Sermons
March 9, 2025
“The only good Samaritan is…”
Luke 10:25-42
When we read books that were written in different eras, we oftentimes run into language or concepts that we are not fans of in this day and age. We might go back to Shakespeare and read The Taming of the Shrew, and before we even open the book, we object to the title. Years ago, and sometimes even today, we hear a woman being described as “shrewish.”. And sometimes, that woman truly has an unpleasant personality; but oftentimes she is simply someone who speaks her mind, or asks for what she wants, or is simply assertive in ways that are admired in men but not in women.
One of the first books I heard of people objecting to for this reason was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was criticized because Mark Twain, in the story, employs the N word a great deal. But at that time the word was not as unacceptable as we consider it to be nowadays, and I think Twain uses it to make a point.
Lately I have heard similar criticism of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The objection is because of Laura’s Ma’s frequent saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” We don’t approve of that kind of prejudice these days, and we would rather not have to hear it in stories from earlier times, when that prejudice was somewhat commonplace.
I don’t personally agree with doing away with books like these because of this problematic content. I think there’s a place for making sure that we understand the context, though. So the question we need to ask isn’t if it’s OK to let our kids read these books, but why such things were acceptable in the past, why they are not now, and what an author is trying to tell us by using these expressions or words.
When we look at a passage from the Bible, particularly a parable like the one before us today, we also need to think about context. Centuries of familiarity will often keep us from finding these stories as shocking and possibly offensive as they would have been originally.
The story of the Good Samaritan is one that we all know—and over the years we’ve come to see the characters in a different way than the original hearers would have.
Nowadays we have hospitals and nursing homes, counseling centers and even veterinary clinics named after the Samaritan in the story. But the idea of a Good Samaritan would have been shocking to the Jews of the first century, the ones Jesus first told this story to. A Samaritan was, by definition, anything but good.
The Samaritans were the descendants of people who had been left on the land in the northern Kingdom of Israel when the Assyrians conquered that nation in 722 BCE, and they had intermarried with the various groups of people that the Assyrians had settled in that land. So, to a Jewish person in that time, Samaritans were unclean because they were of mixed ethnicity, and their religious practices had mixed with those of the others who had been settled in their land.
Not only that, but when the exiles had come home from Babylon to rebuild the temple and the city of Jerusalem, the Samaritans had resisted them. They had built their own place to worship, on a mountain in what came to be known as Samaria, and they worshiped the Lord there. And Jewish people had, on at least one occasion, come up to that temple on Mount Gerizim, and destroyed it. So there was bad blood between the Jews and the Samaritans.
Jews at the time may have said, “The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.”. Samaritans at the time may have said, “The only good Jew is a dead Jew.”. But because we have been listening to the story for centuries, recognizing that this Samaritan is the good guy in the story, we don’t necessarily understand. Jews did not associate with Samaritans, as John tells us when Jesus meets up with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well and has a theological discussion with her.1
We don’t know anything about the nationality or the ethnicity of the man in our story who was beaten and left for dead. If he was a Jew, it is possible that he would have been absolutely mortified to discover he’d been rescued and taken care of by a Samaritan—quite possibly he’d rather have died.
The original hearers of the story would have been set up for a punchline that disparaged the religious professionals—clergy—of their day. If there was an original version of this story that Jesus drew on and adapted for his own purposes, it probably talked about a priest, a Levite, and an Israelite—a layperson, who stopped to care for someone that the people whose job it was supposed to be to care for people refused to help, for whatever reason.
But Jesus made the hero one of the hated Samaritans, and he did it to make a point that we need to put the story in context to understand.
How it came about that Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan was that he was challenged by an expert in the law. In that time and place, the law meant the Torah, and so this fellow was not a lawyer in the same way as our lawyers of to day but a scholar of the Torah, a Biblical scholar. He probably spent a lot of time with other scholars of the Torah discussing the finer points of the commandments, like “What does it mean that we do not work on the Sabbath? What can we do, and what things are forbidden?” They were interpreters of the religious law.
So, on the surface, this lawyer’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Could simply be an invitation to have a debate with this odd new rabbi who had been having theological discussions with religious leaders since he was 12 years old. But the Greek words seemed to indicate that he’s not wanting to have a scholarly discussion. He is, like many others throughout the Gospels, trying to trap Jesus into saying something wrong. And Jesus knows what’s going on, so he throws the question back to the lawyer: you are a scholar of the law; what is your interpretation?
The lawyer responds by giving what Jesus in other places calls the greatest commandments. The first comes from Deuteronomy 6: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind—in other words, with your whole being. The second comes from Leviticus 19: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus says, “That’s right. If you will just do that, you will have eternal life.”
But the lawyer wants to know more. It was a perfectly reasonable discussion for a group of rabbis to have: when God commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, what does he mean by “neighbor”? In other words, who am I responsible for loving, and whom can I safely ignore? It says he’s trying to justify himself. He wants to be able to say, “Yes, I do that—I love my neighbor, when you define neighbor as a fellow Jew who is ritually clean and not a collaborator with Rome.” Then Jesus would say to him, hopefully, OK, then you’ve earned your way in.
But Jesus turns the whole thing on its head. He tells the parable that is so familiar to us: a man is beaten and robbed and left naked by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite—the Levites might be thought of as associate pastors or elders, perhaps, who helped the priests at the temple—both passed him by. Both the priests and the Levites were among the “good guys” of first century Jewish culture: they were righteous, and they had devoted their lives to serving God—although their behavior in this story seems anything but good.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time and used up a lot of ink trying to make what these two did seem perfectly understandable, not out of line at all. They say, well, if they were on their way to the temple, and it was their turn to serve there, which only came up a few times in any person’s life, then certainly they’d want to avoid contact with what very well could have been a dead body, because that would have rendered them unclean and they would not have been allowed to set foot in the temple. But there are a few problems with this.
The first is geographical. Both the victim and the priest are described as going down the road—and the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is definitely down. In something like 17 miles, the road drops almost 3300 feet in elevation.
If the priest was going down the road, then he was leaving Jerusalem. He was not going to the temple to serve there; he’d already been there and was now on his way back home. So staying ritually pure so he could serve in the temple was not an issue.
Secondly, all three potential rescuers in the story—the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan—are all described as having seen the victim. They all had a good enough look at the man to know that he was not yet dead, and that he was in need of help. But the priest and the Levite chose not to help.2
Another problem with this interpretation that takes it easy on the priest and the Levite is that, even if they had been on their way to the temple, the very law they lived by made clear that they had some responsibility. In the Torah, if there was a conflict between two commandments, one that required purity and one that saved a life, the conflict was to be resolved in favor of saving a life. Remember the conversation Jesus had with the folks in the synagogue who objected to his healing on the Sabbath:3 the law allowed an obedient Jew even to save the life of an animal on the Sabbath, and of course human beings were more important than animals.
The priest and the Levite had no excuse whatsoever for their failure to help the man who had been beaten and robbed and left to die in a ditch.
Then along came a Samaritan—a bad guy, in the way of thinking of first-century Jews. To understand the offense of this fully, I invite you to picture in your mind someone from a group many people today would have prejudice against. Or, perhaps, you might look at the story in a way suggested by a commentator years ago.
Say you’re watching an old western, and an Arapahoe warrior walks into Dodge City with a scalped cowboy on his horse, checks into the Dodge House with the cowboy, and stays the night to take care of him. Any Indian so brave would be fortunate to get out of the city alive even if he had saved that cowboy’s life!4
The story doesn’t shock us anymore because we’ve put a white hat on the Samaritan. But he was not a good guy in Jesus’ day, and so telling this story was something that could well have gotten Jesus into trouble, because this Samaritan did what the other two were supposed to have done.
God kept saying through the prophets, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”5 That specific language is from Hosea, but most of the profits say something similar. For instance, Amos talked about how the people were so concerned to make sure that they had their beliefs and rituals right, but when it came to their neighbors, they were more inclined to look the other way than to care for their needs.
The ultra-righteous priest and Levite did nothing for someone who was in need. Only this unclean foreigner cared enough to stop.
At the end of the story, Jesus asks another question.
He doesn’t answer either of the lawyer’s questions directly, but makes the lawyer come up with the answers. “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
Do you see what he’s done? He has turned the question on its head.
The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” What he meant was, “Whom am I required to love, and whom can I ignore?” Jesus makes the issue, “What does it mean to be a neighbor?”
The lawyer can’t even bring himself to name the man. He won’t say, “The Samaritan.”. He says, “The one who showed him mercy.” And that probably reluctantly, but I think he maybe has realized it’s pointless to try and argue with Jesus about this.
He understands now that in the Kingdom Jesus proclaims to be at hand, things aren’t like they are here, even among religious specialists like himself. In that kingdom, people won’t be picking apart the scriptures to figure out what they have to obey and what they can let slide—to try and figure out what they can get by with not doing. In that kingdom, the ones wearing the white hats will turn out to be the bad guys, and the ones wearing the black hats will be the good guys.
In that kingdom, only two things matter: love of God and love of neighbor—and to love one’s neighbor means to be a neighbor to them. This love doesn’t nitpick about who is already a neighbor—doesn’t worry that if we take care of strangers and people who are not like us, there won’t be enough left to take care of our own. No, this love goes out and finds people in need and makes neighbors out of them. It doesn’t worry about boundaries, about race, or ethnicity, or nationality, or social class, or church membership, or behavior, or anything else. It just sees a person in need and does what it can to help.
Now the lawyer understands. He may not like it, but he understands. Jesus isn’t interested in debating who is in and who is out; he’s less concerned about all the legal and theological ducks being in a row than he is about making sure people are taken care of.
What he cares about is this: “Go and do likewise.” Stop spending all your time and energy worrying about who is a neighbor, and get out there and be a neighbor to those who need one.