23/06/2026
The Good Samaritan parable is so familiar we've lost how offensive it was.
The lawyer who asked the question was Jewish. The audience was Jewish. The victim was Jewish.
And in first-century Israel, Samaritans were not just different, they were despised. Centuries of ethnic hatred. Religious division. The kind of mutual contempt that gets passed down in families.
When Jesus said "a Samaritan came where the man was", the crowd would have braced themselves for the villain.
Instead, he was the only one who stopped.
The priest passed by on the other side. The Levite did too. The religious insiders, the people with the right credentials, they crossed the street.
The outsider, the wrong-religion, wrong-ethnicity, wrong-everything Samaritan, he knelt in the dirt and used his own supplies on a man who, in any other context, would have crossed the street to avoid him.
Jesus then asked: "Which of these three was a neighbor?"
The lawyer couldn't even say "the Samaritan." He said "the one who showed mercy."
Who is your Samaritan, the person or group you'd be most surprised to receive help from? And who are you the Samaritan to?
