Week 6 | Sunday, July 10, 2022
Luke 10:25-37
Week 6 PDF version
1 | begin
Go outside and practice a brief prayer of presence in your neighborhood. You can sit or take a short walk around the block. Either way, be as fully present as you can to everything and everyone around you.
2 | explore
Journal on your own about your experiences or share your stories with a group:
Describe a time when you witnessed compassion in action. What happened? How did you respond?
Describe a time when acting with love felt easy for you. Then describe a time when acting with love felt hard. What made these times different for you?
3 | read
Read Luke 10:25–37. Then read the passage a second time.
4 | engage
“Love your neighbor.” Christian life does not get more basic than that. But the ways many of us in the U.S. have been trained to love our neighbors do not often look like all-in, life-changing love. Neighbor love looks more like isolated, contained deeds that pose little disruption to our schedules and lives. A dollar handed to a person lacking safe housing. A prayer for victims of war or violence.
The reasons are understandable. Our lives are busy. We shoulder countless work, relationship, and community responsibilities. We also deal with these in a society ordered by inequity, which disempowers and marginalizes people in multiple ways, maintains power by provoking overwhelm, and diverts attention away from systemic change by encouraging neighbor love practices that fit into occasional spare moments.
But think about the last movie you saw or book you read where a character’s life was completely transformed because they chose to support or care for someone else. Even if that character intended their initial deed to be a five-minute event, it became a powerful act that drew that character onto a different path, into a new community, or toward another world. Such stories and characters can evoke not just our admiration but also profound hope that this could be true for us too: that an act of love would escape our containers and turn our lives upside down.
Jesus’s story about the Samaritan neighbor exudes a love of this gravitational force. In Luke 10, when someone challenges Jesus to identify the ultimate commandment and then to specify who counts as a neighbor in this commandment, Jesus offers a parable. In the story, a person gets attacked while traveling and is injured to the point that he might die on the side of the road if he does not receive help. A priest and a Levite each see this person and just keep going without stopping. A third person, identified as a “Samaritan,” encounters the injured man and “[is] moved with compassion” (10:33, NRSVUE) to help him.
The parable’s answer to the question “Whom am I commanded to love?” is fairly straightforward. “Neighbor” is not limited to people from the same place, of similar social or economic status, or with the same marks of identity. “Neighbor” is who the Samaritan man, injured man, and the innkeeper become by and through love. The Greek word for “neighbor” in this passage is the preposition “near” turned into a noun, which suggests that a neighbor is whomever you are near to as well as whomever you become near to because love has made you into neighbors for one another.
Less clear may be the parable’s depiction of love. It can be easy to read love as simply a feeling or as a “doing for” that requires economic privilege. But neither of these gets at love’s dynamics in the story. The Samaritan man, whose identity may have signified marginal religious status for some Judeans, is the embodiment of compassion and “mercy” (10:37), the love that YHWH displays over and over in scripture (for example, Ps 103). [1] His care for the injured man blurs any lines between center and margins and reflects a love like Jesus’s (see Lk 7:13). He shows comprehensive, abiding support for a stranger’s life, health, and well-being by giving what he can for as long as he can: oil, wine, bandages, transportation, money, time, vigil. He invites the innkeeper to collaborate in this labor of love in ways that the Samaritan man can’t do alone, and the innkeeper says yes to providing what they can (10:34–35). Between the two of them, the Samaritan man and innkeeper create a system of support when their neighbor needs it most so that he can fight for his life.
An all-in, life-changing love is at work among these three characters. Whatever happens after this will not be contained or isolated. Compassion is likely to move them again to seek life, health, and well-being for more neighbors.
Why might neighbor love be the ultimate commandment? Because love matters. Love means life. Love makes us neighbors for one another and knits our lives together. It may not be easy, fast, or fit neatly into our plans for the day. But we may also be drawn into something bigger than ourselves and our wildest hopes: a true, life-changing love story.
5 | respond
Journal on your own or talk with a group about these questions:
1. What book or movie character can you think of whose life is completely changed by helping or supporting someone else? How do you respond to that character?
2. What does neighbor love mean to you? What is doing this commandment like for you?
3. What stands out to you in Luke 10:25–37? With which character(s) do you identify in Jesus’s parable?
4. How might you say yes to love’s movement this week? What might that involve?
6 | practice
Take a few minutes this week to do one of these activities:
Love Story
Read a book, watch a movie, or write your own story about an act of love that changes someone’s life.
Labor of Love Collaboration
Do something with a group or community to support life, health, and well-being with more neighbors (with rather than doing for).
References & Credits
1. What Samaritan identity means in the text is still debated. Scholars like Matthew Chalmers have challenged readings that “assume […] Jewish-Samaritan hostility” and Samaritan “exclusion” from Israelite identity in the text. Matthew Chalmers, “Rethinking Luke 10: The Parable of the Good Samaritan Israelite,” Journal of Biblical Literature 139, no. 3 (2020): 543–66, 544, 565. However, if “Samaritan” signifies “the boundaries of ‘Israel,’” as he says (565), that location implies marginalization.
Header image of “Wood Path” is by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash at this link
Image of “Books” is by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash at this link
Image of “Table and Chairs” is by No Revisions on Unsplash at this link
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
The scripture reading comes from the Revised Common Lectionary lessons for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost in Year C, which can be found at the Episcopal Church Lectionary Page here
