The Good Samaritan

A quick note to parents

Before you read together

This lesson digs down to the root of kindness: one of the best-known kindness stories in the world, a parable Jesus told about two thousand years ago. It is only a few sentences long, and it has never stopped being dangerous.

Here is why it startled the people who first heard it. A man asked a clever, self-protecting question: who counts as my neighbor? He was hoping to draw a small circle he could be done with. Instead of answering who was inside the circle, the story erased the circle. The hero turns out to be a Samaritan: a foreigner the listeners were raised to despise, and who was raised to despise them right back. That is the whole shock. Kindness, at its root, is not something you owe your own kind. It is what you do for the stranger in the ditch.

Here is a story worth keeping. Read it slowly.

The road down to Jericho

One day an expert in religious law asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus answered with this story.

There was a road, and everyone who used it was afraid of it. It ran roughly seventeen to twenty miles downhill from Jerusalem to Jericho, through bare red cliffs and blind curves and caves where robbers waited. Centuries later, a writer named Jerome said one steep climb on this road was called the place of blood, because robbers had shed so much blood there. You did not walk it alone if you could help it.

One man had to. He was somewhere on that lonely road when robbers attacked him. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and left him half dead beside the road.

Then someone came along. A priest came down the same way. He saw the man in the dust. There is no pretending he didn’t; the story says plainly that he saw him. And he crossed to the far side of the road and kept walking.

Then a Levite came, a man whose whole job was helping in the temple, a man everyone would have trusted. He came to the place, and he too looked at the wounded man. And he too crossed over and went on. Two men. Two long looks. Two backs, walking away.

And then came a Samaritan. Now, you have to understand what that word did to the people first hearing this. Samaritans and Jews had long disagreed about where to worship God. Luke’s Greek calls the wounded traveler simply “a man”; the NLT and many readers take him to be Jewish. If anyone had a reason to keep walking, to call it none of his business, it was this man. He was the enemy.

But when the Samaritan saw the man in the dust, something turned over inside him. The old word for it is compassion: a feeling so deep it is almost physical, a pity that grabs you low in the chest and will not let you walk on.

And here is the difference between him and the two men who passed: he did not just feel it. He got down in the dust.

What the story is really about

The question, turned upside down

The Samaritan went to the wounded man. He treated the man’s wounds with oil and wine and bandaged them. He set him on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him through the night. In the morning he paid the innkeeper two days’ wages and said: look after him, and whatever more it costs, I will pay you when I come back. The story never tells us his name.

The old English word kind is cousin to kin, family. That is the Samaritan in the dust: to be kind is to treat a stranger like your own blood. The root of kindness is mercy that crosses a line. And the deeper the line it crosses, the more it looks like the real thing.

Talk it over

Three questions, no wrong answers

1. The priest and the Levite both saw the wounded man; the story is careful to say so. Why do you think it is so much easier to look at someone in trouble and keep walking than to stop? When have you looked, and walked?
2. The hero is a Samaritan, the enemy, the one the listeners were raised to look down on. Why do you think the story made him the good one, instead of the priest? What is it trying to knock loose in us?
3. The Samaritan’s kindness cost him oil, wine, a ride on his own donkey, two days’ pay, a whole night, and a promise to pay more. Pick one person outside your circle this week. What would “go and do the same” actually cost you, and is it worth it?

Copywork

Copy the line below, or say it together at supper or bedtime. Words worth keeping.

“Yes, now go and do the same.”Luke 10:37

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Where the trail goes next

From the road to the real world

The story never tells us if the wounded man ever learned the name of the one who saved him. Jesus did not even give the Samaritan a name. That is the root of kindness in one small detail: it does not stop to be thanked, and it does not check whose side you are on. First you see the person in need. Then you kneel in the dust of the road.

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