I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 10-11

When I got to Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan I realized something I do not remember anyone ever making note of: In yesterday’s passage we had an account of a Samaritan village which refused to welcome Jesus so strenuously that James and John wanted to call down fire from Heaven on them.  Which puts Jesus’ telling of this parable in a different context.  Despite having only a short time before having been rejected by a group of Samaritans, Jesus uses one of them as the person we should emulate in a story He told.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the three people who passed the man on the road.  First, we have a priest.  He would have been trained from childhood on up on the proper ways to worship God and it was his job to care for the spiritual welfare of the people.  However, he was also required to keep to a very high standard of ritual purity and if the beaten man were to die while the priest was touching him, he would be defiled and unable to fill his duties.  Well, then we have a Levite (the NLT translation says “Temple Assistant”, which for most understanding of this parable is good enough).  He would have had similar training to a priest, but would not have had quite as strict purity requirements.   However, neither of these men stopped to help the beaten man.  Finally a Samaritan, who did not even truly understand how to worship God, came along.  This Samaritan, who was despised by the Jews as someone who distorted God’s commands and who thought the same of the Jews, sacrificed his time and money to help the beaten man.  Jesus’ instructions to be like the Samaritan applies to more than just helping those in distress.  In this story, the priest and the Levite were more concerned with getting the ritual’s correct than with people.  The Samaritan’s only focus was on people.