Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: July 13, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Amos 7:7-17 | Psalm 82 | Colossians 1:1-14 | Luke 10:25-37

The parable of the Good Samaritan is probably one of the most well-known of Jesus’ parables. Even those who have never stepped foot inside of a church can likely tell you the gist of it. There are hospitals, outreach centers, and nursing homes throughout the world that bear the name “Good Samaritan.” In our country, we even have a law named after it that provides legal protection for those who stop to help someone who’s in need. It’s a familiar story that has found its way into our cultural consciousness – be a good neighbor, lend a helping hand, tend to the needs of those you meet along the way. And yet, as a society, we seem to still be asking the lawyer’s question that prompted the parable in the first place. Where does the boundary of neighborliness begin and end? To whom exactly should we offer a helping hand? Whose needs am I encouraged or obligated to tend as I go about my business?

For those of us who’ve read the parable, who’ve listened to preachers and teachers interpret its moral and meaning, we might find these questions exasperating. In our present moment, as we begin to navigate the impact of the latest budget bill to get signed into law, we might find ourselves pointing to parables like this one to fuel our convictions and illustrate our values. We know that the lawyer’s question about who exactly was to be counted as his neighbor was the wrong question. We hear Jesus’ parable as a summons to be like the Good Samaritan, to be a nice person, to show mercy and compassion, to be more concerned with being a neighbor than with defining who exactly is our neighbor. We hear “go and do likewise” as both a rallying cry to action and a mantra to focus our efforts and energy.

And our embrace of the parable and its meaning as rallying cry is not without precedent. Centuries of Christian interpretation have led to the same convictions, espoused a similar moral: being a kind, compassionate, and merciful neighbor is a tangible goal for what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. And this interpretation compels us to enter this story again and again through the character of the Good Samaritan, to see ourselves in his shoes – if not in the reality of our lived lives, then in the model to which we ought to aspire. But I wonder if this is really all there is to Jesus’ parable. As good and worthy as this interpretation may be, I wonder how Jesus’ or Luke’s original audience might have heard it and understood it. Would they agree with our reading and understanding of it?

As with most of the parables we find in the gospels, there is an intended “shock factor” to this story that is often lost on us Christians in the 21st century. We are far, far removed from first-century Palestine; far removed from the cultural, religious, and political world that Jesus’ Jewish community inhabited. And so, we would do well to dig a little beneath the surface of the story and the parable. Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine suggests that Christians often miss the shock factor of the story because we don’t know that when a story names a Priest and a Levite, the next personality expected to be named is “an Israelite.” Instead, Jesus mentions a Samaritan. In Jesus’ contemporary moment, the Samaritans and Jews were entrenched enemies. They disagreed about everything – where and how to worship God, how best to interpret Scripture. They practiced their faith in different ways, prayed in different temples. The animosity was so great between them that they avoided social contact with one another. For Jesus to name a Samaritan in the story at all was a scandal, and his original audience would have been loath to enter the story through this character. For this reason, Amy-Jill Levine cautions us against identifying too readily with the “Good Samaritan.” Instead, she suggests that the proper entry into this narrative is through the character lying in the ditch and left for dead.[i]

I wonder how this might change your perspective as you listen again to the story.

Imagine that you’re walking along the road. As you follow the path around a corner, suddenly a group of people are standing in front of you, demanding you hand over all of your valuables. Through force and violence, they take what they want and leave you lying on the ground. Unable to get up, you hope with all your being for someone to come by and help. Perhaps you see several people pass by and you wonder why they don’t stop. Then, someone approaches, tends to your wounds and carries you to safety. The person who stopped? They aren’t just anybody, they are the enemy: they are the MAGA Republican, the White Supremacist, the racist cop, the anti-LGBTQ activist, the member of Westboro Baptist Church… They are the very person you fear and despise, the last person on earth you would deem “good,” the last person on earth from whom you would ask a favor.

In telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus wasn’t just offering an “example to follow” story. He was challenging his listeners to confront their entrenched worldviews that led them to inhabit bitter animosity. He was challenging his listeners to let go of their prejudices, to see “the other” as more than party-line caricatures. He was insisting that the capacity to be a neighbor is as much about our capacity to receive neighborly care as it is to be compassionate and merciful. And so, he invites us to occupy not the space of the priest, Levite, or Samaritan, but that of the one who is beaten and broken, the desperate stranger dependent on the helping hand that binds our wounds. Why? Because, as commentator Debie Thomas helpfully suggests,

… all tribalisms fall away on the broken road.  All divisions of "us" and "them" disappear of necessity. When you're lying bloody in a ditch, what matters is not whose help you'd prefer, whose way of practicing Christianity you like best, whose politics you agree with. What matters is whether or not anyone will stop to show you mercy before you die.[ii]

When we enter the parable of the Good Samaritan from the place of the person beaten and robbed, we discover that perhaps we have discarded the lawyer’s question too quickly. Maybe we do, in fact, need to ask it – as Debie Thomas goes on to explain: “Who is my neighbor?” he asked Jesus. “‘Your neighbor is the one who scandalizes you with compassion,’ Jesus answered. ‘Your neighbor is the one who upends all your entrenched categories and shocks you with a fresh face of God. Your neighbor is the one who mercifully steps over the ancient, bloodied line separating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ and teaches you the real meaning of ‘Good.’”

In our present moment, a moment laden with narratives that sow division and hatred, a moment in which our social, religious, and political discourses are shouted into echo chambers and entrench us in bitter animosity – in this moment, let us rise above the lines that separate us and learn to inhabit this world with compassion and mercy. Let us pray in this moment to the God whose love demands our all that our own wounds might be revealed and that God would give us the grace to know our neighbor tending us with foreign hands.[iii] Amen.

[i] Elizabeth Palmer, “Knowing and Preaching the Jewish Jesus.” Interview with Amy-Jill Levine and published in The Christian Century, March 2019. Online. Accessed July 8, 2025.

[ii] Debi Thomas, “Go and Do Likewise.” July 2016. Online. Accessed July 9, 2025. Journeywithjesus.net

[iii] Stephen Shakespeare, “Year C Collect for Proper 10,” in Prayers for an Inclusive Church. Church Publishing, 2009. 100.