Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 10-11.

In today’s passage, Jesus discusses what we must do to inherit eternal life.  He tells us, by agreeing with the man who asked Him about it, that all of God’s commands follow from two basic commands:

• Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind
• Love your neighbor as yourself

Really, the first of these should be sufficient, because if we truly love God with all of our heart, and all of our soul, and all of our strength, we will love our neighbor as ourselves.  However, we need the second because some of us, most of us, would try to claim we do the first command while treating our fellow man with contempt.  However, what I really want to look at is the story Jesus told to illustrate who our neighbor is.  He told the story of the Good Samaritan.  The Samaritan in this story practices love for his neighbor.  But, who was the Samaritan?  He was part of a social group which the man who fell victim to criminals held in contempt.  The Samaritan would have been an “oppressed” group to those in Jesus’ audience: they would have hated them.   The Samaritan was one of those whom many today would have said was justified to commit violence against the man he instead helped.  So, with this story, Jesus tells us that we should love and care for those who abuse and oppress us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.