THE BACKGROUND WE HAVE FORGOTTEN

THE BACKGROUND WE HAVE FORGOTTEN

The force of the Parable of the Good Samaritan cannot be fully appreciated unless it is heard against the background of our own age.

For we, too, live among roads crowded with invisible divisions.
Our roads are no longer merely between Jerusalem and Jericho.

They run through political parties and social classes.
They run through neighborhoods divided by wealth.
They run through races, nations, religions, and ideologies.
They run through digital worlds where strangers pass one another without ever truly meeting.

We have become experts at identifying tribes.

We know who belongs.
We know who disagrees.
We know who is inside the fence.
We know who stands outside it.

Yet the wounded still lie beside the road.

The homeless man beneath the overpass.
The refugee carrying the weight of exile.
The addict fighting a hidden battle.
The elderly forgotten in lonely rooms.
The child trapped in cycles of neglect.
The worker crushed beneath debts and anxieties.
The neighbor whose suffering remains unseen because everyone is in a hurry.

The road has changed.
The wounds have not.

We often hear the parable as a pleasant lesson about kindness. But Jesus was not offering a sentimental story. He was placing a mirror before a society fractured by religion, politics, economics, and historical grievances.

He does the same today.
For every generation creates its own Samaritans.

The people we distrust.
The people we dismiss.
The people we blame.
The people we avoid.
The people we assume could never teach us anything about God.

Then Christ turns the story upside down.
The one we expected to help passes by.

The one we expected to ignore the suffering stops.
The one we least expected becomes the neighbor.

And suddenly the question is no longer about them.
It is about us.

The parable exposes something deeper than prejudice. It reveals how easily systems, institutions, and ideologies can become more important than the human being lying wounded before our eyes.

The priest and Levite still walk among us.
Sometimes they wear religious robes.
Sometimes they wear business suits.
Sometimes they wear political colors.
Sometimes they look exactly like us.

They are found wherever duty becomes greater than compassion, wherever ideology becomes greater than mercy, and wherever people become obstacles instead of neighbors.

Yet the Samaritan still walks the road as well.

He appears wherever a person crosses a boundary to help another.
Where mercy interrupts convenience.
Where compassion refuses to ask whether the wounded deserve assistance.
Where love is practiced before it is explained.

The world teaches us to ask, "Which side are you on?"
The Kingdom asks, "Who needs your mercy?"

The world asks, "Who belongs to my group?"
The Kingdom asks, "To whom can you become a neighbor?"

This is why the parable remains dangerous.

It does not merely challenge individuals.
It challenges civilizations.

It challenges every age that has learned how to categorize people more quickly than it can love them.

And perhaps the road from Jerusalem to Jericho still stretches before us—not as a place on a map, but as the daily path of human life, where Christ continues to ask the same unsettling question:

When you encounter the wounded, will you pass by?
Or will mercy cross the road?

Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
May 29, 2026