Ministries of Mercy, 3rd ed.

The Call of the Jericho Road

Timothy J. Keller

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781596389564
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Tim Keller shows how individuals and churches can participate in compassion ministries, arguing that caring for those in need is as fundamental to Christian living as worship and evangelism.

Part 1

Principles

1

The Call to Mercy

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)

Overview: Mercy to the full range of human needs is such an essential mark of being a Christian that it can be used as a test of true faith. Mercy is not optional or an addition to being a Christian. Rather, a life poured out in deeds of mercy is the inevitable sign of true faith.

The Essence of Love

The expert in the law came “to test” Jesus—to trap him (Luke 10:25). He was probably trying to get Jesus to say something negative about the law or to minimize its role in salvation. Jesus, on the other hand, is laying his own trap for the man, but his trap is a trap of love.

Our Lord asked the man for a summary of the Law, and he replied by articulating what many Jewish scribes and teachers believed, that all the rules of the Law hung on two principles. First, the Law requires a heart and mind totally submitted to and absorbed in God alone (Deut. 6:5). Second, it requires that we must meet the needs of others, with all the speed, the eagerness, the energy, and the joy with which we meet our own (Lev. 19:18). How staggering these principles are! They reflect both the holiness of God and the fundamental debt we owe the one who gave us everything. Since he gave us all we have, we must give him all we are.

When the law expert provided this summary of perfect love and righteousness, Jesus replied: “Do this and you will live.” What was Jesus’ strategy? Why did he not say, “Receive me as your personal Savior” or something to that effect? Was he suggesting to the man that the way of salvation was by the performance of good deeds? No, not at all.

Instead, he had turned the tables on the law expert. When we look at the regulations of the Old Testament individually, we see many that are possible to keep. But if we look at the principles beneath the particulars and at the kind of life that the law is really after, then we see how we fail utterly to reach it. Jesus is pointing him to the perfect righteousness the Law demanded so that he could see he is powerless to fulfill it. He was seeking to convict the law expert of sin. Jesus says in effect:

My friend, I do take the law seriously, even more seriously than you do. Yes, you can be accepted by God if you obey the law perfectly, but look at the law! See what it is really after. If you can do that, you will live. But if you see clearly, you will realize that the righteous requirement of the Law must be fulfilled in some other way.

Jesus had the same purpose in his confrontation with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17–22). He was seeking conviction of sin, even as he “looked at him and loved him.”

“You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’ ”

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth. (Mark 10:19–22)

The rich young ruler claimed to have been obedient to the Law, until Jesus called him to give up all his riches and follow him. That was nothing more than an exposition of the first commandment. Jesus was asking: “Are you willing to lose everything if it is necessary to gain my fellowship? Will you truly have ‘no other gods before me’?” The rich young ruler left in sorrow. Was Jesus being heavy-handed, unnecessarily demanding? No, not at all. The gospel is the gospel of the kingdom, and unless we give our hearts to Jesus as king, we have not given them at all. The ministry of mercy is expensive, and our willingness to carry it out is a critical sign of our submission to the lordship of Christ.

The Riches and Poverty of God

So here too, in Luke 10, we see Jesus is seeking to bring the law expert to despair of any salvation through his own personal efforts. This time, however, he expounds the second great commandment, rather than the first. Why does Jesus find it necessary to do this? Because, to receive the mercy of God, we must all come first to the place where we despair of our own moral efforts. Nathan Cole, a Connecticut farmer converted in the 1740s, put it clearly when describing what happened to him under the preaching of George Whitefield: “My hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”39

The law expert should have responded in the same way. If he had said, “I see! How then can anyone be righteous before God?” then Jesus could have replied, “Only through the mercy of God.” And the mercy of God is simply this. We must see that all of us are spiritually poor and bankrupt before God (Matt. 5:3), and even when we put on our best moral efforts for God, we appear as beggars clothed in filthy rags (Isa. 64:6). Yet in Jesus Christ, God provided a righteousness for us (Rom. 3:21–22), a wealth straight from the account of the Son of God, who impoverished himself through suffering and death that we might receive it (2 Cor. 8:9).

No one understood this more clearly than John Bunyan, who described his conversion in these terms:

But one day . . . this sentence fell upon my soul, “Thy righteousness is in heaven”; and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, as my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say to me “He wants my righteousness,” for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. . . . Oh! methought, Christ! Christ! there was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes. . . . Now I could look from myself to him, and would reckon that all those graces of God that now were green on me, were yet but like those cracked groats and four-pence-half-pennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home: Oh! I saw my gold was in my trunk at home! In Christ my Lord and Saviour. Now Christ was all; all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption.40

But the law expert resisted our Lord. He did not want to acknowledge that he was poor, spiritually bankrupt. It is clear that he felt the pressure of Jesus’ argument, for soon we see him attempting “to justify himself” by asking, “who is my neighbor?”

What was he trying to do? He wanted Jesus to define the second commandment in such a way as to make its requirements reachable. Jesus responds with a parable that expounds the second great commandment. He shows us the extent and the essence of the love God requires.

We must remember this entire context of the parable of the Good Samaritan, or we can fall easily into the trap of moralism. Jesus is not telling us that we can be saved by imitating the Good Samaritan, even though he is clearly charging us to follow his pattern. Rather, Jesus is seeking to humble us with the love God requires, so we will be willing to receive the love God offers.

Mercy Is Not Optional

The parable describes a Samaritan who came upon a Jew who had been beaten and robbed. The Samaritan provided physical protection (from a new attack), medical help, transportation, and a financial subsidy. In short, he met his full range of physical and economic needs. The law expert called all of this activity the work of “mercy” (v. 37). This story can only have its fullest impact if we remember its purpose. Jesus’ parable has been saved for a description of Christian love to our neighbor. Jesus’ reply is to show us a man performing what many today call “social work.”

Evangelical Christians today are by no means against helping the needy and hurting. Yet “social relief work” is generally looke...