The Enemy Who Stopped to Help

One day a man asked Jesus a tricky question. "Who is my neighbor?" he said. What he really meant was: who do I actually have to love? Surely not everyone.

So Jesus told him a story.

There was a man walking down a lonely, rocky road, the kind of road where you walk a little faster. Robbers were waiting there. They jumped out and they hurt him and they took everything he had. Then they ran away and left him in the dust, half alive, too hurt to stand, too hurt even to call for help. On the stormy sea, Peter had cried out, "Lord, save me," and a hand caught him that very instant. This man could not even cry. He just lay there, hoping someone would come.

And someone did. A priest came walking down that very road. A holy man, who knew all about God. The hurt man must have thought, oh, good. Now I'll be helped. But the priest saw the man lying there, and he crossed to the other side, and he kept on walking.

Then another man came. A helper from the temple. He saw the hurt man too. And he also crossed over, and he also walked away.

Can you imagine it? Lying in the dirt, watching the good people pass you by. How small and forgotten the hurt man must have felt, as if he didn't matter to anyone at all.

But the story wasn't over.

Down the road came one more traveler. A Samaritan. Now, the Samaritans and this hurt man's people did not like each other. Not even a little. They were enemies. If anyone was going to walk on past, surely it would be this one.

But he didn't.

He saw the man in the dust, and something in him broke. He knelt right down in the dirt. He cleaned the wounds, gentle and slow. He wrapped them up soft. He lifted the hurt man onto his own donkey and walked beside him the whole long way. He found a safe place and stayed up caring for him all through the night. And in the morning he paid for everything, and promised he would come back.

The enemy, the one nobody expected, turned out to be the true neighbor.

Then Jesus looked at the man who had asked the tricky question. "Go," he said, "and love like that."

The man had wanted a small love, a love with edges, a love that could stop at the people it didn't like. But God's love has no edges at all. It is always the wrong person, kneeling down for you, when the right people have already walked away.

That kind, kneeling Samaritan is a picture of Someone else. Someone who would find us when we were hurt and could not save ourselves. Someone the world would call strange, and wrong, and not the right kind of person at all. He would cross every line to reach us. He would kneel down in our dust. He would pay for everything.

His name is Jesus. He found us where we lay, and one day, like the Samaritan riding back down that road, he will return for the ones he rescued.