Surely, the phrase "Good Samaritan", speaks of one who helps
a stranger.
During the 1970’s as wounded Vietnam veterans came home, one of my
clinical nursing rotations was at a VA hospital. My eight year old son cut the featured image
from the newspaper one evening and gave it to me. We called the man in the picture the Good Samaritan as he offered his hand to help the older man step up. I put the picture in his scrapbook, never to
forget that his young heart had felt the act of mercy and compassion captured in a newspaper
photograph.
The parable
of the Good Samaritan is found only in one of the four gospels. Luke the physician recorded Jesus’s parable in
chapter 10 of his gospel.
In reply to the lawyer’s question, “who is my
neighbor,” Jesus said: “A man was going down from
Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his
clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going
down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to
the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came
where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his
wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought
him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two
denarii and gave them to the innkeeper.
‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any
extra expense you may have.’
“Which of these three
do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
The
expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
No comments:
Post a Comment