I approach preaching on one of Jesus’ two most famous parables (both in Luke) with a bit of trepidation. The Good Samaritan is so familiar to us, so burned into the mind of Christendom, both west and east, that it is hard to imagine anything fresh to say about it. It’s tempting to simply recite the story, perhaps in contemporary paraphrase like Clarence Jordan’s Cottonpatch version, and let it stand for itself.
Yet perhaps it is helpful to prod a bit at our experience of Luke 10:25-37, just to try and shake loose any standard cultural appropriation of the story like the names of hospitals or “Good Samaritan” laws. In searching for art images of the parable, I appreciated the one by Bertram Poole that I post here. Unlike many paintings and images of the story, it includes the priest and Levite who have already passed by the man in distress. Those “good citizens” and whatever excuses they might have had for not helping are healthy reminders that even the best of us may fail to do as Jesus was teaching here.
The unlikeliness of the Samaritan as the helper in Jesus’ own milieu also deserves a second look and some pondering. I think we typically do some sort of mental conversion of the story that causes us to suppose Jesus is teaching us here to be kind to marginal or unsavory people. We come away from the text resolving to be more helpful to undocumented people or addicts or those of different ethnicity.
What we may miss or fail to dwell upon is that it is the marginal person who is the good man in the parable, the one who helps. Whatever it might imply about whom we might aid, Jesus’ pointed message is that establishment religiosity and “goodness” are less important in God’s eyes than simple human kindness. As Jesus tells the religious establishment elsewhere, “the tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of heaven before you do.” Though evangelicals may typically take that latter statement as a declaration about grace, it may tie to this parable’s demonstration that sometimes those who are “sinners” in the eyes of good church people may have a better grasp of what really pleases God than we do.
So I’m looking forward to taking another run at our Lord’s simple but rich story which challenges us in so many ways to drop our excuses and to “Go and do likewise.”