Today’s scripture: Luke 10:25-37 (NRSV) (The Message) (KJV) What might God be saying to me?
My thoughts (Penny Dean):
This is one of Jesus’ best-known parables. The phrase “Good Samaritan” has entered the vernacular to the point that even hospitals are so named. Those of us who have been in church for years can recite the story with just the right amount of scorn for the Levite and the priest. Yet how often are we just like the two who passed by, in spite of having been beat up and left for dead ourselves?
Jesus only describes the victim as “a man.” To the religious scholar, he probably meant a Jew and I see no reason to debate that. Yet this critically wounded man was ignored and avoided by his religious brethren — the equivalent of being ignored by one’s pastor and deacon. Actually, it’s more than just ignoring, it’s scrupulously avoiding.
But along comes the Samaritan. Samaritans were an anathema to the Jews because they were only half Jewish. While most of Israel had been in captivity in Babylon centuries before, those who remained had intermarried with surrounding cultures, resulting in the Samaritans. To a Jew, the Samaritan was his religious opposite, someone he would never have expected to help in his time of need. For me, this would be the equivalent of a televangelist coming to my rescue. The Samaritan in the parable transcended the years of animosity between his sect and the Jews. He helped the victim because he saw him as a man just like himself and felt compassion towards him.
Clearly the priest and the Levite couldn’t set their baggage aside to help the man in the ditch. Even the religious scholar, whose question prompted Jesus’ parable, didn’t quite get it at the end. He gave the correct answer, that the Samaritan was the victim’s neighbor, but he could not call him “the Samaritan” or “the man who treated him kindly.” He was still having difficulty grasping that a Samaritan could do good and blandly refers to him as “the one.”
How easy it is to judge the priest and the Levite and the religious scholar! We can point accusingly at them and say, “You could’ve/should’ve/would’ve…” but the old adage is true: we would still have three fingers pointing back at ourselves. I would like to think that I would stop to help the televangelist if he were in the ditch, but that would mean setting down my own religious baggage and the differences between us. That’s hard. That would require me to see what he and I have in common, which might only be our shared humanity. That should be enough.
Thought for the day: Is there someone you resolutely avoid because they are not like you or because their opinion differs from yours? What would happen if you noticed your commonalities rather than your differences?
We encourage you to include a time of prayer with this reading. If you need a place to get started, consider the guidelines on the How to Pray page.