The Scribe and the Samaritan
Preached at Decatur First United Methodist Church
July 13, 2025
Luke 10: 25 - 37 (CEB)
25 A legal expert stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain eternal life?”
26 Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?”
27 He responded, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
28 Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”
29 But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right, so he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 Jesus replied, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He encountered thieves, who stripped him naked, beat him up, and left him near death. 31 Now it just so happened that a priest was also going down the same road. When he saw the injured man, he crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 32 Likewise, a Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 33 A Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was. But when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. 34 The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine. Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day, he took two full days’ worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper. He said, ‘Take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you back for any additional costs.’ 36 What do you think? Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?”
37 Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
When I was in college my friend Kassie and I met every Sunday night to watch a television show called The X-Files, which was a kind of creepy, sometimes funny, hour-long drama about two FBI agents investigating complicated government secrets and paranormal activity. This was before streaming tv shows was an option, of course, so the show only came on once a week and if you missed it, you missed it.
The show was complicated and had interconnected characters who might seem unimportant in the first season but later ended up having a critical role. So, it was very, very important to be in front of the television BEFORE the show started so that you could watch something I call “Previously on…”
Television shows still do this. Before anything new happens, there’s a voiceover that says, “Previously, on the X-files” and then they show a brief set of clips from previous episodes of the show. The clips are curated to give you exactly the information you need to understand the show you are about to watch.
These days there is a button you can click when you are streaming a show to “Skip recap” and you don’t have to watch the clips of what was “previously on.” I never do that. I want to know what THEY want me to know, so I can get the most out of what I’m about to watch.
This week, I found myself wishing I could show you a “Previously on…” recap. Imagine there’s a show about Life with God. The pilot episode would be the first creation account from the book of Genesis, and then it keeps going, season after season. Today’s text would be from the 42nd season, the Gospel of Luke. This episode has some new characters, but even though they are unfamiliar, they refer back to previous situations from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th seasons of the show. Without a recap to give context to these characters, this story might seem uncomplicated -
A lawyer asks how to have eternal life?
Jesus says, “you’re a lawyer, what does the law say?”
The lawyer says, “Love God and Love your neighbor”
Jesus says, “Do that”
The lawyer wants to be smart and says, “but who is my neighbor?”
Jesus tells a story about three guys. Two of them are bad guys and one of them is a good guy. Then he says, “Which one was a good neighbor?”
The lawyer says, “The good guy.”
Jesus says, “Go and be a good guy.”
If you are new to the show, that might seem fine. But if you are a longtime fan of the show, you know this doesn’t sound right. Especially in this season of the show, the simple dichotomy of good guys and bad guys doesn’t sound right. There has to be more to this story, and there is.
If I could create a recap for you, I would start with the guy asking the question. The text says that he’s a legal expert, but most of the time I hear him called a lawyer. This leads to smiles and eyerolls because people love a good lawyer joke. But, that’s not the kind of legal expert that Jesus was talking to.
Rather than a lawyer as we know them today, this is a Jewish scribe, who would have been an expert in the religious laws of the Jewish community found in the books of Deuteronomy, Numbers, and Leviticus. For me, that changes this encounter. Our scribe is a scholar of God’s laws. His vocation, and likely his life, is based on knowing and keeping the religious law that is supposed to keep him good with God, and he is debating Jesus on that subject.
The next characters we meet come from the divine imagination. Jesus is answering the scribe’s question with a story that Jesus is making up on the spot. We are getting a glimpse into how creative and intentional God is, because this story is the perfect answer to our scribe’s question.
We know almost nothing about the man in the story who was robbed, beaten and left half-dead. We don’t know his race, class, religion or status. We know a little about the first two men who walk by him though, because we know what they do for a living. Priests and Levites were religious professionals in the Jewish community. Their roles were different from our scribe, but they likely would have all been on the same “side” in a conversation with Jesus.
Because Jesus specifically tells us that they are going down the road from Jerusalem, where the temple was located, to Jericho, we can assume that the priest and the Levite are headed home from work when they encounter the man who has been beaten and left for dead. It would have been a 17 mile walk from Jerusalem to Jericho, and because of the long and dangerous commute, religious professionals would work in the temple for two weeks at a time, and then travel home for a short break before going back to the temple for another two weeks of work.
Like religious professionals today, scribes, priests, and Levites were compensated for their work. It may have been a calling, and one that they felt deeply committed to as an act of faith, but it was also a job that provided for them and their families.
In order to do that job, they had to honor and keep the laws that our scribe knew so well. In his response to Jesus’s question, the scribe quoted Leviticus 19, verse 18 - You must not take revenge nor hold a grudge against any of your people; instead, you must love your neighbor as yourself… This sounds reasonable to our modern ear and a lot like Jesus. But right after this, in Leviticus 19:19 we get a shift in tone - You must keep my rules. Do not crossbreed your livestock, do not plant your field with two kinds of seed, and do not wear clothes made from two kinds of material.
Those make less sense to me, but there they are in the book of Leviticus, right next to loving my neighbor as myself. Verse 18 is part of my life’s work. Verse 19 is not something that I feel the need to obey at all. But for the real-life scribe that Jesus is talking to, and the imagined priest and Levite in the story, those texts, and many more, would have had carried a lot of weight.
As anyone who has tried to read the Bible from beginning to end will tell you, the books containing the laws will make you want to stop reading. There are a lot of them, they are repetitive, the details are mind-numbing, and they often seem irrelevant to Jesus' message of love and peace that is so life-giving today. So, we tend to skip over them, but in order to grasp this episode of “Life with God,” we really have to know something about the ritual of water purification from Numbers chapter 19.
Previously, on “Life with God,” people were either clean or unclean. Not like, I worked in the yard so I’m not clean. This is a state of being ritually unclean and it meant separation from the community and from holy places. Things that made you unclean included coming into contact with blood, and coming into contact with a corpse, or coming into contact with someone who was unclean because THEY had come into contact with blood or a corpse.
Our scribe, as an expert in the law, would know that if a religious professional stopped to care for someone who had been beaten and possibly dead, they would not be able to return to work until they had completed a specific cleansing ritual, that goes like this -
No sooner than three days after exposure, they would need to be sprinkled with water that contained the ashes from the ritual sacrifice of a perfect, never ridden, completely red-haired female cow. Then, seven days after exposure, they would be sprinkled again with that same kind of water. During the time that they were unclean, at least seven days, they could not go to work in the temple, and would not get paid. Everyone in their household, as well as the person performing the ritual, would be considered unclean for some period of time as well.
As Jesus told this story, our scribe would know that the priest and the Levite would have to consider all of the laws, and that the cost of stopping to help and becoming unclean would have consequences, actual costs, for them AND anyone who depended on them for their provision. I don’t think the scribe was surprised when the priest and Levite not only didn’t stop to help, but took extra care to put more distance between them by crossing the street.
Finally, we meet a Samaritan. The word “Samaritan” is now and forever linked to the word, “good.” But that word is not in the text, and to the original audience, those were not words that went together.
Jews and Samaritans had common ancestors, but had long ago become separate groups who considered each other foreigners. Over generations they had developed different holy places, which was a point of disagreement and disdain. They also had different understandings of the cleanliness laws we talked about earlier. For Jesus' audience, Samaritans were at best outsiders, but really they were just the worst.
It’s hard to find a modern correlation to help us understand this dynamic, because it might be different for everyone. For those of us who find our identity as UNITED Methodists to be important, the closest thing to a Samaritan might be a Global Methodist - someone who has disaffiliated from the UMC primarily because we disagree on the full inclusion of our LGBTQ siblings. We are both confident that we are right, and that the other one is getting it very, very wrong. They are our Samaritans, and we are theirs.
Your Samaritan does not have to be about religious conflict, but it is likely someone that you disagree with about something fundamental to your life. Not only would you not ASK them for help, you wouldn’t even want them to know that you need help, because there's a smugness and sense of superiority there. If you follow this person on social media, you might have muted them, but I suspect that you haven’t because you check their posts to see what ill-informed or disagreeable thing they shared. If Jesus were telling this story for you, that person would be the hero of the story.
So, that’s much longer than a “previously on…” recap would be, but that’s what folks who were reading Luke’s Gospel for the first time would have already known, and now we know it too. So let’s start again.
25 A legal expert stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain eternal life?”
26 Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?”
27 He responded, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
28 Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”
29 But the legal expert had something to prove, so he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 Jesus replied, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He encountered thieves, who stripped him naked, beat him up, and left him near death. 31 Now it just so happened that a priest was also going down the same road. When he saw the injured man, he crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 32 Likewise, a Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 33 A Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was. But when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. 34 The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine. Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him.
35 The next day, he took two full days’ worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper. He said, ‘Take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you back for any additional costs.’
36 What do you think? Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?”
37 Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Today’s episode of “Life with God” asks a lot of us. Maybe if we had skipped the recap we could walk out of here thinking that all we have to do is to be a good guy. But that’s not what the context tells us. When we hear this story out of context we are likely to focus on the three imagined characters and to decide that Jesus is telling us to be a Good Samaritan. But this morning I’d like to consider that we are also the scribe.
He has dedicated his life to studying and keeping the law. He’s engaged in a public debate that he plans to win, but I think he actually does want to know how to have eternal life with God, because his whole life has been about that, or so he thought. But then, the hero of the story, the one who will gain eternal life, is an outsider and does not observe the laws that have defined our scribe. I wonder, as he says, “The one who demonstrated mercy” was he also thinking, “what am I even doing with my life?”
The Samaritan in this story shows radical compassion and generosity. We should, indeed, do likewise. But Jesus could have cast anyone in that role and our scribe’s answer would have been the same. Jesus chose to make our scribe question his own identity, and the very ground beneath his feet. This story is a call to acts of mercy, and it’s also a call to do the inner work of questioning whatever we think we are doing to save ourselves. Whether it is a religious system of rules that we have learned to follow, or something else - like our own cleverness, our job, our popularity, our grades, our willpower and discipline, or our sense that we have everything under control. If Jesus were telling you this story, the hero would be the opposite of whatever you think is saving you.
Jesus' final words to the scribe are “GO and DO.” But unlike the cleanliness laws, showing mercy is not a line on our to-do list that can be marked off. We never get to put a check mark next to “being a good neighbor”. Not because we’re terrible or because God is a harsh judge, but just because this is the way. Season after season this is how we live life with God.
Being a good neighbor will be different depending on the person in front of me, but based on today’s scripture there are some things I can expect -
I expect to encounter people that I find difficult, because we see the world differently.
I expect that opportunities to show mercy will be inconvenient, and possibly expensive, and that should not keep me from being merciful.
I expect to break rules that I once thought were sacred, to change my mind, and admit it.
I expect that I will have to risk things to follow Jesus, and to accept the consequences of that.
I expect that when I ask God a question, God may follow up with another question, and the answer might turn my life upside down.
I expect to occasionally ask “what am I even doing with my life?” and that God will be with me whether I can answer it or not.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
