Luke 10: 25-37 the Good Samaritan
Today’s Gospel passage has to be one of the most memorable in the Bible. Even people who know almost nothing about the Bible often know the story of “The Good Samaritan”. When Chad Varah was looking for a name for his telephone listening service to help people who were feeling suicidal, he settled on the name “Samaritans”. But of course, when Jesus first told the story a ‘Samaritan’ was something quite different. A Samaritan was the person you least expected to help – the sort of person a self-respecting Jew would cross the street to avoid, not a person to help or to expect to receive help from. Remember how in telling the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well, John’s gospel (4: 9) states: The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans). Jesus tells this story of the man beaten up on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and sets up a scenario where the Priest an