By Metropolitan Dionysios of Servia and Kozani
(Delivered on September 14, 1965)
(Delivered on September 14, 1965)
‘Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus’. This ‘lawyer’ [i.e. a student of the Law of the Old Testament, rather than an advocate in a court] approached Jesus Christ, supposedly to ask what he should do to inherit eternal life, but in fact out of a desire to provoke Him. The lawyer was an educated man of his time who studied and interpreted the Law and it was his aim to trap Jesus into a discussion. Instead he received a much-needed lesson. Jesus got him to understand that it’s one thing to be well-educated and play at being clever and quite another to be a good and useful human being. Wisdom isn’t a matter of knowing who your neighbor is, but knowing what you should do for that person. Everybody knows and says lots of things, but very few do what they should. This is why we see in this parable the lawyer asking one thing and Christ answering another. The lawyer asks: ‘Who is my neighbor?’, and Christ answers: ‘Go and do likewise’. The lawyer asks who’s supposed to be his neighbor and Christ sends him off to demonstrate his love to every person. Because each and every person is our neighbor. Christ doesn’t tell him that every person’s his neighbor, but what he should do for every person, who is his neighbor. And this is what we Christians need to do on every occasion: not to know a lot and be wise, but to have love and to do what we should.
