal life comes from reading in scripture that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.  For those of us who have been brought up knowing that we are absolutely not good enough to do this, that our sinful self gets in the way and messes it up, that Jesus came to die for us because we fall short, let me point you to the first lesson from Deuteronomy 30.
     It would seem that Jesus is having a conversation with scripture, that he is taking the teaching from Deuteronomy and reinforcing God's promises with a twist.  In Deuteronomy 30 we read,

 Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Sometimes I think that we use grace as a crutch, blaming our sinful selves on the fact that we didn't do what we knew we should.  As much as I loathe the so-called 'Lutheran guilt,' and joke that we have 'overactive guilt glands,' I sometimes think it is a healthy slap from the Holy Spirit.  After all, we have the word in our mouths and our hearts to observe - 'it is not too hard nor is it too far away.'
     The gift we have in grace and faith is that we aren't alone in living out our faith.  Christ who has faced every temptation we will knows what it is to know what is right and yearn to not do it.  The Holy Spirit who rushed in like a violent wind and set the world on fire knows what it is to be pulled in different directions, the right one the hardest path.  And that is where the grace and faith come.
     As gifts right when we need them most, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  The mystery for me this week is how God can strengthen me (who I know to not want to do what is right all the time) to live out my life of faith in love - toward God and toward neighbor.  How is God calling you to live love?