Luke 10:25-37
The man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho alone that day never had a chance. He was either very careless or very reckless to have been traveling that road alone. It was known as “The Bloody Way,” because of all the violent incidents that occurred there. The dirt road wound its way through a barren wilderness, dropping about 3,600 feet in twenty miles, with lots of sharp turns and narrow passages. It was the perfect place for bandits to hide behind the rocks and attack anyone foolhardy enough to be caught on the road alone. And this man never had a chance. A group of robbers jumped him, beat him up to the point of unconsciousness, took his clothes and his money, and left him for dead in the ditch. It was a brutal attack. The man had virtually no chance of surviving.
But then along came a priest. Surely help had arrived! A hero to save the day! The law made it clear that it was his duty to stop and help someone in need. But instead, when the priest saw this man lying there, naked and beaten up, bleeding and unconscious, he hurried by on the other side of the road. He didn’t even get close enough to see if the man was still alive. Whatever this was, he wasn’t going to get involved in it!
And then, a little later in the day, a Levite made his way along this same stretch of highway. Levites were assistants to the priests in the Temple. He was a little more curious than the priest; he actually walked over and took a good look at the man lying in the ditch. He must have realized that the man was still alive, but he also chose to walk away without offering any help. Maybe he was afraid the bandits would come back and attack him, too. I don’t know. But he hurried off, just like the priest had done.
By this time, the people listening to Jesus tell the story must have been trying to guess who the hero was going to be. It would seem like the next most logical person to come along the road would be an average Jew, since the priest and the Levite had both failed to do anything to help the man. But they couldn’t have been more wrong in their assumption. Because the next man to come along was a Samaritan!
Samaritans and Jews had been enemies for about 450 years. They hated each other! Jews considered Samaritans to be the lowest of the low, even lower than slaves. In Jewish synagogue services, Samaritans were publicly cursed. But here was a Samaritan stopping to give help to a Jew. He felt compassion for his enemy. And he stopped to help him. He took care of the man’s wounds, gave him a ride to the next inn, and made arrangements for his future care, to be paid for out of his own pocket.
Jesus asked, “Who was a neighbor to the man in the ditch?” The only answer was, “The Samaritan.” And how it must have pained the expert in the law to admit that. To admit that a hated enemy was the one who was a neighbor, someone who showed compassion and kindness to his enemy.
When you hear the story of the good Samaritan, which character do you identify with? Do you imagine yourself to be the priest or the Levite, who passed by on the other side of the road, not wanting to get involved, afraid to take the risk, unwilling to be inconvenienced? Or maybe you picture yourself as the Samaritan, very willing to get involved and to help anyone in need, even your enemy, even at personal cost to you, because you see everyone as a neighbor.
Well, it’s kind of easy to imagine yourself as the Samaritan, isn’t it? It makes you feel good. You can kind of pat yourself on the back. And you get to feel superior to the priest and the Levite, and especially to the man in the ditch. Here is your enemy, the man who belongs to the people you have hated all your life, and you gave him help, he depended on you for his survival. You have something now to hold over his head. You can feel proud about it, maybe even gloat a little. It would only be human nature.
But I want you to imagine for just a moment that you’re the man in the ditch. You have been viciously attacked and left for dead. You can’t help yourself; you can barely even move. You can’t even call for help apparently. You have heard two travelers come close, and you have gotten up your hopes that help was on the way, but both times the men only slowed down enough to look at you, and then walked on by, not even offering you a cup of cold water. And then a third traveler came by. He slowed down and he stopped. He came over and saw that you were in bad shape. He took some provisions out of his pack and treated your wounds. Then he put you up on his own donkey and took you to an inn, to a nice soft bed. He made sure that your needs were taken care of and even paid the bill in advance. You should be grateful, right? But the man who helped you is a Samaritan! You have hated Samaritans all your life! You don’t talk to Samaritans. You don’t do business with Samaritans. You avoid all contact with Samaritans. You certainly don’t want a Samaritan touching you, helping you. Maybe you get angry about it. Maybe you’re offended. You might even rather be dead than accept help from a Samaritan.
Who would you rather die than accept help from? A Muslim? A member of Al-Qaeda? A person of another race? A person of another political party? A drug addict? A rich person? A poor person? An undocumented immigrant? When Clarence Jordan wrote his Cotton Patch Version of Luke in the 1960s, the Samaritan was a black man and the man in the ditch was a white man. Who would the Samaritan be for you?
J. Ellsworth Kalas is a United Methodist pastor. One day, when he was serving a church in Cleveland, Ohio, he was in a hurry to get to a lunch appointment with a church member. He had forgotten that he needed gas in his car until he started across town, and he was hoping that he had enough to make it to the restaurant. But his car ran out of gas, just when he was in one of the worst parts of town.
He got of his car and noticed two men across the street standing in front of one of the girlie shows that were in the area. The men hurried over to where he was standing to see if they could be of any help. Kalas explained that he had run out of gas. One of the men offered to siphon some gas out of his car into Kalas’s tank, enough to get him to the next gas station. He went to get a container and a hose, and then started to siphon the gas. Kalas struck up a conversation with the other man.
The man told Kalas that the two of them worked for the guy who ran the girlie shows. “He buys a building and we fix it up for him and then we run it,” he said. “He gets a few pretty girls, you know, who put on about three shows a night. They take off all their clothes and dance around naked, while we shine colored lights on them. It’s a pretty good business. Lots of men come in.”
When the gas was poured into Kalas’s tank, he tried to pay the two men for their help. “Not on your life,” they said. “We were just going for a late breakfast and had time on our hands.” So Kalas offered to buy them breakfast. But by this time, they were already walking away. “We wouldn’t think of it,” one said. “This is just the sort of thing one fellow ought to do for another.”
As Kalas drove away, he thought about how much the two men had done for him and how cheerful they had been about doing it. And he thought about the kind of work they did for a living. And he thought to himself, “How come the person who stopped to help me wasn’t someone with a bumper sticker that reads, ‘Honk if you love Jesus’? Or maybe one of my friends who was driving downtown for a meeting of the United Way? Why did my good Samaritan have to be two fellows who run a girlie show?”
The story that Jesus told about the Samaritan who stopped to help the Jewish man in the ditch teaches us that we are all neighbors to each other. Maybe it would make us feel better to be the one who offers help to our enemy than to be the one who receives help from our enemy. But the truth is, both are neighbors to each other. And we need to allow the walls that stand between us to fall down. What if we really considered every other human being our neighbor? What would happen if we acted neighborly towards every person we meet? What would happen if we allowed others to be neighborly to us?
Sometimes we just have to accept the fact that we might be saved by the enemy. And be grateful.
