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 and the Levite – the ones you would think most ‘holy’ and most likely to help, pass by the victim, and the Samaritan, whom you would least expect to help, turns out to be the one who does the right thing.

At the end of the story, the Jewish lawyer to whom Jesus tells the story, is asked by Jesus ‘' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?".

The lawyer can’t bear to say the words “The Samaritan” and so answers "The one who showed him mercy."

‘He who must not be named’ turns out to be the good and righteous one.

So good and righteous is the Samaritan that all good and righteous people after that might earn the title “Good Samaritan”.

But if we really want to recapture the force of the story, we need to think about those whom we would least expect to help us – those (let’s be honest) we least like, or most suspect, or find hardest to live with. I’m guessing that that person might be different for each one of us, but it’s worth spending a moment thinking about it, and I’d like to do that now in 2s or 3s. You don’t have to say the name of the person who would be the Samaritan for you, but think about how you would feel if that person, the most unlikely person, came to help you in your hour of need.

And then how do you feel to hear Jesus say ‘this is your neighbour – the one who helps you and who loves you.. go and do likewise’. How do you feel about loving this most unlikely, most unlikable person?

…5 minutes pause…

Share thoughts about how hard it is to accept help from someone we dislike.

How hard it might be to offer help. How hard it is to love some people.

About now you might be feeling a bit beaten up yourself. I have asked you to imagine the person you most dislike, and then told you that Jesus tells us to love that person, to accept the love of that person, and to treat even the most dislikable person we can think of as a neighbour. Ouch!

Well, if you’re reeling from that blow, what you need is a Good Samaritan.

And here’s a picture of one

  

The painter of this icon has imagined Jesus as the Good Samaritan. It is Jesus who rescues, heals and restores the wounded man. It is Jesus who can help us when we find it hard to love others.

Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan is not just a story which tells us that we should be good neighbours, it reminds us that the grace of Jesus Christ can make us better able to serve others and to accept their service.

In this icon Jesus lifts the wounded person – that could be us – onto ‘his own animal’, which looks like a very strong horse to me – and leads us off down the road to the very welcoming-looking inn in the top right corner.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that the inn looks a lot like a church. If the Good Samaritan in each of our lives is Jesus, rescuing us from all that could make us a bad neighbour, then where else will he bring us but to the safety of the church? Here in the church we can rest and heal & be restored by the care of others, until we are fit once more to go out into the world.

In October 2013, Pope Francis said this:

“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. ... And you have to start from the ground up.”

We are here today to be healed, to be restored.

It might seem almost impossible to love all our neighbours, but the grace of Jesus Christ, shared with us through our brothers and sisters in Christ, can make us whole again.

I pray we will all feel the healing touch of God today, and be enabled to love others with the love Christ gives us, in the power of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.