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Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – July 13, 2025
Luke 10:25-37
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Today we hear one of Jesus’ best-known parables, commonly called the parable of the Good Samaritan. An expert in Jewish law asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus responded with this parable. You know how the story goes. A man is stripped and beaten and robbed, left half-dead on the road. A priest sees this man in need and walks right past him, crossing the street to avoid him. Then a Levite, a worker in the temple, does the very same thing, passing him by. Then a Samaritan sees him and stops. This Samaritan bandages his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. The Samaritan then brings the half-dead man to an inn where he can continue to receive care, where he can be nursed back to life. The Samaritan generously promises to cover any and all debts he incurs.
The shock of the parable is that the one who acted most neighborly was not the priest, and not the temple worker, but the Samaritan. You see, to a Jewish lawyer, there was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan. Samaritans were despised by the Jews. The Samaritans were seen as wayward Jews who had abandoned the true Jewish faith. The Samaritans were former Jews who had intermarried with people of other cultures and adopted many of their religious practices, even while retaining some aspects of Judaism. They were seen as traitors and heretics. They were seen as unclean. In some ways they were worse than Gentiles, because they had once known and then had abandoned the true God of Israel. And yet, here Jesus makes a Samaritan the hero of the story, the one who best embodied what it meant to be a neighbor. He might be a Samaritan, but he responded to the human need in front of him without regard to religious or ethnic or political or social differences.
This is a parable we need to hear. We need to be reminded that to be a godly neighbor is to respond to human needs regardless of human differences. This is not an abstract idea or principle. It is not a general policy prescription for others to fulfill. It is an individual obligation for those who wish to be faithful to God’s law. It is a call to personally attend to the needs of those whom God puts in our path, those who are close at hand.
There is some discernment involved in this. We should use wisdom in how we go about it. There are plenty of scriptures which give this very advice. But, generally speaking, this is what it looks like to love our neighbors as ourselves: responding to human needs regardless of human differences.
We saw this principle being lived out recently in the response to the devastating and deadly flooding in Texas. When a few people tried to exploit the situation to try to score a few cheap political points, the Texans on the ground weren’t having any of it.
I saw a video clip of an African American woman responding to these political jabs by posting a video on social media. While some of it is not what I would call pulpit language, I’d like to share her comments unedited. She said : “I just wanted to say as a proud Texan…those who are bringing up who people voted for…this is not about politics. One thing about a Texan, we’re gonna’ pick up and we’re gonna’ help our neighbors. We don’t give a damn who they voted for in this time of need. What needs to be done is we need to find these babies. That’s what we are worried about. No politics, no nothing…We all pull our boots up and help each other. We don’t give a damn – blue, yellow, orange, white, brown, we all are gonna’ help each other.”
This is the spirit of the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is what it looks like to respond to human needs regardless of human differences. And in this time of such deep polarization, in a culture which is so deeply divided by politics and social class and ethnicity and religion, this is something we need to be reminded of again and again.
But as important as this is, there is an even deeper issue involved in Jesus’ conversation with this scholar of Biblical law. Note that the first question this lawyer had for Jesus was how he could inherit eternal life. This was a question about salvation. And when Jesus gave him a reference to the law, pointing him to the passage in Deuteronomy about loving God and loving neighbor, St. Luke tells us his next question came because he was trying to justify himself. That is, he was trying to make himself right with God. He was looking for assurance of salvation, assurance which, apparently, the law wasn’t giving him!
This is where the parable becomes more than a simple lesson in morality and becomes a parable about salvation. Given this crucially important bit of context, we can start to read the parable in such a way that it isn’t just Jesus giving this guy more law, more advice on how to behave. Looking at what exactly prompted the story can help us to see this parable also as an allegory of the gospel. It isn’t just about what we do, but what Christ is doing for us!
The earliest interpreters of this parable saw it this way. The earliest interpreters of this parable, including such luminaries as St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, saw this not only as a moral example story, but as an allegory of the saving work of Jesus Christ, who is the true Good Samaritan, the true neighbor who saves.
The allegorical interpretation of this parable sees the half-dead man as representing humanity after the fall, beaten up by the devil, robbed of all hope and joy, abandoned and alienated. The priest and the temple worker represent the inability of the law and the temple sacrifices to deliver any saving help to the suffering sinner. Jesus is the Samaritan, the one who was despised and rejected by his fellow Jews. Jesus comes with oil and wine, symbols of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, to bind up our wounds. Jesus delivers us into the inn of his church, where we can continue to be cared for, where our healing process can continue, all at his expense, with him promising to pay our every last debt.
Do you see it now? Do you see how this parable is not only a story about being a moral person and a good neighbor? Do you see how Jesus is actually responding to the man’s initial questions about how to inherit eternal life? About how he can be made right with God? It isn’t ultimately about doing a good job of keeping the law, which would contradict the entire rest of the New Testament and completely negate everything Jesus did on the cross for us. The assurance of salvation this man is looking for is instead to be found in the unexpected savior standing right in front of him, in the outsider who has come to meet him in his need. It is instead to be found in the despised and rejected One who has come to him when he was half-dead and when all his training in the religious law offered him no help. It is to be found in the surprising rescuer who came to him with oil and wine, gave him shelter, and took his debt upon himself.
We do need to be reminded of the moral imperatives of the parable of the Good Samaritan. We do need to be reminded that God does indeed call each of us to respond to human needs regardless of human differences. But we will never be such a good neighbor that we can stake our salvation on it. We will always be like the religious lawyer, wondering if we have done enough to inherit eternal life, wondering if we have done enough to justify ourselves before God.
What we need even more than a moral lesson is the assurance of the gospel, and the allegorical reading of this parable gives us just that. When we were dead in our sin, our Lord Jesus came to us. When the religious law offered us no help, he did. He gave us the anointing oil of baptism and the wine of his supper to heal us, to save us. He delivered us into the inn of his church where we can continue to be brought back to life. He has promised to cover our debts, to make everything right when he returns.
The two layers of meaning in this parable go together. We have both the gift of the gospel and instruction for the Christian life. The example and the allegory are tightly woven together. No one saw this more clearly than Martin Luther, who wrote:
[In this parable] Christ…especially wants to show that he himself is and wants to be the neighbor who correctly fulfills the commandment and demonstrates his love to the poor, miserable consciences and hearts of all people, which were wounded and perishing before God. In this way he also gives the example that his Christians should do the same as he does, even though he is regarded as a Samaritan by all the world.
We inherit eternal life through Christ’s work, not ours. We are justified, made right with God, through his keeping of the commandment, not our own. Jesus is the Good Samaritan who has come to our aid. He has come to rescue us, binding up our wounds, bringing us healing and salvation and new life. He has brought us into the shelter of his inn, the church, where we can continue to be brought back to life. He has promised us that the cost, the debt of our sin is covered. It has been paid in full – not with gold or silver, but with his own precious blood.
Jesus is the good neighbor who has responded to our needs, no matter who we are.
Now let us go and do likewise.
Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church