Love thine enemy
A Sermon on Luke 10:25-37
13 July 2025
Let’s have a bit of fun to begin with.
I’d like to play a recording which supports the contention I make on the front of the pewsheet, namely, that the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) has worked its way into western culture, even if it’s understood imperfectly.
Something was lost in the translation of the parable which Mr Dagg received – the Samaritan had become a Samurai – but the idea that we have a moral duty to help strangers (even gnomes) in their hour of need did come through successfully.
The message that love obliges us to help strangers in need is of crucial importance, and is a teaching that will certainly come up in the sermons heard on this Gospel over the course of the day, as the sun rises progressively around the planet this Sunday.
One element of the story that may not be picked up in that preaching is the radical nature of the care that we are called to, because it is not just strangers we are called to care for in this parable, but sworn enemies.
This becomes evident when we consider the historical context in which the parable was told, the identity of the hero and the person rescued, and the identity of the people to whom Jesus told this parable.
Let’s start with the person rescued first of all. His identity isn’t stated directly, but everything points to him being a Jewish man. How do we know that? Well, for two reasons. Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence is that he was said to be coming down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem was the heart of the Jewish faith and the location of their Temple, so the majority of people coming down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, most of the time, would have been Jews. That would be the preconception of Jesus’ listeners – who were Jews themselves, which leads to the second reason we are meant to interpret the hero as being Jewish, because if Jesus didn’t mean him to be understood as Jewish (in the context of the telling of the story – surrounded as he was by Jews) he would have spelled out the man’s ethnicity.
Now, to the hero. His ethnicity is explicitly stated. He is a Samaritan (not a Samurai).
Who were they, you might ask? Well, they were a group of people living in the north-central part of King David’s former Kingdom (at its prime about 1000BC) who survived the invasion of the Assyrians into their territory between 732 and 720BC, and became amalgamated with people of other ethnicities whom the Assyrians deliberately placed there from other parts of their empire, to reduce the likelihood of Israel rising to power again. This heterogenous, multicultural mix of people, however, clung to (in the case of the local remnant) or adopted (in the case of the displaced persons) the same basic Abrahamic faith which the southern Kingdom of Judah would go on to develop into Judaism. Inevitably, there were some differences between the two expressions of faith, which led to inevitable friction. They each had a different opinion, for instance, about where God wanted his temple to be (John 4:20) – specifically on their territory and not on their neighbour’s. And the Jews – for whom genetic pedigree became more and more important after their own exile in Babylon (Ezra 9:12), tended to look down on Samaritans because their pedigree wasn’t completely Abrahamic. It would be fair to say that, as far as Jews of Jesus’ day were concerned, Samaritans were an inferior people with a corrupt and superficial grasp of the true religion.
This has got a bit of a modern ring to it, when you consider what is transpiring in the Gaza strip right now and across the West Bank too, sadly. On one side, are the Israelis who celebrate their descent from Abraham and see themselves as representative of the Jewish tradition; and on the other side are people – the Palestinians, largely Muslim but Christians too – who celebrate Abraham as their father as well and share many of the beliefs and practices fundamental to Judaism (especially the Muslim Palestinians), but without the same claim to biological pedigree.
To say that the Israelis and Palestinians don’t get along is an understatement. They have fought tooth and claw for dominance over the Holy Land for a hundred years, but when one group’s cause is underwritten by a superpower, the outcome for the other side is poor – it’s very much a zero-sum game (winner takes all); and we are seeing the heartbreaking consequences for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families unfolding now, day by day.
One significant New Testament scholar, Amy-Jill Levine – an orthodox, Jewish woman – suggests (in her 2006 book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus) that the parable of the Good Samaritan might best be understood by replacing the beaten man in the parable with a Jewish settler, collapsed beside the same roadway to Jericho, in the West Bank of today (which incidentally is referred to by Israelis as Samaria and Judea). A Rabbi and a Member of the Knesset – the Israeli parliament – notice the man, but speed past. Then, a car pulls up and a Muslim, a member of Hamas even, gets out, checks him over, and despite being quite aware that the man is Jewish, carefully lifts him into his car, and whisks him away to the best hospital he can afford (if there’ one still standing).
A thoughtful western audience – like yourselves – ‘gets’ this retelling, but I think it would be even more humbling – and possibly very aggravating (humanizing the enemy it might be said) – when expressed in the context Levine imagines it being told in – amongst Jewish settlers who want their Rabbi to tell them who their neighbour is, whom they ought to love.
That is how edgy or radical Jesus’ teaching about the nature of love was. It behooves us to remember this, the next time we find ourselves ‘hating’ on a group of people who are different than us; it’s just not the Christian thing to do. If we fall into that trap, God will soon show us the error of our ways, typically by placing in front of us an example of our enemy doing something very laudable.
That ought to humble us and get us back on the path that leads to happiness and heaven.
Tony Surman