Something Wonderful

Who is your neighbor? This is a critical question, asked and explained, in a beautiful fashion that has resonated across two millennia by Jesus Christ. The story of the Good Samaritan is a fantastic story, and like fantastic stories, it gets told over and over again. It has been told so many times and interpreted in so many ways that it has become a common part of speech. We think of it more like the line of the kindly old lady in Superman II when Superman prevents a kid from falling over the railing into Niagara Falls, when she understates things hilariously and says, “What a nice man.” It’s in the name of foundations, so it’s gone corporate. It’s been depicted in film, on TV, and stage. It’s just all over the place. It’s so ubiquitous that we hardly give it a thought anymore and I think we miss the real power of the point that Jesus was trying to make. Do we really know who the Samaritans were other than those old timy Jesusy people?

Who were the samaritans?

I’m glad you asked.

The story begins over 900 years before Jesus, when the Kingdom of Israel split in two after the reign of Solomon. The Northern Kingdom, with its capital in Samaria, broke off from the Southern Kingdom of Judah, where Jerusalem remained the religious heart. The north developed its own religious centers—especially Mount Gerizim, which the Samaritans would come to regard as the holy place of God, rivaling Jerusalem’s temple. The Old Testament that we read all the time, written by the Judean folks in the south, is chock-full of admonitions about those who worship at the places other than Jerusalem.

In 722 BCE, the Northern Kingdom fell to the Assyrians, and many Israelites were exiled. The Assyrians resettled the area with people from other nations. These newcomers intermarried with those who remained, creating what would later be called the Samaritans—a mixed population with a modified version of the Torah and a different center of worship.

Fast-forward a few centuries: when the southern Israelites, the Jews, returned from Babylonian exile in the 500s BCE. The Samaritans who were already there, and who already knew a thing or two about exile, diaspora, and getting conquered offered to help rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and the returning Judean aristocracy and priests, said, “No thank you. We don’t need to get involved with all that. You know half-breed blashphemers and all.” The rift deepened. The Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, and in 128 BCE, Jewish forces under the Hasmoneans destroyed it. By the time of Jesus, the hostility between Jews and Samaritans was centuries old—bitter, political, theological, and deeply personal.

And yet—it’s right there that Jesus, the Jewish Rabbi, goes.

In John 4, we find Jesus tired and thirsty at Jacob’s well in Samaria, speaking with a Samaritan woman. She’s shocked: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?” John adds, almost with a wink, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” And yet, Jesus shares not only water, but the living water of God’s grace.

Then in Luke 10, today, Jesus tells one of his most powerful and famous parables. A man is beaten and left for dead. A priest and a Levite—religious insiders—pass him by. But a Samaritan, the enemy, a half breed, impure, blasphemer is the one that stops, binds his wounds, pays for his care. And Jesus dares to say: That—that outsider—is your neighbor. Go and do likewise.

Jesus isn’t just being nice. He’s healing centuries of division. He’s crossing boundaries of race, religion, and historical trauma. He’s saying the grace of God is not limited to one place, one people, one tradition. In fact, sometimes the “outsider” gets it more than the ones who claim to be the insider.

And here’s the wild part—Jesus’ shocking parable about the Samaritan isn’t even a departure from the Torah. It’s a fulfillment of it. Right there in Deuteronomy 30:9–14, our first reading today. Moses says the command to love God and follow God’s way is “not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.” It’s not up in heaven or across the sea, requiring someone to fetch it—it is, as the text says, “very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to do it.” In other words, the command to love is right here. It’s accessible. It’s not reserved for the elite or the ritually pure or the doctrinally correct. It’s already inscribed on the hearts of the people.

Jesus picks up that ancient wisdom and gives it flesh and blood. He’s not just telling us to follow a new rule—he’s pointing us back to the heart of the Torah. He’s saying: you already know this. You’ve always known this. Love is not some abstract theological theory. Love is what you do when someone’s bleeding on the side of the road. Love is what happens when you risk your own comfort, safety, or pride to help someone the world has taught you to avoid.

That’s the brilliance of Jesus’ teaching: it doesn’t cancel the law—it reveals its heart.

So how would we tell this story today so that it has the same impact on you as it did to the lawyer or the disciples?

Let’s try this: (If it challenges you, good. (That’s what it’s supposed to do.)

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent is on patrol during a blistering summer afternoon. While searching for signs of unauthorized crossings, he suffers heatstroke, falls down a ravine, and breaks his leg. His radio is lost somehow during the fall and he is too badly hurt to look for it. He has his flare gun and fires it.

A Border Patrol agent isn’t too far away to see the flare but doesn’t investigate it—assuming it’s a decoy for a cartel ambush.

A local rancher, known for his tough anti-immigrant stance, spots the man’s vehicle and notices that it’s been there for a while but refuses to get involved. “He’s trained for this,” he mutters, and drives off.

Hours later, a young undocumented migrant crossing alone with only a bottle of water and a ripped backpack hears faint cries for help. He climbs down the ravine, assesses the injuries, and takes a long time and super human effort to, foot by foot, drag the now unconscious ICE agent out of the ravine and carry him back toward the road, using his own shirt as bandages.

At the risk of ruining everything he has sacrificed for, the migrant flags down a passing truck, gets on, and stays with the agent until they deliver him to the medical professionals at the hospital. Before they carry him off he removes a simple chain from his neck that carries a tiny pendant with the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe and places it in the hand of the agent. Then he quietly walks out before anyone else can ask questions.

There are other ways to tell the story today. We might tell a story of the Good Muslim, or the Good Drag Queen. Call him or her: anyone of the people that at one point or another the good church folk have thrown under the bus, have said these people are no good, have said these people are flawed, have said we don’t want your help with our church because you don’t measure up, have said those people threaten the way we like to do things, have said our faith isn’t big enough to accomodate THEM.

So there is your Samaritan, seen in a way that hopefully rings more true to you now.

Now, You can see what a big deal it was for Jesus to have ANYTHING to do with Samaritans.

Now you can see how scandalous it was to those who heard the story that day.

In 2010: The Year We Make Contact, one of my favorite movies and one that is massively underrated as far as I’m concerned, throughout the movie, when the characters get a chance to talk to the almost Godlike alien intelligence they ask, “What’s going to happen.” And the response is always, “Tell them… something wonderful.”

Jesus in this reading today is truly doing “something wonderful.”

Jesus is showing us an opportunity: to see the stranger not as the enemy, but as a neighbor; to practice the kind of boundary-breaking compassion that he shows at the well in John 4 and on the road to Jericho, in this parable in Luke.

By going through Samaria on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus, God incarnate, in sharing with the Samaritans just as freely as the Judeans, becomes the buckle that reconnects the two halves of Israel to wholeness. “What was sundered and undone, behold, the two made one!” (That’s a Dark Crystal, reference. Jim Henson. Go watch it.) Jesus is showing that God’s love and mercy trumps theological, historical, and cultural disagreement. The Judeans and Samaritans are BOTH Israelites of a sort. And they are reunited in the love of Christ! Here is the clearest sign that Jesus is the salvific agent of the whole world, reaching out to those on the outside, just as much to those on the inside, reconciling enemies, healing rifts, restoring creation to oneness with God.

What’s going to happen? “Something wonderful.”

Jesus is also reminding us: God’s love shows up where we least expect it. Among strangers. Among enemies. Among those we’ve been taught not to trust. Among those who we’ve been taught to hate.

And maybe—just maybe—Jesus is inviting us to lay down our old divisions, to reach out across boundaries, and to find living water in the most surprising places.

Amen.