“And who is my neighbor?” Ah! This will get him. This will draw him into a trap. This will entangle him in all manner of racial, theological, and cultural weeds. But Jesus pivots. He avoids legal exposition and argument and turns instead to a practical illustration.

Jesus answers with a story. In doing this, the Lord reminds us that the Bible is the world’s greatest storybook, and he is its greatest storyteller. The parable he tells is one of history’s most poignant and memorable. Its descriptions are riveting, its principle timeless.

As a child I loved replacing burnt out incandescent light bulbs with new vibrant ones. I was fascinated by the fact that you could shake the dead bulb and hear the filament rattling — a musical confirmation that the bulb was indeed broken and no more light could be extracted from it. Most of all, I loved to see light shining again in a space where once there had been darkness.

It happened from time to time.

Someone in the audience would ask what he thought was a trick question.

This was supposed to be some kind of test.

The trap nearly always caught the trapper.