Sermon: The Good Samaritan

Trinity 4C – 13.7.2025
Deuteronomy 30. 9-14; Luke 10. 25-37

I read that parables are meant to ‘comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. (1) The trouble with parables like the one we’ve just read is that we have heard it so many times that it’s hard to hear it afresh and hear what God might be saying to us today.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is probably the most well-known of them all. Most of us can’t remember a time when he hadn’t heard the story. And of course even the word Samaritan now conjures up the image of someone you can call up in a time of crisis.

Just yesterday a friend of mine visited our house and she was in a wheelchair and was struggling to get to the house from her car and a couple of tourists helped her. She told me she’d met a couple of ‘Good Samaritans’.

The trouble with this parable is that we all know what it means already, or perhaps we all think we know what it means. We should be nice, kind people like the Samaritan, and help others in need, and we should not be people who cross the road on the other side like the priest and the Levite.

I’m going to be bold here and I’m going to assert this morning that the parable of the Good Samaritan might not be what you think it is – a story about how we should help others. Instead we’re going to think about what in this parable might ‘afflict’ us alongside the more ‘comfortable’ message

Luke tells us that Jesus was approached by a lawyer, who sought to test him asking ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life’ (v.25). This kind of debating was common in their culture – it was a way of honing ideas and sharpening understanding – it wasn’t necessarily a negative thing. 

Jesus doesn’t answer the question but asks the lawyer what he thinks. He draws from the Shema (the law), correctly quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus: ‘you shall love the lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself’.

Tick. Gold Star.

The lawyer asks a follow up question, ‘and who is my neighbour’ (v.29).

The lawyer often gets bad press. It’s a good question – we need a bit of clarity on this. We might ask the same. We can’t love everyone, surely. We can just about manage our own families and friends. We only have to walk down Cornmarket and see numerous people at the side of the road – it leads to constant guilt. Where are the boundary lines here.

Our street, our parish, our city, our country, people like us, people who are Christians as well?

What the lawyer is really asking is perhaps, ‘who is NOT my neighbour’.

He was a lawyer and lawyers want clarity. I read somewhere that he presumably wanted something on the order of:

“A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one’s own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever.”^[2]

Jesus doesn’t answer this directly, but responds with the story we know so well.

A man is robbed and left for dead at the side of the road. The religious people see the man but pass by on the other side, presumably because they were afraid of contaminating themselves by touching a dead or dying body and then being unable to fulfil their duty. 

The Samaritan man sees the man and walks over the road towards him. He is moved with compassion, he treats and binds up his wounds, puts him on his animal, makes sure he’s cared for going the extra mile.

‘Go and do likewise’.

It’s a beautiful example of how we might live, loving and caring for those in need.

A few years ago on Christmas Eve my son cut his hand really badly whilst wrapping presents. We had to leave our evening meal to rush to the hospital and on the way a tire blew out. We’d left so quickly we hadn’t remembered to take a wallet (before the time when our phones were wallets!). A passing cyclist saw us and stopped. He not only helped get the car to the side of the road, but he hailed a taxi to the hospital and insisted on paying the taxi himself.  Truly a Good Samaritan.

But where we see ourselves in this parable makes a difference to how we read this.

On a good day we might see ourselves as the Samaritan helping the man, and I suspect this is the role we’d all like to think we play!

On a bad day we might see ourselves in the priest and the Levite walking by on the other side.

But there is a third option – we might be the beaten man, lying helplessly in the dirt on the side of the road.

So, where might Jesus’ Jewish hearers have seen themselves?

It is very unlikely they would have seen themselves in the Samaritan. In first century Palestine, Samaritans and Jews hated one another. This was a bitter and entrenched hostility along religious, geographic and ethnic lines.

They might be the priest or the lawyer, but Luke’s readers were more likely to have imagined themselves as the man in the ditch than the Samaritan. Jesus deliberately chooses an enemy to be the one who acted like a neighbour to make his point, adding another layer of challenge to his story.

‘Who is my neighbour?’ – in this situation the neighbour turned out to be the least likely person they could imagine.

This brings us to the heart of the gospel message of salvation. That Jesus, seeing our deepest need when we are in a metaphorical ditch, battered and bruised by life, sees us, is moved by compassion, binds up our wounds, picks us up and heals and cares for us, and pays what we owe so we don’t have to.

In this way of reading the parable we are not the Samaritan – Jesus is. We are the one in the ditch needing Jesus’ healing touch.

All of which makes me wonder whether there is yet another lesson in this parable: that God often shows up where we least expect God to be, and though the people we least expect.

Who, we might ask, do we have the hardest time imagining God working through? And then we should probably expect God to do just that!

The challenge in this parable is that Jesus pushes the very notion of boundaries or line at all. For Jesus, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ at all. The Samaritan and Jew were divided by history, culture and theology, yet their obligation to love supersedes it all.

All the boundaries we humans put up, be it race, sex, gender, sexuality, conviction, these are all challenged here. Our call to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength goes hand in hand with our call to love our neighbours. And this love looks like a man in a ditch being helped by his arch enemy.

And so, like the lawyer, we’re left not with the comfortable question, “Who is my neighbour?”, but with a far more afflicting one:
Will I allow myself to be loved by someone I would rather keep at a distance?

This parable isn’t just a call to compassion: it’s a challenge to our categories. It invites us to look again at who we are willing to receive love from, and who we are willing to become vulnerable before.

The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us that God’s grace and goodness can come from unexpected places, through unexpected people. And perhaps, the real test of neighbourliness is not only how we give love, but how humbly we receive it.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, we give thanks for this familiar parable and for the power it has to both comfort and afflict us. Thank you that you showed us the way to life and love, and that way is one that crosses boundaries and challenges assumptions. Help us to see you in those we encounter, and help us to both give, and receive love from those we least expect. Amen