August 16, 2026
Who Is My Neighbor?
Luke 10:25-37
The story that has been told for thousands of years. It was written to make sense of the moral and ethical questions of its time. It has been repeated in every culture, reworked, reimagined, recast as one of the greatest stories ever told. I’m talking of course about The Odyssey.
This summer, Christopher Nolan has given us a shared cultural event in his reworking of Homer’s great epic in the movie, The Odyssey. Underneath all the wandering and the delays and the shipwrecks and homesickness, Homer is trying to make sense of the moral and ethical framework of his day and reiterate that moral framework at a time when it was coming apart. The Odyssey is about an ethical rule that holds the whole poem together, though many will not notice it until it’s pointed out: xenia, the ancient guest-code of Zeus.
A stranger shows up at your door, and you feed him before you ask his name. You send him on his way with a gift. And if you don’t, if you close the door, or worse, eat your guest instead of feeding him, the god of guests deals with you personally. Zeus, who hurls lightning bolts, keeps the records and he will zap you.
That is the strong moral engine running under all twenty-four books of storm and grief: who deserves welcome, and what happens if you get it wrong.
To put that question into the Jewish idiom, “Who is my neighbor?” It is not just a Jewish question, or Greek question. It’s a human question. In every life we must ask to whom do I owe care, compassion, love?
A lawyer stands up to test Jesus. He was not a trial lawyer or estate attorney. He was an expert in religious and moral law. It was his vocation to know the answer to life’s great questions. So he stood up to test Jesus.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now, what does he mean by that? He doesn’t only mean how do I go to heaven when I die? In Luke’s gospel, eternal life means more than that. Luke insists that heaven begins now – that the flourishing and abundant life of God that we will enjoy then is one we can experience now. How do I inherit eternal life? It’s life’s biggest question.
Jesus, the way a good teacher does, turns the question around on him, and the lawyer answers it himself. He quotes the ancient scripture, Deuteronomy and Leviticus: love the Lord alone with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself.
Jesus tells him that he’s right. Do it and live!
But then the lawyer shows his cards. He was trying to win a point, Luke writes that he was trying to justify himself, he asks his follow-up: “and who is my neighbor?”
Now, whatever his motives are, I want to suggest we should not be too hard on him for asking because this is a question every serious tradition has wrestled with for as long as there has been wisdom.
Who is my neighbor? Is it only me—am I responsible only for myself? Is it my tribe—am I am responsible for people in my family or group? Is it everyone—is anyone who crosses my path my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? Where does the circle of my obligation begin and end? It’s a fair question, and it is a modern question, it is a political question, and it is a life question.
Jesus—you shouldn’t be surprised—doesn’t answer it directly. He tells a story instead, which we’ve all heard so many times we could recite it in our sleep. There’s no need to belabor the plot.
A man—could have been anyone—was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho falls into the hands of robbers. It was a dangerous road, about 17 miles long, literally down hill, full of rock outcropping where people could hide. Jesus is telling a realistic story.
The robbers strip him, beat him, and leave him half dead in the ditch. A priest comes by, sees him, and passes on the other side. A Levite does the same. For the audience who heard Jesus tell the story, this would have been shocking—these were the people they would have expected would absolutely do something. Like a doctor and a medic passing by.
And then a Samaritan came by. This is where Jesus twists the story. His audience did not expect a Samaritan here. They were expecting a layperson as the third character. Like, “a priest, a rabbi, and a pastor get into a boat.” A “priest, a Levite, and a layperson go down the road.” That’s how these stories went.
The Samaritan was a complete outsider, no better than a Gentile or a Roman–someone the crowd around Jesus would have expected to walk past without a second thought. But the Samaritan sees the man and is moved with compassion.
The Greek word underneath it, which I’ve shared with you before, comes from the word for the gut. What happened to this Samaritan was visceral. It’s not that he noticed, and thought, “Gosh, I should help this person.” This isn’t a thought he had. It names something closer to being struck, low in the body, in a place you don’t control. He saw the man in the ditch, and he was stricken, he responded at a gut level.
The action of this Samaritan dominates the story. He gets ten verbs, one after another. He comes. He sees. He is moved. He goes to him. He bandages the wounds. He pours oil and wine. He lifts him onto his own animal. He carries him to the inn. He pays. He promises to come back whatever the bill becomes.
His compassion in this story, is not just a thought or a feeling. It is a series of costly actions, that involve him in the life of another person.
The problem with this parable is that we’ve just heard it too many times. We know what’s coming, and we already know how it’s supposed to make us feel. More like this guy and less like these guys. We’re supposed to walk out of here resolved to be more like the Samaritan and less like the priest and the Levite. Every one of us in this room has heard this story enough to know what’s expected, and I’d guess every one of us has also, maybe at some point this week, been the priest or been the Levite.
Why did they walk by? We don’t know, that’s just the way the story goes. But I guess that these two walked by for the same reason that most of walk by: when it looks complicated, it’s just easier to not get involved. We have things to do, a schedule, appointments. We have concerns, we have second thoughts, we’re not prepared as we would like to be.
It’s not evil intent. It isn’t even a moral failure, most days. It’s what a responsible, dutiful life looks like from the inside. It’s easier to not get involved.
And it doesn’t help to just tell ourselves to try harder to be the Samaritan. If we leave here today and say, “I really need to be more like the Samaritan,” we’ll the priest again by Tuesday morning. Shame has never once, in the history of the world, produced a single act of real compassion in anyone. We need a different door into this story than the one marked “try harder.”
So here’s another way in. Jesus is asking us in this story to identify with the characters. But what if that goes deeper than just what they did?
To understand why this stings, you need to know what a Samaritan actually was to Jesus’s audience. In Jewish eyes the Samaritan was an ethnically compromised distant cousin. They worshipped God, but on Mount Gerizim, not in Jerusalem. They kept their own version of the Torah.
By Jesus’s day, the hostility ran both directions, deep enough that Jews traveling between Galilee and Judea would go miles out of their way rather than pass through Samaritan territory. A Samaritan wasn’t a stranger to this crowd. He was the wrong kind of person, in the wrong religion, from the wrong family tree, on the wrong mountain.
Which means, the Samaritan in this story isn’t a better class of person than the other two. The Samaritan isn’t someone with a clear calendar and a sparkling spiritual life. The Samaritan is not someone who always does the right thing.
The Samaritan is the person who knows what it’s like to be in that ditch and have other people walk by. The Samaritan is the one who has already been excluded somewhere, hurt somewhere, made invisible somewhere, pushed to the margins somewhere.
And what if the way through this story is to find that part of ourselves that, like the Samaritan, has gone through some stuff, been wounded and hurt, and understands pain from the inside?
The twist of this parable is that the part of us that is most capable of stopping to help a neighbor, the part of that is most capable of knowing the abundant life of God here and now, is not the dutiful part of us, nor the devout part of us, nor the scheduled part. The part of us most able to fulfill God’s law and enjoy God’s love is the wounded part of us.
Compassion isn’t something you can talk yourself into or will yourself into or shame yourself into. I can’t preach you into compassion. Compassion doesn’t come from trying harder or from feeling worse. It comes from somewhere else entirely. It comes from the gut, and it is born out of our pain.
In 2013, a man named Darnell Barton, a bus driver in Buffalo, New York, was driving his route when he spotted a woman standing on the outer ledge of an overpass over a busy highway, looking down at the traffic below. She was contemplating whether to take her life. Cars were going by, people were staring, many wondering what was going to happen
When the traffic stopped, it happened Barton and his school bus were directly beside the woman. Without thinking, he opened the door and called to her, “Do you want to come back on this side of the guard rail?” She looked at him and looked back at the highway below, and he knew that was a bad sign. So, he got out of the bus, went over, put his arm around her and he didn’t lecture or shout at her. He simply put his arm around her and asked, “Whatever it is, it might feel bad, it may feel bad, but jumping is not the answer.”
Barton later shared in interviews that he, like many others, had suffered mental illness at times, had known depression, and he could see himself or his mom or his family in the face of woman on the bridge. He coaxed the woman back over the guardrail, and sat with her on the sidewalk until responders arrived, holding her hand.
What happened between those two wasn’t expertise. What happened was recognition that prompted instinctive compassion and deep knowing. One wounded person helping another wounded person to climb out of the ditch and back on the road.
Henri Nouwen had a phrase for this: the wounded healer. By that phrase he meant that real healing does not come because the healer has it together helps the wounded who doesn’t. True healing only happens because both people know, from the inside, exactly what it means to be broken. The Samaritan helped the man in the ditch because he knew what it was like to broken and in need of help.
None of us gets to choose whether we will be wounded. We only get to choose what we do with the wound once we have it. We can try to ignore it, or keep it guarded, or defend it; but then we will waste it, or worse it will often harden into bitterness or fear.
The other choice is to give our wounds to God and let God use them. Your pain can be a blessing to others. Your pain, if you tend it and let God heal it, becomes the thing you that can recognize in someone else on the inside and held with a compassion that comes from the gut.
Which brings us to the oldest way of reading of this parable, the deeper twist, one that goes back to the earliest generations of the church, and it might be the truest one.
Christ is the Samaritan. He is the outsider who came down the road where we were. He saw us in the ditch, and he was moved, in his own gut, in a way that cost him everything. He did not regard equality with God as something to grasp but emptied himself to pour oil and wine on our wounds. He bound up what was broken. He paid what we couldn’t pay. And he promised to return.
God in Christ is the Samaritan who found us in the ditch, who bore our wounds and healed our iniquities. God in Christ does not sit like Zeus on a high mountain to zap the ones who do not welcome the stranger. God in Christ comes to us, in the form of the stranger, as one of us, to be rejected and cast out, in order to heal us and lead us into eternal life. God in Christ is the Samaritan.
As his disciples, Christ sends us to be like he is. He came to us a Samaritan, he sends us to be Samaritans. To be people who live with compassion from the wounds he has healed and so fulfill the law of God.
Go and do likewise.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina