Showing Mercy
Luke put stories together that carried the same theme.
Why then did he put the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25-37) and the Martha/Mary conflict (Luke 10:38-42) side by side? In each Jesus is changing boundaries the Jews would have thought were eternally unchangeable.
The Good Samaritan parable is Jesus’ answer to the expert in the law’s question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ This man knew Leviticus 19:18 ‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbour as yourself.’
So what boundary did Jesus change? Notice that the neighbour in Leviticus 19:18 was your Jewish neighbour, ‘…one of your people.’ In the parable the man who was robbed and beaten was not helped by a priest; nor was he helped by a Levite. Both would be ceremonially “unclean” had they physically helped him. The one who does help is a Samaritan.
The Samaritans were considered a “mongrel” race of deportees brought into northern Israel after the Israelites were defeated and deported in 722BC. Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans (John 4:9) so for this Samaritan to stop and help the beaten and wounded traveller was unheard of.
Jesus finishes the parable with the question ‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ The answer is telling, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ This scribe is recognising something the nation couldn’t – that those outside of God’s “chosen” people sometimes fulfil the heart of God for others better than the “chosen” do. Caught up in its self-righteous, exclusive outlook, the nation of Israel was blind to its own condition.
This scribe of the law was having his eyes opened to something too many in the church today still can’t see. Unfortunately too many of us have become insensitive to the hurts of others. We don’t want to get our hands dirty. We give lip-service to God’s will. We mouth it but don’t do it. Like the priest and the Levite we don’t want to get messed up in the affairs of a broken, beaten, hurting world. Sometimes those outside the church do a better job of this than we do.
Who is your neighbour? The one who shows mercy to an undeserving world (Luke 10:37), the same mercy God has shown us through Calvary.
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