The Good Samaritan has come for you.

It would be nice to ignore parables.  If you’re the kind of person who dismisses stories because that’s for little kids or for people who aren’t educated, then you’d miss out on all the richness that Jesus’s parables have to offer and these stories are for you, too, if you can manage to humble yourself enough to learn. 

Ched Myers writes that many Christians ignore parables in favor of later theological developments about Jesus’s teaching, and he even names names—

evangelicals like to focus on the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross,

Catholics and Orthodox Christians focus on the Church and its Magisterium,

and mainline Protestants (that’s us!) tend to focus on the things Paul wrote and filter that through the lens of the Enlightenment.[1] 

So we might be the ones asking Jesus questions like the expert in the law in the Gospel story—how do I inherit eternal life? 

Ched Myers writes (page 103), “…this changes the issue from theological to economic, since the [word the expert uses means] material inheritance.  This reflects a conceit typical of the elite, who presume salvation to be like the intergenerational transfer of wealth they enjoy.”[2] 

Like anything else that comes as easily as being born and dying and living off someone else’s riches: that’s eternal life, right?  And Jesus doesn’t say this law expert is wrong for thinking this, since he answers correctly about the law: love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. 

Sure, Jesus says: do this and you will live.  This could have been a very short and uninteresting story. 

But Jesus is on a mission to get us to see the world differently.  So when the law expert tries to ask “well, WHO is the neighbor I HAFTA love?” Jesus gives an answer that this law expert might struggle to understand.  Because this parable of Jesus would sound very different to peasants, to people with little economic power or little political power. 

A theologian named Douglas Oakman wrote a book called Jesus and the Peasants to illustrate how Jesus’s teachings and his parables would have sounded to poor people living in Palestine at the same time as Jesus.  Oakman described Jesus as “a careful observer of agrarian life” and “rural artisan working often within typical peasant contexts.”  Remember Jesus grew up in a rural village, watching how people live and work, for many years of adulthood before beginning this preaching and healing ministry. 

Could it be that God pays attention to this stuff about ordinary human daily life?  Hmm. 

We’re used to interpreting this so-called Good Samaritan parable as a morality teaching about how we’re supposed to look out for people in distress.  In our day we turn this into a guilt-inducing story about giving money to people who are begging. 

But what did this story mean to the people originally listening to it?  How would a peasant have heard this parable? 

Douglas Oakman, summarized here by Ched Myers, “identifies several aspects…that challenge a simple moralizing reading of this parable.”  So here’s what he notices:

“As an opponent of Roman occupation, and of domination by the Judean elite, Jesus would likely have shared peasant sympathies with the social banditry portrayed in the parable (if not with its violence) as a form of popular economic resistance. …” (and more examples from page 104)

Ched Myers writes:

“This and the Samaritan’s commitment to make up for any additional expenses symbolize an almost unimaginable act of sharing—all on behalf of a stranger in need.  Like the feeding of the five thousand, this scene [of the parable] takes place in a marginal space, the desert between Jerusalem and Jericho; it, too, shows Sabbath Economics through a different kind of radical hospitality in the wilderness.  The village ethos of mutual aid shown by sharing bread and fish here extends well beyond ethnicity or kinship to an enemy helping an enemy.”[3]

If we try to identify ourselves with the Good Samaritan, we miss Jesus’s message about who is our neighbor.  This has to do with vulnerability, and it’s terribly uncomfortable. 

Last week, the Gospel lesson was about Jesus sending out disciples to do the work of mission not out of the overflow of one’s generosity or the demonstration of one’s strength but doing mission from the site of your own poverty—take no bag, no purse, no sandals!  And doing the work of mission from your own vulnerability, bringing nothing to fix someone else’s situation nor tell them what to do but bringing only God’s kin-dom of healing and looking for someone bold enough to receive it by extending hospitality. 

God’s kin-dom is about turning the tables of power, becoming vulnerable because that’s the way God is showing up in Jesus Christ, born as a helpless human infant. 

The Good Samaritan is not a story to remind you that you should be helping people so you can do good things and go to heaven.  When you want to know “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus is answering: who pulled your car out of the ditch?  Who paid the remainder of the bill you couldn’t cover?  Who gave you a place to stay when you had nowhere to go?  Who saved YOUR life? 

YOU are the one lying half-dead in the road, watching your friends and your social safety net pass by without even acknowledging you.  And here comes your enemy—might they be the one to save your life?  That’s your neighbor. 

Or would you rather die than be saved by your enemy?  Consider that very carefully because that’s where you’re getting close to losing your humanity.  Would you rather die than let your enemy save your life? 

This is the kind of healing that Jesus brings: not just to bandage the wounds and cover over the brokenness of humanity, but to heal our brokenness from the inside, to remind us that vulnerability is the strength of God.  Jesus came to change the entire way we see the world. 

The neighbor is the one who shows mercy because they already understood how merciful God has already been to them in the first place.  Who has shown mercy to you?  What does that look like?  This is what eternal life looks like. 

Amen. 

Pastor Cheryl

[1] Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025, page 103.

[2] Ibid 103.

[3] Ibid 105.