Now there's so much going on here. Any time you read a Hebrew parable you have to understand how they interpreted it. Hebrew people read parables for identification, not primarily for content okay. Hebrew people read parables for identification, not for content. Here's how it worked. Jesus was called a Master of Haggadah which was the ability to teach with parables. Now it took some skill to do it because this was how they thought about it. Any time you're reading a Hebrew parable the first question you ask is this: who is asking the question? Two - so who is asking the question? Two, what question is he asking? Three, who in the story would he identify with? The answer to the question is found in whoever the one asking it identifies with in the parable. Okay, does that make sense? So if I'm asking a question and you're my rabbi and you say let me answer you with a parable, I would be listening intently for whoever I would identify with in the parable and that would be the answer to my question, alright.
So there's at least two things going on here. The first thing is this, is Jesus is giving us a light and heavy interpretation of what do you do when you find someone left for dead, touching them versus helping them? What do you do? If you touch them you're sinning; if you leave them for dead you're sinning. Which one's the worst? Alright, so Jesus is doing that. The second thing He's doing is He's answering this guy's question, so let's go through this. Who was the one asking the question? Who is it? An expert Pharisee, so a top end Pharisee alright, so expert Pharisee. Okay, what question is he asking? Who is my neighbour. Why is he asking that? He comes to Jesus and he says what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus is so rabbinical, Jesus says um I don't know, how do you read it? You're a Pharisee, tell me your yoke, right and the Pharisee says okay, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus says that's it. If you do that you'll inherit eternal life, okay. If you do that you'll inherit eternal life.
So the Pharisee says well hold on then, who's my neighbour? In other words if I have to love my neighbour like I love myself, then let's define who are the people I have to love this way. So essentially he's drawing a box and he's saying in this box are neighbours. Who is in here? Now there are a lot of answers aren't there? Isn't there a lot of possibilities? Couldn't Jesus have said okay, just Jews. Just Jews. The Pharisee, okay - maybe He could have said only clean Jews. That would have even been better. What if He said only Pharisees? What if He only said the guys who live on your street, those neighbours? Like there are a lot of potential answers here and it's a very important thing because Jesus is talking about something called eternal life. He's saying if you want to inherit eternal life you've got to love your neighbour as yourself. The question is who's my neighbour? In other words who are these group of people that I have to love like I love myself? So Jesus says let me tell you a parable to answer this.
Now as soon as He said that the Pharisee would have been listening to the parable for who he identifies with in the story. In a Hebrew parable there are three characters as you see at the end of the parable Jesus said, so which one of the three acted like a neighbour, okay? There are three characters okay, so Jesus sets him up. So He says there's this guy that gets left for dead, okay. There's three people are going to walk by him. The first one is a priest and he walks right by him. Now two questions: one, would the Pharisee have identified with the priest? No. Priests were Sadducees. Pharisees and priests did not get along because they disagreed on what made up the scriptures. The Pharisees said that the Torah and the prophets made up scriptures; the priests said that the Torah only was the scripture, so they didn't get along at all. So as soon as Jesus said there's this priest that walked by the Pharisee would have been like okay, go on.