In 1973, sixty-seven students at Princeton Seminary agreed to take part in a study, which they were told was about religious education and vocation, but was really an experiment in social psychology. The students were told that some of them would be sent to one building to give a brief talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, while others would be sent to another building to make a presentation on the types of jobs available to seminarians after graduation.

The students were sent off one at a time. Some were told they had a few minutes before they needed to be there, others were told the staff was waiting for them, and still others were told they were already late and needed to hurry.

So, each participant took off for the other building and each encountered a man (who was an actor), lying on the ground, doubled over and coughing violently. Among the group tasked with talking about employment opportunities, almost three out of four failed to stop, but most people in the other group, the one that was supposed to speak on the Good Samaritan, did stop. But that distinction didn’t hold in the subgroup that was told they were already late and needed to hurry. In fact, one of the “Good Samaritan students” even stepped over the “seriously ill man” because he was blocking the doorway.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan was today’s gospel reading from the lectionary. Jesus told it to a man who was eager to talk about theology but passive about living it out, for twice Jesus told him to “DO” something. It reminds me of what George Macdonald wrote. God, he said, is looking for someone who “will do the will of God—not understand it, not care about it, not theorize it, but do it…”^[1]

In Luke’s Gospel, the expert in the law could talk about what to do – “‘Love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” He just wasn’t doing it. So, Jesus spoke to him frankly: “Do this and you will live!”

Such straightforward talk made the scholar uncomfortable and “wanted to justify himself.” He could not do that on a personal-behavioral level, only on an intellectual one, so he tried to shift the conversation back to something more abstract. He asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

When I see how quickly this man found a path to self-justification and how he transitioned to it with such agility, I think he must have had a lot of practice. We get good at what we do regularly, and he was good at this—not that it did him any good. The trouble with justifying yourself is no one outside yourself (and a tiny circle of friends) will buy into it. Self-justification is like Argentinian currency, which has been experiencing a 193% inflation rate. Nobody wants it. You can’t give it away.

When it comes to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, people who write Bible studies like to ask questions like, “Where do you see yourself in this story? Are you most like the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan?”

I think they should add, “Or are you most like the expert in the law?” Sadly, that is where I see myself. Comfortable with abstract ideas. Enjoy a good debate. Far too nimble at self-justification.

I don’t want to look like the priest or the Levite, but neither do I want to look like the expert in the law. The person in the text that I want to look like is Jesus. But looking like him doesn’t happen because people have right answers. It happens because people do what Jesus does in a spirit like his. But that is not natural for me and would be impossible except for one thing: by the grace of Christ and the miracle of Pentecost, the Spirit that was in Jesus is in me.

Pentecost, which marks the outpouring of the Spirit, is in a couple of days. How good of God who gave his Son to give his Spirit. Because of his incredible gift, I need not look like the priest or the Levite, or even the expert in the law. I can hope to look like Jesus.

[1] George Macdonald, God’s Word to His Children, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1887