The Good Samaritan

A man lies by the side of a lonely road. Beaten. Stripped. Barely breathing. Footsteps approach. And then, slowly, they move away again.

Jesus is teaching, and an expert in the law of Moses stands up to test him. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus turns it back to him. “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The man knows his stuff. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. And love your neighbour as yourself.” “Right,” says Jesus. “Do this, and you will live.” But the man wants to justify himself. So he asks one more question. “And who is my neighbour?” Jesus answers with a story.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Everyone listening knows that road. It twists down through bare, rocky desert, dropping steeply all the way, with plenty of places for bandits to hide. And on this day, bandits are waiting. They jump the traveller. They strip him, beat him, and leave him half dead by the side of the road. Then they are gone. The sun climbs. Flies buzz. The man can't stand, can't call out. All he can do is lie in the dust and hope that someone, anyone, comes down that road.

“By chance, a priest was going down that road.” Help has arrived, surely. A man who serves at God's temple. But when the priest sees the wounded man, he crosses to the other side and keeps walking. “Then a Levite came to the place.” Another temple worker. He looks. And he too passes by on the other side. Jesus doesn't tell us why they kept going. Maybe they were afraid. Maybe they were busy. Maybe they had reasons that sounded good. The man is still lying there.

“But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was.” And a ripple goes through the crowd. A Samaritan? “When he saw him, he had compassion.” He goes to him. He pours oil and wine on the wounds and bandages them. He lifts the man onto his own animal and walks him to an inn. All night he looks after him. The next day he hands the innkeeper two silver coins. “Take care of him. Whatever more you spend, I'll repay you when I come back.”

Then Jesus asks his own question. And notice how he changes it. The lawyer asked, who is my neighbour? Jesus asks, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer can't quite bring himself to say the word Samaritan. “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus says, “Go, and do the same.”

To hear this the way the first listeners did, you need to know about Samaritans. Jews and Samaritans shared ancestors and both honoured the books of Moses, but they had been divided for centuries, over where to worship God and who truly belonged to his people. Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim, not in Jerusalem. The bitterness ran both ways. John's Gospel puts it plainly: Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. So the hero of Jesus' story is the last person his audience would have chosen.

The Good Samaritan. You'll find it in Luke chapter 10, verses 25 to 37. The lawyer wanted to know how far his duty went. Jesus showed him someone who didn't stop to ask. So here's the question to carry with you. Who is lying by your road this week, and will you stop?