This is a story and a teaching about the quiet habit of drawing a line around the people we owe something to. Most of us have a circle in our heads, family first, then our own town, then people who look and talk and believe the way we do, and somewhere out past all of that there are folks we would help if it were easy and walk past if it were not. Very few people would say that out loud, and almost everyone carries a version of it.
One day a man who had studied the law of God his whole life stood up in front of Jesus and asked exactly where that line sat. Jesus answered him with a short story, and he built that story so the hero would be the one man his listeners had been taught since childhood to hate.
So let us stand in that crowd and listen to the whole thing the way they heard it, from the first question to the last word.
The question that started it
A lawyer stood up. In that world a lawyer was not a courtroom man. He was a scholar of the law of Moses, a religious expert, one of the most respected men in any room he walked into. He came to test Jesus.
He asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus turned it back on him. You know the law, so what is written in it?
The man answered well. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus told him he had answered right, and that if he did that, he would live.
Then the man asked one more question.
But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?Luke 10:29
He wanted a boundary. He wanted to know which people the command covered and which people he was free to walk past.
Jesus told him a story instead.
The road down to Jericho
A man was walking the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho. It was a real road, about seventeen miles of it. It dropped through bare rock country with blind turns and caves along the way. Travelers were robbed on it often enough that everybody listening knew the risk.
Robbers jumped him. They beat him, stripped his clothes off him, and left him lying in the dirt half dead.
Losing his clothes mattered more than it sounds. In that time your clothing announced your town, your people, and your standing before you ever opened your mouth. He was stripped and he could not speak, so nobody coming along that road could tell what kind of man he was. He was a bleeding body in the dust.
The first man to come down the road was a priest. A priest was one of the men who served God at the temple in Jerusalem, offering the sacrifices for the whole nation, about as respected as a man could be.
He saw the body. He crossed to the far side of the road and kept walking.
The second man to come down the road was a Levite. Levites came from the tribe set apart to work at the temple as well, singers and guards and assistants to the priests. He came over closer, looked at the dying man, then he crossed to the other side too, and he moved on.
The people listening knew this shape of story. Two men have failed, so the third man is the hero, and the third man is going to be an ordinary decent Israelite like them, one of their own doing it right.
The third man on the road
The third man down the road was a Samaritan.
Samaritans lived just north, in the hill country between Galilee and Judea. They and the Jewish people shared ancestors and shared part of the same scriptures, and they had split from each other centuries before, and the hatred between them was hot and daily. Samaritans worshiped on Mount Gerizim and said that was the mountain God chose. Jewish people worshiped at the temple in Jerusalem and said that was the one. Each side counted the other as unclean.
Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.John 4:9
Two of Jesus’s own students were brothers named James and John. They once passed through a Samaritan village that would not take them in. They asked their teacher for permission to call fire down out of the sky and burn the town.
And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?Luke 9:52-54
When men wanted to insult Jesus with the worst word they had, they called him a Samaritan.
That is the man Jesus put on the road.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.Luke 10:33
He got down off his animal and knelt in the dirt. He poured oil and wine into the open wounds, which is what people used to clean and soothe a cut. He tore cloth and bound them up. He lifted the man onto his own animal and walked beside him the rest of the way. He brought him to an inn and stayed the night looking after him. In the morning he handed the innkeeper two silver coins. That was about two days of a working man’s pay. He told the innkeeper to care for the man, and that whatever more it cost, he would pay it himself when he came back through.
The question, turned around
Then Jesus looked at the lawyer who had asked him the question, and he asked one back.
Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.Luke 10:36-37
The lawyer did not say the word Samaritan. He said, the one who showed him mercy.
And Jesus told him to go and do the same.
What Jesus did to the question
The lawyer had asked who counts as my neighbor. That question has a group inside it, a list of people you are responsible for, and a place where the list runs out. Jesus asked him which of the three men on the road became a neighbor to the man in the ditch. That question has no list in it at all. Being a neighbor is not something you are born into. It is something you do, on a particular afternoon, on a particular road, for whoever is lying in front of you.
Jesus could have made the hero an ordinary Israelite and still taught kindness, and everyone would have gone home comfortable. He made the hero the man they despised, and then told a religious expert to go live like him.
The priest and the Levite had real duties waiting for them in Jerusalem, and a bloody body on the roadside was a complication with a cost attached. Deciding in advance who is worth stopping for is not excusable, but it is common. That is the human part of us. It is not the part where the Holy Spirit lives.
Two roads home
Maybe you have been the man in the dirt. You know what it is to be down and to watch the respectable people, the church people, glance over and keep walking. If that has been you, then hear the rest of it. Help was still coming, and it arrived wearing the face of the person you had been warned about. Mercy reaches people from directions nobody expects, and it is God’s mercy either way.
And maybe you are standing at the top of the road with your own circle already drawn. The person outside your line may be closer to the heart of God than the people inside it. Your job was never to work out whether they qualify. Your job is to go and do likewise.
There is no fence around the word neighbor. Jesus took the holiest men his listeners could picture, and the most hated man they could picture, and he handed the mercy to the one they hated. He did it on purpose. Nobody could ask him who counts and get the answer they were hoping for.
If you want to keep walking through the old stories this way, slow and plain, with the hard parts left in, come find us online. There is room at this table for you, whichever side of the road you are on.