PARABLES OF JESUS CHRIST
PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN
DR. JIM DIXON
LUKE 10:25-37
NOVEMBER 14, 1982
In Juneau, Alaska ten years ago, an old woman walked out of a grocery store. She was carrying a bag of groceries. There was a severe winter storm. She stepped into the street. She slipped and she fell to the ground. Her groceries were scattered. She struggled to get up, but she was more than 85 years old, and she could not. No one came to her aid, and she literally froze to death in the street. In the days that followed, the police tried to reconstruct what had taken place. They found three people who actually witnessed her fall. One said that he didn’t know her, and he didn’t think it was any of his business. The other two said that they thought someone else would help her. Who is my neighbor? Two thousand years ago, a lawyer stood up and put that question to the Son of God and Jesus gave him two answers. His first answer was this. “Your neighbor is anyone who is in need.”
There was a road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The ancients called it “the bloody road.” It was a winding twisting road that descended more than 3,600 feet in a distance of only 20 miles. It was a dangerous road. There were robbers and thieves. One day, Jesus tells us, a stranger was going down that road. He fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead by the side of the road. Now by chance, Jesus said, a priest was going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side and so, likewise, a Levite when he came to the place, saw him, and passed by on the other side. A priest and a Levite, two very special people in Israel.
It was the priest who was the steward of the temple, the dwelling of God. It was the priest who was the steward of the Jewish purification rites. It was the priest who was the steward of the Torah, the Pentateuch, the law of God, and it was the priest who was the steward of the Jewish sacrificial system. It was the priest who gave the morning and the evening sacrifices. It was the priest who received the animal and grain offerings from the people. It was the priest who blessed the people. It was the priest who was the mediator between God and man.
Then there was the Levite. It was the Levites who took tithes from the people. Some have suggested that perhaps the Levite looked at the wounded man and saw that he was already robbed. The Levites were descended from Levi though not through the line of Aaron and therefore they could not attain to the priestly office. They served the priest, and they served the outer courts of the temple. They could not go into the inner court. They could not go into the holy place. They could not approach the altar. They could not touch the sacred vestments, but they led in temple liturgy. They led in temple worship. They led the people in singing praises to God and yet this priest and this Levite, for all of their religious devotion, for all of their religious liturgy, for all of their religiosity, they had not learned to love, and they were not willing to be a neighbor to a person in need.
The Bible says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I’m a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and I understand all knowledge and all mysteries, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I’m nothing.” In the eyes of the world, that priest and that Levite were very special, and their lives were significant, but in the eyes of God, their lives were nothing because, you see, they had not learned to love.
Ninety years ago, in 1892, at the newly formed Leland Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, there were two students who had a brilliant idea. They needed to raise room, board and tuition for their education, so they decided to stage a concert and they invited the famous Polish concert pianist, Paderewski to come and to perform. They promised him a gratuity of $2,000. They didn’t think that would be any problem because they thought their receipts would far exceed that. They thought they would be able to give Paderewski the $2,000, be able to pay the concert expenses and have plenty of money left over for their room and board and tuition. It didn’t work out like that. They only took in $1,600 and they were in a bind, but they knew what they had to do. They went to Paderewski, and they gave him the full $1,600 plus they gave him a promissory note for $400, that they might complete their obligation.
The great pianist ripped up that promissory note and he smiled. He gave them back the $1,600 and he said, “Take this money and pay your concert expenses. Whatever is left over, each of you take 10% for your own work and wage. Whatever there is beyond that, you can give to me.” The two students were very grateful. The years passed, the decades passed, the great war came and went. It was in the middle of the 1920s and eastern Europe was in desolation and people were starving. Paderewski was in Poland trying to feed his starving people. The United States government responded. The United States government sent millions of dollars’ worth of food and aid and supplies to Poland. In 1929, Paderewski returned to this country to thank our government. He stood before President Hoover, and he expressed his gratitude and Hoover smiled. You see, it had been Hoover who had been in charge of the food distribution in eastern Europe. Hoover said, “I would have done anything for you because many years ago, more than 25 years ago, another student and I at Stanford University were in a bind and you helped us out.”
It’s a great thing in the mind of God when one nation is willing to be a neighbor to another nation in need. It’s a great thing in the mind of God when one person is willing to be a neighbor to another person in need. This is our call in Christ Jesus, that we would be a neighbor to people in need.
There was a woman named Nancy Bidebach who was walking on the beach at Emerald Bay in Laguna, California. She was a Christian and she was in the midst of a great personal crisis. It was in the middle of the winter, and she was all alone or so she thought as she walked on that beach. She stopped and she began to write in the sand with a stick. She wrote these words, “Jesus, please help me.” Suddenly she saw a small shadow in the sand, and she turned. It was a little boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old. He had two friends with him. The little boy looked down and began to read the writing. Nancy Bidebach was embarrassed. The little boy took the stick, and he drew a cross right above the name of Jesus that she had written. Then the little boy looked up at her and he smiled. He said, “I’m a Christian too.” Then with his two little friends, they just went off down the beach.
Nancy Bidebach said there is no way that she could explain the peace that God gave her in that moment. It was almost like God was saying, through that little boy, I love you. When you stop to think about it, that little boy hadn’t done much. He merely paused in his life’s journey to be sensitive to another person in accordance with the measure of maturity that was in him. That’s really all that God asks for each and every one of us to do as Christians, that as we journey through life, to be sensitive to the needs of other people.
Two weeks ago, I was jogging east of Holly and south of Arapahoe Road. I was jogging on the dam that is there. I jog there because it’s level. The only thing that’s better than jogging on the level is going downhill. The only thing better than that is not jogging at all. As I was jogging that day, there were some people on the dam. Usually that’s a problem for me because when there’s people on the dam, I pick up my pace. I think pride goeth before exhaustion. I was done jogging and I was walking back. I was coming near Holly Street. I wasn’t in a good mood, and I was kind of in a hurry. As I got right near Holly there, a little VW kind of coasted to a stop. I could tell they’d run out of gas. This guy got out of the car. He looked like he’d just stepped out of the 1960’s counter-culture movement. His hair was about two feet long and it looked like he’d tried to comb it with a broom. There was a girl in the car. He had done strange things to the car. The engine was exposed, and the front end was altered. He started walking towards me. I knew he wanted help, and I just wasn’t in the mood. He said, “Hey, I ran out of gas.” I said, “Really.”
I knew what the Lord wanted me to do because the nearest gas station was almost two miles away. Reluctantly, I said, “Why don’t you walk with me back to the house and we’ll get the car and go get you some gas.” He said, “Okay.” As we began to talk, I could see he was really a pretty nice guy. He asked me what I do, and I told him I was a Christian minister. He didn’t say anything but when he left, I could tell that he was very grateful, and he had a smile on his face. I felt good because, you see, the Bible tells us and sometimes we forget this, that it’s only through serving that we find joy and meaning and happiness. It’s only through serving that God is able to bless us. It’s only as we give our lives away that we find life. God has made us like that. We give our life to Christ, and we give our life to others. Through that, you see, comes blessing.
Two guys were driving along in their car on a country road. They were good friends. One was named Walter and the other was named Arthur. Walter had something he wanted to show Arthur, so they turned off that country road and went down this little dirt road. They went through the middle of an orange grove and out into this great vast expanse of land. They stopped the car and Walter and Arthur got out. Walter said, “Arthur, I’m going to do something great here.” He began to explain to Arthur all of the buildings, the great project that he had. He had a dream. He was going to build great things there. He said, “Arthur, I want you to be in on the ground floor. This is going to take all the money I have but it’s worth everything to me and I want you to be in on it. I want you to buy all the land around this project because there’s going to be hotels, there’s going to be convention centers, there’s going to be restaurants. It will be a great investment for you.”
Well, Arthur thought to himself, “What a crazy idea. Who’s going to drive 25 miles out here into the country for this kind of a dream.” So, Arthur said something about money being tight. He said he would think about it later. Walter said, “Later is going to be too late.” He said that land is going to go up hundreds of times in value in only a few years. Well, so it was that Art Linkletter lost his opportunity to buy all the land that surrounds Disneyland in California. Walt Disney wanted him to buy it, but Art Linkletter didn’t do it. In his autobiography, Art Linkletter says that he regards that as the greatest missed opportunity of his life.
Now, I’m sure that many of you have had lost business opportunities but, you see, from God’s perspective, the opportunities that He is most concerned with in your life are not business opportunities. From God’s perspective, the opportunities that He’s most concerned with are those opportunities that you have to serve and to be a neighbor. The greatest lost opportunities of your life from God’s perspective are those times when you fail to be a neighbor, those times when we fail to be sensitive to the needs of others, those times when we fail to reach out in love.
Who is my neighbor? Jesus said, “Your neighbor is anyone who is in need.” But He had a second message for that lawyer, a second answer. That answer was this. “Your neighbor is anyone of any race.” This was a difficult teaching. Jesus said, “A Samaritan was going down that road and when he came to where the wounded man was, he looked at him and he had compassion.” Now I’m sure that when Jesus mentioned that Samaritan, His Jewish audience took a step backwards because they hated the Samaritans and Jesus knew it.
In 722 BC, the Assyrians conquered the city of Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom. The book of II Kings tells us that 27,290 Jews were deported from that city, many of them from the nobility but thousands and thousands of peasant Jews remained in Samaria. When the Syrians and the Babylonians began to move into that conquered city, over the years those peasant Jews began to intermarry with other races, with foreigners, and they produced offspring of mixed blood. Now the pure orthodox Jews of Jerusalem regarded that offspring as mutant. They regarded that offspring as tainted, and they hated the Samaritans. They considered them half-bloods. Over time, the Samaritans grew to hate the Jews. But, you see, this one Samaritan, as he journeyed down that Jericho Road and saw a wounded Jew, was able to reach beyond all the social, political, economic and racial prejudices, able to reach beyond it and be a neighbor to a Jew in need. That’s what God calls upon us to do. You see, there’s no room for prejudice in the body of Christ.
In 1920, there was a Jew named Mike Gold. He was an American Communist. He wrote a great deal of literature. Some of his writings were widely read. But when Communism fell into ill repute, all of his writings and popularity kind of passed into oblivion. If you’d read any of his stuff, you’d probably say, “rightly so.” But out of his oblivion, he wrote a very interesting book. That book was called “A Jew Without Knowing It.” In that book, he described what it was like growing up as a Jew in New York City in the midst of a Jewish ghetto. His mother had told him as a little boy that there were four streets he was not to go beyond, and those four streets surrounded his ghetto. But one day he was very curious, and Mike went beyond his neighborhood. He went beyond that ghetto, and he wandered into another neighborhood. He ran into some older boys, and they said to him, “Are you a k***?” He’d never heard that word before. He said, “I don’t know.” They said, “Well, are you a Christ killer?” He had never ever heard the name of Christ before. He said, “I don’t know what you mean.” They said, “Well, we’re Christians and we hate Christ killers” and they beat him up. He wandered back into his neighborhood with blood on his face. He came to his home. When his mother saw him, she said, “Michael, what happened?” He didn’t say anything because he didn’t understand what had happened. He sat on his mother’s lap, and he said, “Mommy, who is Christ?”
In 1962, Mike Gold died at a Catholic charity house in New York City. A woman named Dorothy Day who was the nun in charge of that charity house said only two weeks before he died… She said, “Every day Mike eats at the table of Jesus, but he will probably never become a Christian because of the circumstances in which he first heard the name of Jesus Christ.” Nothing kills Christian witness and Christian testimony more than prejudice.
I went to Westmont College from 1964 to 1968 and I had a friend in college and her name was Audrey. We both majored in psychology and Audrey, and I became good friends. We both had the same warped sense of humor. We made fun of the books and fun of the professors and fun of the world. Audrey was the only black person in our whole college, but we had a special day every year at Westmont, and it was called Twirp. On that day, the woman asked the men on a day. Twirp means “the women in reversed places.” The week before that Saturday night, the week before Twirp, women would put invitations in the mailboxes of the men, whoever they wanted to ask out. Well Audrey wanted to go to Twirp, but I think she felt very sensitive, she felt very awkward because she was the only black person. I was surprised when I went to my mailbox that week and Audrey had “twirped” me. When I read that invitation, I can’t explain to you the feelings that arose in me. I didn’t think I was prejudiced but all kinds of red flags just went up. I went to Audrey, and I explained to her all my concerns, and she was very gentle and she was very loving and understanding and let me off the hook. I’m sure she must have thought, “this guy really is a twirp!”
I have not seen Audrey in 16 years. This past week I got a letter from Westmont College, and it listed all the alumnae from all the graduating classes through the years. At the bottom there was a list of all those alumnae that they couldn’t locate, could not find anywhere. Audrey was on that list. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know what she’s doing but I hope and pray that wherever she is, there are people more sensitive to her need than I was.
As Christians, you see, there is no room for prejudice. James says, “Show no partiality, my brethren, as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory. If you would fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, you must love your neighbor as yourself. If you do this, you do well but if you show partiality, you commit sin and you are judged by the law as transgressors.” The Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Galatia, and he said, “We are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ. All who have been baptized into Christ belong to Christ. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus.
Jesus had two answers for that lawyer. Who is my neighbor? Your neighbor is anyone who is in need. Who is my neighbor? Your neighbor is anyone of any race, anyone of any socioeconomic standing, anyone of any political persuasion. You see, the message of the good Samaritan is really a message of love. It describes the demands of love upon our life.
When Heather was born, and with this story we’11 close. When Heather was born, she weighed 8 lbs., 6 oz. She’s 7 years old now and she is growing like a weed. You forget how little they were when first they were born. I used to be able to hold Heather in my hand very carefully and I can remember times I would come home from work, and I’d be tired or maybe I’d even be frustrated but I would look down into the crib. I’d pull Heather out and when I would look at her, I would just forget about all my problems. It wasn’t because she loved me. It was because I loved her. If I’d been hurting inside, it wouldn’t have affected her sleep. If I’d had some horrible disease, it wouldn’t have affected her play. If I had died, she would have forgotten me in a few days because her little mind and her little heart were not capable of understanding or responding to that. But, you see, I loved her and all the money in the world couldn’t have taken her from me.
God wants us to know that He loves us like that. When we’re born into the family of God through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of our life, He loves us and it’s not that we love Him. It’s simply that He loves us, but as we grow and as we begin to mature, He expects us to begin to return some of that love to Him even as Barbara and I expect Drew and Heather to return our love to us. As God pours His love into us through Christ and by His Spirit, as He pours His love into us, He expects that love to overflow so that we begin to love those around us, as we begin to love our neighbors. There’s no higher calling in the body of Christ. Jesus said, “By this, all men will know that you are My disciples if you love one another.”
John says, “Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God. He who loves is born of God and knows God but he who does not love does not know God for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent His only Son into the world that we might have life through Him. In this His love. Not that we love God but that He loved us and gave His Son to be the expiation for our sins.” John says, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another but if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in Him. My little children, let not your love be in word or in speech but indeed and in truth.” Shall we pray?