Last Sunday, I preached on Luke 10:25-36. This is the story of the Samaritan.
This text is often referred to as the Good Samaritan. However, Jesus never called the Samaritan “good.” That subtext has been added to the Bible.They didn’t expect a Samaritan to be a neighbor. Because it made us uncomfortable. Because it challenged our categories. But Jesus refuses to play nice with our prejudices.
Calling the Samaritan good seems to buy into the ethnocentric and racialized assumption that Samaritans are bad. Why add the adjective that the Samaritan is good unless we expect him to be bad? It wasn’t that the bad Samaritan stepped into the positive Judeo-Christian ethic of being good. The Samaritan embodied the compassion of God.
There’s still a question in the air: “Who is my neighbor?” In the sermon, I reminded us that Jesus didn’t answer this question with a lecture, but with a story because sometimes a story will do what a doctrine can’t. This calls us not just to feel compassion, but to embody it.
The parable of the Samaritan doesn’t just expose the hypocrisy of religious folk who pass by suffering. It also invites us to take responsibility, not just for harm we’ve caused, but for the wounds we’ve ignored. It doesn’t have to be your fault, to be your responsibility. God didn’t save us from the sky. God came down in flesh. In dusty, Nazareth-born, crucified-on-a-cross flesh. God came down into the ditches of humanity, into the wounds of oppression, into the despair of empire, and said, “I will take responsibility for you.”
Jesus challenges the social order by making the Samaritan—the despised outsider—the one who reflects God’s compassion. And maybe that’s the point. God shows up in the very people we’re taught to fear or despise: the refugee, the unhoused, the addict, the ones we label “unclean.” God dwells in the margins, not ivory towers.
The sermon closed with a modern parable of a beautiful church that failed its neighborhood. God whispered: “I left long ago. I was in the places you wouldn’t go.”
The question is clear: Are we still walking past? Or will we stop, like the Samaritan, and reflect the compassion of a boundary-breaking God?
Because if we’re looking for Jesus, we’ll find him in the ditch.
Amen.
For a link to this Sundays service check out our facebook page.
