Sermon for the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Year C (7-13-25)

Audience participation first thing this morning! Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the term “good Samaritan”. Now, raise your hand if you’ve heard that a Good Samaritan is, generally speaking, someone who goes out of their way to help someone else in need.

Great! That’s not what I’m preaching about today, so I’m glad to know most of you have heard that helping people in need is a good thing to do. Go and do likewise.

We’re going somewhere else this morning. Let’s start by recapping the beginning of today’s Gospel from Luke:

So this story seems fairly straightforward by this point, yes? We have someone posing what seems to be a reasonable clarifying question to Jesus: Who is my neighbor? And they expect to receive an answer from the renowned teacher. But instead of giving the lawyer an answer, Jesus launches into something that sounds like the set-up of a really corny joke: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho...” Perhaps a first-century, Palestinian version of “A man walks into a bar...” kind of thing.

No, instead of an answer Jesus offers a story. Instead of giving a clear directive, Jesus gives a parable.

There’s no denying that Jesus had a soft spot for parables. In fact, he used them so often that of the 24 or so parables that we see scattered among Matthew, Mark, and Luke eight of those same stories are repeated at least in two - if not all three - of those Gospels. And in our Bible when things are important they’re repeated. 

So, what was so important about this insistence on storytelling over answering? If Jesus really wanted to tell us some Good News, wouldn’t it have been better to just get to the point? 

Over the past few years my theological imagination has been piqued by New Testament scholar Dr Amy-Jill Levine. As a Jewish historian her writing consistently paints a vivid portrait of Jesus, his followers, and his adversaries in an authentic, first-century Jewish context. Which is great because - historically speaking -Jesus was a first-century Jew! She argues that when parables are heard through the ears of their original intended audience, these quirky stories should seldom make us feel content and comfortable.

Quoting a talk of hers she suggests that: “Parables are a genre well-known to Jews at the time. There’s an old line about religion that “religion was designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” And people back then knew that if someone told a parable, those stories were not banal statements of the obvious, and they were not children’s stories – although children can understand them. They were designed to do a bit of heart surgery. To do some personal excavation. They tell us what we already know, but simply don’t want to acknowledge. So when we hear a parable and think “isn’t that nice, or isn’t that sweet” we’re probably not listening very well, because parables are actually designed to indict.”

But surely in this line of thinking the parable of the Good Samaritan was designed to indict - to call to question - the original first-century hearers, right? Not us as twenty-first-century hearers... right? Lucky for us Jesus’ teaching tale still packs a punch for us all these years later. But if we already know that it’s the right thing – even an expectation of Christian ethics – to help those who need help, what’s the indictment here? Why is this parable worth digging into in any meaningful way? What's left to learn? What are we missing?

What we’re missing is some context about what makes the Samaritan a Good Samaritan. During the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans were categorically not fond of each other, to put it lightly. To Jesus’ Jewish hearers, the term Good Samaritan would have sounded like a potential oxymoron – think good murderer, or good fill in the blank with some group with an overwhelming negative stereotype.

Samaritans and Jews lived in relatively close quarters, generally avoided traveling through each other’s territory, and were embroiled in seemingly unquenchable hostility. You can likely easily think of two groups of people today – either here or abroad – that fit these characteristics. But the history at the heart of the lasting animosity between these two groups is a critical detail that is often overlooked by current-day hearers of this parable.

If we look back to Old Testament accounts (specifically around Second Kings) we see that the Jews and the Samaritans used to be - wait for it - the same group of people. Dun dun dunnn! The plot thickens! And what caused the split of this one religious/ethic group into two? Well, that would be a disagreement on how to carry out specific tenants of their faith: 1) specifically who could marry whom and 2) how and where worship should happen. They couldn’t see eye to eye on these and other issues, and so they split. Sound familiar? 

So here is now Jesus hundreds of years later telling a story to Jewish listeners about a man – who we can reasonably assume was Jewish – being attacked on the road. We can make this assumption because Luke’s text says “a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho”. And no matter what direction you’re traveling, you always go up to Jerusalem to participate in the temple ritual. And when you leave you go down from Jerusalem. That just how it worked.

This man is attacked, robbed, and left for dead on the road. Both a priest and a Levite (also a priestly type) pass right by this man who is in terrible need. Now, if this man is in fact a Jew these two people would be his people. But still he's left for dead. The a Samaritan stops. This Samaritan not only helps immediately, but he also ensures that the injured man is cared for in the long term by dropping him at an inn and telling the innkeeper “take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend”.

When the lawyer, who is the main recipient of this parable, is asked by Jesus, “which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” the lawyer can’t even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He only replies, “the one who showed him mercy”. Such longstanding animosity toward another group that he can barely conceive of - let alone voice the idea of - a Jew needing and receiving mercy from a Samaritan. Sound familiar? 

If parables are designed to indict us as Dr. Levine would have us believe, what then is the charge to us? If we place ourselves in the roles of each of the characters in the story, which one feels like the most uncomfortable fit? If we become the priest or Levite, passing by the man in need in spite of knowing better – that’s an easy lesson. We already know that. If we become the Samaritan, going out of our way to help someone in need – even someone who is different than us, or even from a group with which we don’t typically associate – that’s a bit closer. But it's still not much of an indictment.

But what about the man lying on the road? What might it mean to see humanity, mercy, help, and mutuality in someone like the Samaritan? Someone who might be labeled on the surface as “an enemy” but who has more in common with us than we’d like to admit. What is the parable, and more broadly, the Gospel drawing us out to admit?

Perhaps that seeing each other’s humanity before digging into the specifics is part-and-parcel to living like Jesus? Perhaps that being open to the mercy of those who we’ve been taught to believe want only to do us harm might break open some space between us for healing? 

My favorite thing about parables is that we get to decide what it means - day in and day out - as life shifts around. As the world continues to open up and we continue to bump into each other, Jesus left us with teachings that could stand up to high-mileage use. But what is clear from the parable of the Good Samaritan no matter how you slice it, is that love of God, love of neighbor, and radical mercy are integral to hearing, living, and proclaiming the Good News.

Jesus showed these with his life. Go and do likewise.

Amen.