Who Is The Good Samaritan? Series

Fifteenth Sunday in Course 2025

Many humans, maybe even most of us, call God the Supreme Being. That stimulates the imagination. But we can imagine Zeus, who doesn’t exist, as a supreme, or at least very, very big being. But the true God is not the Supreme Being. God is not A Being at all. God is Being. Pinch your skin. God created and creates every bit of you and every bit of me. God sustains us in existence. Everything that is has being because of God who is existence.

That reality leads us into St. Paul’s letter to the Christian church at Colossae; our second reading is from that epistle. Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God. You may remember from reading Genesis that God created man and woman in His own image and likeness. But Adam and Eve messed up that image by sinning. The Second Person of the Trinity became human in the womb of the virgin Mary, and therefore is the true image of God, because He is God. Everything was created in Christ Jesus, and for Christ Jesus. When we say that we offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice in Christ Jesus, we are echoing that eternal truth. We are made righteous by Him and in Him, and because He is the head of the Body, the Church, we can by His grace and our faith grow into images of Christ ourselves.

But we must live righteously. How do we do that? Moses has the simple form of God’s law for remaking us in God’s image. He says “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you.” Moses tells us it’s not way high or way low or all the way across the sea. It’s right here. Point to yourself. It’s already in you, a law written in your hearts and mine. This natural moral law is installed as part of our human operating system. Love God above all things, and my neighbor as myself. Start off by memorizing and keeping the Ten Commandments. Do it with the help of Christ’s grace.

Only then can we confidently, with the psalmist, confidently pray for the kindness of God to operate in our lives, and count on God to answer our prayers. Maybe the answer is not what we imagine we want, but God’s answer to our prayer will always, always be what we need.

With this in mind, let’s look at the dialogue and story St. Luke gives us in our Gospel reading. A Jew very learned in Torah stood up and asked a question. Luke says it was to “test” Jesus. Now the verb used for “test” is the same one Jesus uses in Luke 4 to speak of putting God “to the test.” So asking “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” might hide some contempt for Jesus and desire to trap Him. Jesus asks what Torah requires, and gets a good answer right from the Law written on our hearts: love God and love neighbor as self.

But the lawyer wants, it says, to “justify himself.” We know that nobody can justify himself, because none of us can offer an infinite satisfaction for our sins. But the question “who is my neighbor” is too important to brush off. Jesus responds with a story that might have come from the local news network. A Jew was going by himself from Jerusalem to Jericho. Back in the first century, that was a really stupid thing to do. People traveled that road in caravans with guards because robbers frequently took advantage of travelers. But he did it and wound up beaten almost to death and robbed of all valuables.

Both a priest and a Levite walked past him on the other side of the road. Most readers think it was because they had to avoid ritual impurity incurred by touching a dead man or blood, but there was then as now an exception given by the rabbis for someone saving a human life. So those two Temple employees were just avoiding an inconvenience. They were eager to get somewhere, I suppose.

Then comes a Samaritan traveler, who goes over and above any human responsibility to care for the mugged stranger. He was, in the Greek, splagchnizomai. Our translation says “moved with compassion,” but it’s closer to the feeling most of us had in our gut when we heard about the recent victims of Texas flooding. I know I was close to tears to read the stories of those families. So he tended the man’s wounds with oil and wine, an almost sacramental touch. He put him on his own ox or mule, maybe even leaving his own goods on the road, and took him to a wayside inn and even paid the price of his room and board and nursing. And promised to return and pay for anything needed to finish the healing.