The Neighbor from Outside
Hear the Promise of Christ for You
Hear the Word
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29
Who is the Samaritan?
We are the ones beaten and bruised. We are in need of rescue. We cannot turn the parable of the Good Samaritan into another law, except to see that we fail to stand righteously beneath it. We are sinners; we have failed to be a neighbor. And that is the point when Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” we cannot be the neighbor to everyone in need. But Christ, the one we deemed to be outside the camp, stricken by God, he has been our savior, and he has promised “whatever the cost, I will pay.”
This devotional was inspired by a homily preached on Sunday. You can listen to the homily here.
Question of the Week
What is a “Samaritan” in Scripture?
Samaritans in the New Testament descend from a mixture of Jewish ancestors and Assyrians. In the 8th Century BC, Assyria relocated the Northern Kingdom of Israel and interspersed Assyrians among them. Assyria was a kingdom, not only an ethnicity, which meant that the people that were moved into Israel may have come from any portion of the known world. The Israelites that remained eventually married and created families with these people of ‘unknown origin,’ which resulted in a group of people that the Jews (the people of the Southern Kingdom of Judah that remained and/or went to Babylon and returned) considered suspect. Samaritans were believed to be ‘half-bloods’ and deserters of the true faith.