It was a simple and clear question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" It is, after all, the most basic of all questions. It is our question. What must we do? Wrapped up in that simple lawyerly question, was a yearning that is our yearning, not only to live forever but to live fully and completely. How can eternity be grasped here and now? How can I know the sacred? What must I do to inherit eternal life?

The lawyer already knew the answer. He was a bright man with a well-trained mind. He was logical and imaginative. He could make connections between seemingly unrelated facts and point out inconsistencies when people seemed to get things confused. He was concerned with upholding the law and drawing the line between right and wrong. More than bright, he also was looking to deepen his relationship with God. He was hungry. We know him because his longing is our longing.

"What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Who does not wonder that? Who does not want that? For some, eternal life means winning the lotto forever. But for many of us it means winning the lotto now, enjoying a sacred connection now; experiencing a depth and breadth and beauty now, where the sacred becomes present now-not only after we have breathed our last.

How do we gain this quality of life? How do we get it? How do we experience it? "Teacher," the lawyer asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"

Jesus, the lover of paradox and puzzle, does not answer him directly, but turns the question around. We so commonly say, "Jesus hand the answer to me on a silver platter. Give me the key that will unlock the truth. Give it to me straight." Like the lawyer, when life hangs in the balance, we want someone else to figure it out for us. But Jesus wants the lawyer to discover it for himself, so he answers the question with a question. "What is written in the law?" he asks the man, "What do you read there?"

The lawyer, a bright man, advanced degrees lining his office, answers him perfectly. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

The answer is perfect because, after all, it is the heart of Moses' teachings, the soul of prophets, the essence of the Gospel: love God, love neighbor and love self. Jesus is pleased with the response. The answer is right and beautiful and profound and Jesus tells him so. "You have given the right answer; do this and you shall live."

Stop. The lawyer is taken aback. This is not simply about passing the oral exam with honors. This is the practicum. It's not about knowing the right answer, but doing the right answer. This is the real test and the brilliant lawyer wonders if he'll flunk Why? Because he remembers the Latino day workers standing on the corner at Orange Grove and Villa waiting, just waiting for a construction manager to stop his truck and pay a day's wages so that Jose can feed his babies while he charges $200 an hour for his brilliant legal advice. He remembers the stack of fund appeal letters from the homeless shelter, handicapped veterans, abused children, AIDS victims and, yes, the Presbyterian Church. He reads the morning headlines about the latest bloodletting between Palestinians and Israelis, and beneath this pile of humanity's need he has kids and a wife and the firm. "Do this and you will live?" Do this and you will die of physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion.

So the lawyer does what any good lawyer will do and should do. He asks Jesus to define his terms. "And who is my neighbor?" Once again he asks a question to which he already knows the answer. Because he is a bright, learned man, skilled in his command of the Torah he knows who is neighbor is not: not the Hittites or the Canaanites, the Hivites or the Jebusites and certainly not the Greeks or the Romans or the Egyptians. Neighborliness has been pretty well narrowed down in the mind of this bright, capable man.

Jesus is compelled to expand his horizons. The master of paradox and puzzle tells what is to us the most familiar of all parables. "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers." That is all we know about the man, but we assume he was Jewish because otherwise the rest of the parable doesn't make sense. A priest walks by, sees the half-dead man and walks on by. A Levite, another holy man, does the same.

Most of us have heard a dozen or so sermons on the hypocrisy of the priest and the Levite. No doubt they passed by on the other side of the road because one was off to an important meeting about highway safety. The other was a retreat leader for the annual meeting of the Jerusalem deacons about expanding their caring and calling ministries to the sick and the homebound.

If we've enjoyed more sophisticated homiletics then we know that there were various Hebraic laws and codes governing hygiene that would have needed to be broken if the priest and Levite were to render roadside help and hospitality to the wounded man. So they're not evil. We can generously assume that they had important priorities to attend to, religious codes to respect, and when they looked at the half dead man, they saw one in a thousand similar cases that fill our headlines everyday. Sure, he deserved to live. Everyone does. But that's not always possible. Life is hard. So off they went to attend to their own needs or their families. It had likely been a long and exhausting day.

The focus shifts to the Samaritan who Jesus uses to illustrate that one who is an outcast, one of the wounded of society was more likely than the privileged to show kindness and compassion and hospitality. He is later described by the lawyer as "the one who showed mercy."

The Samaritan is the stranger in Israel, a foreigner, a social outcast, religiously a heretic. The Jews had spent a good part of six centuries trying to rid Israel of the contamination that the Samaritans represented. The Samaritans were descendants of a mixed population who occupied the land following the conquest of the Assyrians in the Seventh Century (B.C.E.). They opposed the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem and built their own temple. The Samaritan was the very opposite of the lawyer as well as the priest and the Levite. No Jew would help a Samaritan. No Samaritan would help a Jew. A dead or dying Jew was one less Jew about whom to worry. So this Samaritan acted contrary to the universal expectation and against his own expectation given his history, culture and conditioning.

If the parable was cast among Palestinians and Israelis today, we would call it the parable of the Good Palestinian, or vice versa; or with this past week in Florida and the nation if we peopled it with Democrats and Republicans we would call it the parable of the Good Republican. You get the idea.

What the Samaritan was doing was crossing the very threshold of bigotry and cultural expectation in order to give life and to gain life. Two lives were in the balance: the Jew who clung to life with the barest of threads and the Samaritan, oppressed, outcast and no doubt scarred by years of abuse, clinging to the thread of humanity deep inside. In a miracle of grace and compassion, the Samaritan reached out, poured wine on the Jew's wounds to cleanse them and oil to keep them soft. The Jew in the ditch was no doubt both grateful and stunned. God had answered his prayers and his life was sustained through an extraordinary connection between two human beings that neither culture could have ever imagined.

This parable - if it is about anything - is about the power of the broken, the outcast and the injured to bring about healing, what Henri Nouwen called the wounded healer. The Samaritan, scarred by hatred and abuse, could have administered rough justice or at least walked on by. Instead in a miracle of eternity, he was moved to compassion. Nor did he skimp in his care. He left a blank check with the innkeeper, a brash and foolish act, then goes on his way. Jesus upholds him as an example of what it means to live beyond the requirements of the law, an example of what it means to live with eternity in the here and now.

"What must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"Love God, love neighbor, love self. Do this and you shall live."

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the author writes, "Let love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained strangers unawares." The reference is to the angels that appeared at the tent of Abraham and Sarah and told them that they would bear God's promises. Had Abraham and Sarah turned away the strangers, God's promises to Sarah to bear a child in her old age and for the Hebrews to be a light to the nations would have been thwarted. The message would never had been received. But hospitality was offered to the strangers, the message proclaimed and centuries later another story of healing and hospitality dawned upon the human consciousness.

A gentle, strong man and a pregnant young woman, ride into Bethlehem to be enrolled. They seek shelter from the night and a safe, warm place for their baby to be delivered. While there is no room in the inn there is room in a stable among the kindness of animals and lowly shepherds and angels singing. So Jesus was born.

The battered, broken body of an anonymous Jew is carried into an inn somewhere on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho by a Samaritan we now call good. In time, this broken man heals and tells his story. He tells his story as a means of a revelation of a new reality of God's kingdom. In this new kingdom two strangers become one, unity overcomes difference, the oppressed, broken and abused become instruments of healing and wholeness, light and life. In this kingdom eternity breaks into the here and now in a miracle of dazzling grace and compassion.