The Impossible Story

Read Luke 10:25-37

The strangest thing about reading the parable of the Good Samaritan is that it seems normal. Obviously, we should love God and our neighbors. Only stingy, selfish scoundrels don’t show mercy to the needy. And we love underdog stories, where an unlikely hero saves the day. By now, we know that if someone tries to trip up Jesus, they are going to end up implicating themselves. The second strangest thing is that if we tell the parable as it was originally heard, we still get offended. As soon as someone asks us to show mercy to those who forced us to vaccinate our kids, or whose unvaccinated kids gave a deadly disease to our parents, we balk. It’s like the old saying, “You’ve stopped preaching and you’ve started meddling!” After studying 180 million Americans, Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos found that “a large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment.” That is, we’re increasingly choosing our neighbors based on whether they vote like we do. It’s a milder version of what separated Jews and Samaritans in Jesus’ day. When Jesus told the parable, his listeners expected to hear a priest, a Levite, and then an Israelite. So, they were shocked that a Samaritan was taking the place they deserved. Those people worshiped wrongly and lived badly. Contempt, not admiration, was the appropriate attitude. After telling the story, Jesus asks the lawyer a simple question: Who acted like a neighbor? It’s obviously the Samaritan, but the lawyer can’t admit it. Instead, he says, “The one who showed mercy to him.” It’s as if he wants to say, “If you told the story right, it would have been the priest. Samaritans don’t act like that. Your story is impossible.” Unless we think less of Jesus for telling this story, at least at first, we have missed the point. Then it gets worse, because Jesus tells the lawyer to be like the Samaritan. He’s saying, “Aspire to be as compassionate as the person you currently despise as your enemy.” No one wants their enemies honored or their own group shamed. But that’s what Jesus did. In the parable, the lawyer’s religious leaders failed in their duty, and an ordinary traveler from the group he hated did what’s honorable. People hated him for telling stories like this. If that sounds dramatic, consider that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated for insisting we love one another, he had “a public disapproval rating of nearly 75 percent.” Loving your enemies can get you killed. But if we can’t bring ourselves to be like this Samaritan, then we can’t be like Jesus, either. He did far more than the Samaritan. We weren’t half dead, but completely dead to God. We weren’t strangers, but enemies. We didn’t need another human to spend two days’ wages to put us up at an inn, but God to pay the debt for our sin. Yet Jesus still had compassion on us and his mercy led him to die for us.