Between Stranger and Neighbor
Luke 10:25-37
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
March 9, 2025
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7Uo7xxqDE8
This Bible story starts with the question of eternal life and moves very quickly to a street mugging. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says “The great gospel questions are worked out amidst the concreteness of brutality and nowhere else, brutality we work on each other, brutality we observe, but in which we are, by our humanity, implicated.”[1]
If he is right, about the great gospel questions being worked out in the midst of brutality, then theologians must be having a heyday right now.
This is such a familiar story. We think we know what it says already. And if you think that it says love your neighbor, spoiler alert – you’re right.
Maybe we can start by trying to put ourselves in the place of Jesus first listeners. How might they have heard it?
They would have been familiar with the Jericho road, particularly that dangerous stretch of 17 miles between Jerusalem and Jericho. In that 17 miles, the road drops 3,600 feet. It is a steep, winding road. It was one long day’s journey to travel this road between Jerusalem and Jericho. You set out early to be sure you were off the road before nightfall, and even in daylight you were on your guard because it was well known for bandits. It was 17 miles of watchfulness, 17 miles of potential violence.
When Jesus first told the story, his listeners would likely have identified with the fear of traveling there, they would remember being vigilant, prepared to defend themselves on that road. They would identify with the man who got mugged and beaten and left on the side of the road. The way that I usually hear this story read today, contemporary listeners pretty quickly identify with the Samaritan. We put ourselves into the story as the hero, not the victim.
But the 17-mile road doesn’t have to be an actual highway. It might be a long stretch of suffering, a winding path of oppression or violence or despair. We might find ourselves on the side of that road, with our life upended needing care and safety. I wonder how we might read the story then.
If Jesus’ first listeners have identified with the person who is bruised and bloody in the ditch, then, as the story unfolds, they are most invested in who will help. Maybe they think they know the answer already.
The first one to come on the scene is a priest. He keeps walking. The second one is a Levite. He also keeps on going.
I have to pause here, because again with a familiar story, we think we know what it says. We Christians have tried to make excuses for the priest and the Levite. We have said that they had religious duties and were forbidden from coming into contact with corpses and as the man was half-dead, he might become a corpse at any minute. But that is not in the story that Jesus tells. And it isn’t true. First, the priest is on his way home. He is going away from the Temple. He does not need to be concerned about ritual purity keeping him from his priestly duties because he has already fulfilled them. And secondly, the rule about corpses doesn’t apply to Levites.[2] So, if that understanding has been planted in your mind, try not to let it continue to influence you.
Jesus’ first listeners would have known three standard categories of Jewish people. There were 1) priests descended from Aaron (the brother of Moses), 2) Levites (descended from Levi, who was the third son of Jacob and Leah) and 3) Israelites (descended from one of Jacob’s other sons). [3] Three categories – Priest, Levite, Israelite.
They would have expected the priest and then the Levite to help the wounded man because it is the right thing to do. But as first the priest and then the Levite walk on by, Jesus’ listeners are appalled, but they think they know where the story is headed. They anticipate that it is going to be the ordinary Israelite who comes to the rescue. Jesus is putting the clergy in their place. Oh good, we’re going to like this story.
But they are wrong. The person who stops to help is not an Israelite. The person who sticks around for several hours to provide tangible, life-saving care, is the enemy. It is a Samaritan, one of them who doesn’t know the correct theology and worships in the wrong place. It is someone they love to despise.
If you have been able to imagine yourself beaten and bloody, half-dead, desperately needing safety and care, imagine now that the only person who offers kindness is someone you identify as enemy. I don’t know who that might be for you. For some of us, maybe it is evangelical Christians. That’s an apt comparison because mainline Protestants and evangelicals and similar to Jews and Samaritans, part of the same religious tradition but at continuous odds with each other. Maybe your perceived enemy just now is a Russian or a member of Hamas or an Israeli soldier. Maybe the one you struggle not to hate has aligned themselves with a certain political party. Whoever that is, imagine them being the one who helps, who goes out of their way to pick you up and get you to safety when your own people have crossed the road to avoid you.
That’s the gut punch of the story. Your neighbor may act like a stranger and the one you thought was an enemy may turn out to be the true neighbor.
The lawyer who started all of this wanted to know “who is my neighbor?” Who am I required to love, Jesus. When the final score is tallied, who am I going to get points for?”
Jesus never answers the lawyer’s actual question. Like any good rabbi, he eventually responds with his own question “Who demonstrated neighborliness to the man in need?” And the lawyer can’t bring himself to name the Samaritan. Instead he says, “the one who showed mercy.”
Who is my neighbor? Who is worthy to receive love? Jesus doesn’t address that. Instead, he describes the neighbor as the person who feels compassion and act on it. The neighbor is the one who can change his routine and identity on behalf of someone else. Someone who walks towards trouble, rather than crossing the road to avoid it.
Dr King referenced this story in his final speech before his assassination.[4] He said it was possible that the priest and the Levite were afraid that if they stopped to help the man, they would also be mugged. Perhaps the robbers were still nearby. Or maybe the wounded man on the ground was a faker, a decoy, to draw other travelers to the side of the road where they could be robbed. Dr. King said, “I imagine that the first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ In another sermon he said “we often ask, ‘what will happen to my job, my prestige, or my status if I take a stand on this issue? Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or will I be jailed?’[5]
But then, Dr King said, “the Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
The Samaritan is moved with compassion, maybe because he knows what it is like to be seen as a dangerous enemy, the one that others avoid, the one who is wounded and desperately vulnerable. Maybe he has been there, and so, he wonders, ‘If I don’t stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’ That’s the kind of question Dr. King would ask, the question he would prompt others to ask and answer.
If I do stop to help, what might happen to me?
If I don’t stop to help, what might happen to the wounded one?
It makes me think about one more question: If I don’t stop to help, what have I become?
The temptation many of us are facing now is to be less compassionate, to suppress our desire to be a good neighbor because the cost is too great. The powers that be are overwhelming our capacity to comprehend and adjust and respond. It may be safer and easier to cross to the other side of the road, to stay behind closed doors, to give up on adulting because we are dismayed and distracted, intimidated, demoralized, overwhelmed and exhausted.
But if we stop caring, if we can’t be bothered to help, then what will we become? And what will become of our world?
We are all on the Jericho road together, every one of us vulnerable. We need each other, stranger, neighbor, enemy, friend. We need mercy and we also have a need to be merciful. “Neither of us can be really human, really alive, without the other; and every time we pass someone by and leave them to their own misery, we both suffer for it.”[6] As Emma Lazarus said, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
This week, one of you shared some thoughts from an internet philosopher named Mike Brock. Brock describes the ways that we make moral choices, often quietly, on the spur of the moment, without great fanfare or heroics, like the Samaritan who quickly chose not to mind his own business and keep walking, but to put aside his own plans and help. Brock says these kinds of actions “simply require the decision to remain morally awake when everything around you encourages sleep. To maintain your full humanity when systems push you toward becoming a fraction of yourself.”
He continues “Every minute of every day, you have opportunities to practice standing firm. Each small choice builds the moral muscle memory you'll need for bigger challenges ahead. Each moment you choose courage over comfort, clarity over confusion, community over isolation—you're not just preserving your own humanity. You’re keeping something precious alive in our collective existence.”[7] In the concreteness of brutality, we work out the gospel.
“Who acted as neighbor?” Jesus asked.
“The one who showed mercy” the lawyer said.
May we go and do likewise. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, “A Zinger That Changes Everything” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 7.
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, Ben Witheringtom III, The Gospel of Luke New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 292
[3] Levine and Witherington, p. 293.
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/02/us/king-mlk-last-sermon-annotated.html
[5] Dr. MLK, “On Being a Good Neighbor” In the Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012)
[6] Frederick Buechner “The Miracles at Hand” in The Magnificent Defeat, ((San Francisco : Harper & Row, 1985) p 143.
[7] https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-manifesto-of-the-cognitive-revolution?r=3o1n21&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false