Proper 10 (July 10-16)
Texts: Luke 10:25-37;
Col 1:1-14; Deut 30:9-14
YouTube: https://youtu.be/v0M3anqucbM
Sermon Take-Home Notes
SAVED BY THE FAITHFUL DOING OF JESUS CHRIST
We have been talking about the basics of salvation. What saves us? What are we being saved from? Last week, we read St. Paul warning the Galatians how not to be enslaved by behaviors that divide us. Jesus alone shows the true freedom that paradoxically comes through serving others — summed up in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal 5:14).
This week, Jesus himself stretches our idea of whom our neighbor is. Luke makes things simple by using the word “do” four times. The drama of the passage begins with the lawyer asking, “What must I do to inherit life in God’s reign?” When the lawyer correctly boils the commandments down to love — love God and love neighbor — Jesus responds, “Do this and you will live.” The lawyer’s not yet satisfied and presses Jesus about his neighbor. After telling him the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asks him, ‘Which of the three was a neighbor to the man who was robbed?’ To which the man says (here’s where I changed the translation a bit, because it does say “do”1), “The one doing mercy to him.” And Jesus responds, “Go and do likewise.”
Do love. Do mercy and compassion. That’s what saves us from the divisiveness which has the human family trapped in endless cycles of bloodshed. Can it can be any simpler than that to understand what saves us for the abundant life of God’s reign? Do love! Do mercy!
Yet notice that our traditional Lutheran theology has kind of given us an allergy to being saved by something so simple as doing love and mercy. We have tended to call that “works righteousness” — namely, thinking that we can be saved by what we do. No, we Lutherans have said we are saved only by faith — meaning our faith in what God has graciously done through Jesus. (In many contemporary Protestant churches, this gets boiled to being saved by believing a list of prescribed doctrines.)
This is another crucial matter in which I’ve changed my mind. I no longer think quite in terms of what I was taught. I still believe I’m saved by what God has graciously done through Jesus. But it’s not by my faith in that grace which saves me. No, we have to understand the priority that it is the faithfulness of Jesus which saves you and I. Rather than the priority on our faith. And guess what? That faithfulness of Jesus centers on what he did and what he does. He showed and taught us how to do love and do mercy to all of God’s children. In a world hostile to a law based on love instead of force, this meant Jesus had to do something else: he had die, both because of us and for us on the cross. He died because of us, since we have believed more in the power of force than the power of love. He died for us, to save us from our misplaced trust in violence. And then God did something else: God raised Jesus on Easter to extend forgiveness to us. This is what the faithfulness of Jesus Christ means. It’s what saves us. It is everything he did and does for us in God’s love.
How could we Lutherans have been so off-center on this message of grace? Especially that allergy of sorts to “works righteousness,” to doing. I think it depends on bad translations of key verses from St. Paul which more and more scholars are saying today that Luther and subsequent Protestants simply got wrong.2 I’ve listed several of those crucial verses in a chart in the Sermon Notes, showing the mistranslation of the NRSV in column 1 and the better translation in column 2.
I think you can see the importance of the difference. It boils down to Protestants thinking all these years that, based on Paul, we are saved by our faith in Jesus Christ. But Paul is actually saying we are saved by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. In short, we are saved by what Jesus did and does for us. Then, through faith and the Spirit, that faithfulness of Jesus can begin to live in us. That’s the promise of the Spirit to us. We can begin to do what Jesus does. We can begin to more fully do love and compassion in ways that heal the human family from its ways of death and destruction. That’s what saves us to live in God’s reign of freedom and life.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan gives us a great place to start on being saved by our doing. Who are our neighbors in need of our help? How can we, “Go and do likewise?” Thread-by-Thread Ministry is always a great place for us start here at Bethania! It’s such a vital ministry for meeting needs of our neighbors. But, of course, there’s so much more.
I’d like to stretch our thinking about the possibilities with a story similar to the Good Samaritan but in our modern context. It is a story told by CNN news correspondent Peter Arnett in the early 2000’s.
Peter Arnett told a friend (Tony Campolo3), “Last week I was on the West Bank, and a bomb went off, a terrorist bomb went off. Bodies were flying through the air. There was blood all over. A man came running up to me, holding in his hands a girl that was badly wounded, bloody from head to toe. The man holding this little girl in his arms said to me, ‘Mister, the soldiers have sealed off the area. They won’t let anybody in or anybody out. If I don’t get her to a hospital, she is going to die. You’re the press; you can get us out of the lines. Please, please will you help?’”
Peter went on, “What could I do? I put them in the back of the car, I covered them with a blanket, and we made our way through the lines. And on the way to Tel Aviv, he kept on saying, ‘Go faster, please, mister, go faster,’ and then he started moaning, ‘I’m losing her, I’m losing her, I’m losing her!’”
Peter continued, “When we got to the hospital, we rushed the girl into the operating room, dropped her on the table, came out, and sat on the bench outside the operating room totally exhausted because of the tension that we had just been through. I was taking a deep breath when the doctor came out of the room and said, ‘She’s dead.’ The man convulsed in tears. He screamed and he cried, and I put my arm around him and tried to comfort him. I said to him, ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any children. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a daughter.’
The man looked up at me and said, ‘Oh, that little girl isn’t my daughter. That Palestinian girl is not my daughter. I’m a Jewish settler.’ And then he said, ‘But maybe the time has come when all of us must learn to look on every child as a son and as a daughter. Maybe the day has come when we must discover what it means to be part of the family of God.’”
In the Holy Spirit promised to us at our baptisms, we can do this, right? We can start to look on every child as a son or daughter. We can begin to behave more like the family of God. This is how God is saving little _______ baptized this morning — by helping us, in the promise of the Holy Spirit, to live as God’s family. To learn to do love and compassion when we are met by the needs of our neighbors. To treat everyone not only as neighbors but also as sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers.
And here’s the tragedy of our history: to do religion has added to the problem, not solved it. That’s why Paul insistent on us being offered something truly different. In Jesus Christ, God is offering us a new faithfulness beyond that of religion.4 Because, in our sinfulness, being Jewish or Christian or Muslim has deeply divided God’s family, not united it. So God sent Jesus not to start a religion but to do a more faithful way of being human, a way of living by God’s loving service in the world, in order to save us from everything which divides us and keeps us enslaved to the powers of violence.
So let’s end with one more quick story — one from this week that has a happier ending. Last week, I shared my concern with how the nationalistic policies of our government is rounding up law-abiding migrants. One example is how, on June 22, Donna Kashanian, age 64 — who immigrated from Iran and has lived in the United States for 47 years, she has married a U.S. citizen, Russ Milne, and raised their daughter, Kaitlynn — Donna was gardening in the yard of her New Orleans home June 22 when I.C.E. officers handcuffed her and took her away to a detention center. I’m happy to report the update this week: her representative in Congress, Steve Scalise (R), presented hundreds of letters from neighbors in support of Donna, and she was released by I.C.E. to return home.5 Rep. Scalise has been largely supporting the current immigration policy but in this case joined his neighbors in advocating for Donna. This is something else we can do, right? Advocate! Speak up for those who are being harmed by nationalistic policies. Go and do likewise! Who are our neighbors that need us to advocate for them? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 13, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/v0M3anqucbM
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. The Greek verb used four times is poieō, “do,” as detailed in this paragraph. In this third instance, however, it is often translated with a different word — the NRSV, for example, has it as, “The one who showed him mercy.” The verb is an aorist participle, so the most literal translation would be, “The one having done mercy with him.”
2. I see this as one of the most important translation issues in Christian history. The phrase in Greek is dia pisteōs [Hiēsou] Christou, the four words “through faith Jesus Christ.” But in Greek the grammar is a genitive, a phrase showing possession, which can be translated in two ways. The more common way is subjective, where Jesus Christ possesses the faith or faithfulness: “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” The less frequent option is objective, where Jesus Christ is the object of someone else’s faith(fulness): [my] faith in Jesus Christ. This lesser option has dominated Protestant translations of the past generations, thereby skewing the emphasis concerning salvation to the believer’s faith. This translation trend may change with the next major translations, however, since New Testament scholarship over the past thirty+ years has increasingly argued for a priority on the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. I recall the first place I encountered this argument: reading Charles Cousar’s A Theology of the Cross: The Death of Jesus in the Pauline Letters (Fortress Press, 1990) in the early nineties. It immediately struck me as a matter of great import to a critical understanding of Protestant theology, so I was thereafter on the lookout for other scholars making the same argument. I became aware that Duke Divinity scholar Richard B. Hays wrote an entire book around the translation issue and its import: The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 (Eerdmans, 2002). It has been central in all the Pauline hermeneutics of prolific N. T. scholar N.T. Wright (see, for example, Paul and the Faithfulness of God [Fortress, 2013], pp. 836ff.). Most important to me personally has the argument of Douglas Campbell that Justification theology should be abandoned as a mistaken reading of Paul, and once again this translation issue is at the center of the argument. I highly recommend reading Campbell’s Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (written with Jon DePue; Cascade Books, 2024). He devotes chapter 14, “The Faith of Jesus,” to the importance of this translation issue.
3. From a chapel address by Tony Campolo to John Mark Ministries, online at: https://www.jmm.org.au/articles/16827.htm
4. My translation of Romans 3:21-22: “But now, apart from religion (Torah), the justice of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the justice of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who receive that faithfulness.”
5. See, for example, this story in the July8 The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/ice-iran-mandonna-kashanian-released-detention
