There is something that happens in the weeks following a significant trip overseas. The body returns home, jet-lagged and relieved. But the mind does not return so easily. It lingers in the places it has been — in the rice fields and highland roads, in the worship gatherings and the faces of the people, in the questions that the distance from ordinary life creates space to ask.
Vietnam does this to me more than most places. There is a quality to the spiritual atmosphere there — particularly during Tet, the Lunar New Year — that is difficult to describe with precision and yet impossible to dismiss. The veil between the visible world and the unseen one feels thin. The liminal space where angels and demons do their ancient work is not abstract in Vietnam; it is palpable. You can feel the weight of a cosmic contest for the hearts and minds and souls of the people. It is not metaphor. It is reality — one that simply becomes easier to perceive when you are far from the insulating comfort of the Western context.
I have been carrying this weight since I landed. And with it, I keep returning to a particular question — one that is not uniquely Vietnamese, not uniquely Buddhist, not uniquely anything except human.
Last week, I wrote about the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi and the karmic signboards mounted in its courtyard — a series of illustrated if/then statements: do good, receive good; exploit the sacred, receive consequence. I noted that this posture was not foreign to the Western church. That the transactional approach to the divine is a problem that predates Buddhism and postdates the Reformation. That we have all, at one time or another, approached God as a means rather than an end.
I find I am not finished with that thought.
Because since leaving Hanoi, I have been sitting with a question — three words, posed by a lawyer to Jesus at the opening of the most recognized parable in Scripture. The question sounds like genuine inquiry. It is anything but. And the problem it reveals stretches back further than the lawyer, further than the Mosaic Law, further than we tend to look.
“And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?'” — Luke 10:25 (ESV)
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the most recognized of all the parables of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Preachers have returned to it for centuries. Children learn it early. Its central image — the figure who stops on the road, kneels in the dust, and renders costly care to a stranger — has become shorthand for human kindness across cultures.
But the parable does not begin with the road. It begins with a lawyer.
He stands up to test Jesus. That detail is worth holding. This is not a man asking in ignorance. He is a scholar of the Mosaic Law — trained, credentialed, fluent in the covenant documents of Israel. He knows the Torah. He has spent his life parsing its requirements. Whatever his question sounds like on the surface, it is not a genuine inquiry born of spiritual hunger. Luke tells us the posture before he gives us the words: he stood up to put Him to the test.
And then he asks: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
The question is inherently self-defeating, and the lawyer, of all people, should have recognized it. Inheritance is a category of gift, not transaction. One does not earn an inheritance. One does not perform sufficient deeds to qualify for it. An inheritance is received — by virtue of relationship, by virtue of belonging to the one from whom the estate passes. The moment you ask what must I do to receive an inheritance, you have misunderstood what an inheritance is.
And yet this is precisely the posture with which the lawyer approaches Jesus. He is a master of the Law. He knows what the Law requires. And somewhere beneath the surface of his question is the presumption that if he can identify the correct performance, he can secure the outcome. That eternal life is a transaction waiting to be completed, if only someone will tell him the exchange rate.
But the lawyer was not inventing a new posture. He was inheriting the oldest one on record. To find its origin, we need to go back further than the Second Temple period. Further than Moses and the Sinai code. We need to go back to the first altar.
“In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.” — Genesis 4:3–5 (ESV)
This is the earliest recorded act of worship in the scriptural narrative. And it is already transactional.
The distinction between Cain’s offering and Abel’s is not merely agricultural. Abel brings the firstborn — the covenant portion, the offering that acknowledges God’s prior claim on all that he has. Cain brings what Cain decides. He comes to the altar on his own terms, with his own assessment of what the exchange requires. When the offering is not received, his response is not repentance or inquiry. It is rage.
God’s question to Cain in that moment is one of the most searching in all of Scripture:
“Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?” — Genesis 4:6–7 (ESV)
Notice what God does not do. He does not close the door. He does not revoke the invitation. He says: the way is still open. Come correctly. Not with a different quantity of fruit, not with a more elaborate ritual — but with the posture of a creature who recognizes to whom he belongs and who therefore brings what is owed, not what is convenient.
Cain refuses. He would rather eliminate the competition — the one whose offering was received — than surrender his own approach to God. He will not be redirected. He will not relinquish the ledger. And the result is the first murder: not a crime of passion in any simple sense, but the violent terminus of a transactional heart that could not bear the exposure of its own poverty.
This is where it begins. Not in a Greek law school. Not in the corruptions of Second Temple religion. Not in the prosperity gospel of the modern West. At the first altar, with the first offering, in the first family — the human instinct to approach God on our own terms, with our own calculus of what the exchange requires, is already fully present.
Cain stood at an altar, offering what he chose, expecting acceptance on his own terms.
The lawyer stands before the Son of God, offering a test, expecting to be told the minimum required.
Separated by millennia. Identical in posture.
This is transactional spirituality. Not crude. Not obvious. Woven into the fabric of fallen human nature since the first morning smoke rose from the first altar east of Eden.
I want to be careful here — not to point a finger across a distance that does not exist.
Because we are not so far removed from that courtyard as we would prefer to imagine.
We too approach the Father of Lights, from whom every good and perfect gift descends (James 1:17, ESV). We too carry questions that, if we are honest with ourselves, are structured the same way the lawyer’s was. What must I do to receive this blessing? What must I do to see this prayer answered? What must I do to earn Your favor in this season? The object changes — a healing, a provision, a restored relationship, a ministry breakthrough — but the grammar of the question remains constant. It is the grammar of transaction.
Sometimes the transactional posture is obvious: the bargain struck in a moment of desperation. God, if You do this, I will do that. We recognize this one. We are mildly embarrassed by it.
But the subtler form is more dangerous precisely because it is harder to detect. It lives not in crisis prayers but in the low-grade assumption that our standing before God is a variable — that it rises when we perform well and falls when we do not. That His provision is a response to our output. That the spiritual life is, at its most fundamental level, a system of inputs and outcomes.
The karmic signboards at One Pillar Pagoda were not describing a foreign religion. They were describing a heart posture that lives, with varying degrees of self-awareness, in every one of us.
Follow the transactional logic far enough and it arrives somewhere Dietrich Bonhoeffer named with surgical precision nearly a century ago.
“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Cheap grace is transactional spirituality taken to its logical conclusion. The transaction runs like this: I offer a prayer of confession. God provides forgiveness. The exchange is complete. Nothing is required of me beyond the initial transaction. My sins are covered, my eternal destination secured, and the rest of my life may proceed more or less undisturbed.
It is, in one sense, the most efficient possible arrangement. Minimal cost. Maximum coverage. No ongoing obligation beyond the initiating act.
It is also, Bonhoeffer argued, a mortal enemy. Not because forgiveness is not real, and not because grace is conditional. But because this version of the gospel has quietly evacuated grace of everything that makes it transformative. It has reduced the death and resurrection of the Son of God to a legal transaction — a debt paid, a ledger cleared — and left the one who claims it exactly as they were before.
Paul anticipated the objection in Romans 6:
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” — Romans 6:1–2 (ESV)
The question answers itself. Genuine grace does not leave us unchanged. It kills something and raises something. It does not satisfy a debt and depart. It relocates us. The person who has truly received it is not the same person who came to receive it.
The transactional model cannot account for this. It can process a transaction. The gospel is not a settled account. It is an empty tomb.
Here is what I find most sobering about the lawyer’s question, and about our own: it represents not merely an error in theology, but a catastrophic underestimation of what is actually being offered.
The lawyer asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus redirected him — not to a different transaction, but away from the transactional frame entirely. The story of the Good Samaritan that follows is not a formula for earning anything. It is an image of what it looks like when love has actually been received and is now flowing outward. The Samaritan does not help the wounded man in order to secure an outcome. He helps him because something in him responds. He sees, and he is moved with compassion (Luke 10:33, ESV). The action is not a transaction. It is an overflow.
This is what we forfeit when we reduce our relationship with God to a system of inputs and outputs. Not just theological accuracy — though we forfeit that too. We forfeit the deeper thing. The more that the Father has for us. The life that is not a performance rendered toward a divine audience, but a genuine participation in the life of the Son, lived from the inside out.
The question “what must I do?” keeps us at the counter, calculating the exchange. It keeps us in the posture of the lawyer — standing up, putting the Teacher to the test, managing the transaction. It keeps us, if we are honest, at Cain’s altar: bringing what we have decided, on terms we have set, waiting for an acceptance we have not yet understood we cannot manufacture.
The invitation is to a different posture entirely. To the posture not of the lawyer, but of the one who falls at Jesus’ feet and finds, in that undignified proximity, that the inheritance was never withheld. That it was always already given. That the Father was never waiting for a sufficient performance — He was waiting for a son or daughter to come home.
In Christ, there is nothing left to negotiate. There is only the return.
We must arrest this within ourselves. Not as a matter of theological self-correction, but as an act of return. Turn from the counter. Step away from the ledger. Draw near — not because of what drawing near will yield, but because of who is there.
And discover, in the drawing near, that everything we thought we had to earn was already being held out toward us.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27