Holiness was walking away from the blood.
Two thousand years of Sunday school turned this into a story about helping people. But Jesus told it to destroy the very architecture of religious righteousness. To reveal how sacred laws become excuses for abandoning love.
The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was called the Blood Way. Everyone knew to travel in groups. Everyone knew not to stop. Everyone knew that mercy on that road could cost you everything.
A lawyer had asked Jesus for the exact minimum requirement for eternal life. Who precisely counts as “neighbor.” Where exactly the boundaries of obligation end.
Jesus answered with a story that demolished every boundary the lawyer was trying to build.
Two religious men walk past a dying man to protect their purity. One heretic stops and ruins himself with mercy. The priest had God’s work to do. Work that required clean hands. The Levite had wisdom on his side.
Whoever did this might still be watching.
The Samaritan had five centuries of hatred telling him to keep walking.
He stopped anyway.
This was never about being kind to strangers. It’s about what happens when love costs more than you budgeted. When God’s work is bleeding in the road. When your enemy needs what only you can give.
The wounded still lie there.
Who is crossing to the other side?
GOOD SAMARITAN
On the Blood Way, the old road from Jerusalem to Jericho where robbers wait in shadows between the rocks, a man fell among thieves.
They came upon him in the narrow place where the cliffs rise steep and the sun never fully reaches. They stripped him of everything: his cloak, his sandals, his purse, his dignity. They beat him with fists and stones until his face was no longer a face but a geography of violence. Then they left him there in the dust, suspended between breathing and not breathing, between this world and whatever waits beyond.
The road stretched empty. The sun climbed higher.
The flies began their work.
A priest came down that road, returning from his service in the temple.
He had stood in the holy place. He had offered prayers and incense on behalf of the people. His robes were white as new snow, his hands washed in the prescribed manner seven times. He was, by every measure that mattered to his world, a righteous man. Learned in the law, meticulous in observance, respected by all who knew him.
He came around the bend and saw the shape in the road.
At first he thought it might be rags, debris, something discarded. But then he saw the blood pooling dark in the dust. He saw the shallow, desperate rise and fall of a chest that had not yet given up.
A man. Barely.
The priest stopped. He stood there calculating the cost of compassion.
To touch blood was to become unclean. To become unclean was to be barred from the temple for seven days, from his duties, from the sacred service he had just completed. The law was explicit. Holiness required separation. Purity demanded distance. God’s work could not be done with defiled hands.
He looked at the dying man. He looked at the road ahead. He looked at his clean robes.
And he crossed to the other side.
He did not run. Running would have been admission. He walked with measured steps, a man with somewhere important to be, a man whose righteousness could not afford contamination.
Next came a Levite, set apart from birth for the work of God’s house.
He too saw the shape. He too paused. Perhaps he even took a step closer, close enough to see the extent of damage, the professional beating that spoke of practiced violence.
He considered what helping would cost. The inconvenience of it. The delay to his journey. The blood that would stain his clothes and mark him as one who had touched death. The risk—because whoever had done this might still be watching from the rocks, waiting for the next fool to stop and make himself vulnerable.
The Levite weighed mercy against wisdom.
And he also passed by on the other side.
Two religious men. Two decisions. The same clean hands walking away from the same dirty work of love.
Then came a Samaritan.
Between his people and the wounded man’s people lay five centuries of theological warfare. The kind of hatred that gets passed down like heirloom silver, polished with each generation until it shines like truth. Jews spat when they spoke the word “Samaritan.” They would not eat from the same dish, drink from the same well, stand beneath the same roof. They had separate temples, separate scriptures, separate gods wearing the same name.
The rabbis taught that a Samaritan’s testimony was worthless in court. That their women were perpetually unclean. That their very shadow could contaminate.
A good Jew would die of thirst before accepting water from Samaritan hands.
The Samaritan came around the bend and saw the man lying in the road.
He saw the blood. He saw the broken breathing. He saw what any traveler could see: here was a Jew, circumcised, wearing the remnants of fringed garments that marked him as one of the chosen people who considered Samaritans less than dogs.
And something in the Samaritan broke.
Not his theology. That remained intact. Not his memory of insults endured and ancestors dishonored. Something deeper than doctrine, older than division. Something that recognized suffering as the universal language that needs no translation.
The categories collapsed. The ancient architecture of us and them crumbled like walls made of sand. What remained was simpler than religion and truer than tribe: here was a human being dying alone, and here was he, carrying wine and oil and the terrible freedom to choose.
He went to him.
Not cautiously. Not reluctantly. He went the way a mother goes to a crying child, the way water flows downhill. Naturally, inevitably, without negotiation.
He knelt in the blood-darkened dust. He poured his own wine, the wine meant for his journey, his comfort, his arrival celebration, onto wounds that hissed and wept. The man gasped, a sound torn from somewhere beyond pain. The Samaritan kept pouring. He followed with oil—expensive oil, the kind that marked special occasions, now soaking into torn flesh that would never thank him for it.
He tore strips from his own cloak to make bandages. With each tear, he made himself poorer. His hands, which had been clean, became slick with another man’s blood. His garments, which had marked him as a merchant of some standing, became rags that marked him as a fool.
Then he lifted the man—this enemy, this bigot, this Jew who would have crossed the street to avoid his shadow on a different day—and set him on his own beast.
Think about this: the Samaritan walked so the Jew could ride.
The one who was hated carried the one who hated. The rejected became the rescuer. The excluded became the includer.
He brought him to an inn and cared for him through the night.
He did not dump him at the door with a few coins. He stayed. He washed wounds that kept bleeding. He gave water when the man could drink, wiped his brow when fever came. He sat in the darkness beside someone who, if conscious, might have refused his care. He kept watch through the long hours when death circles closest, when the body decides whether to fight or surrender.
He guarded the sleep of his enemy.
When morning came and his own life called him onward. Because even saints have schedules, even mercy has meetings to keep. He reached for his purse. Pulled out two denarii. Two full days’ wages. The price of sixty loaves of bread.
He gave them to the innkeeper with instructions that would have seemed insane anywhere else: “Take care of him. Whatever more you spend, I will repay when I return.”
No limit set. No conditions stated. No collateral demanded.
He bound his own future to a stranger’s recovery. He made another man’s healing his financial responsibility. He signed a blank check written on the account of compassion.
The innkeeper took the coins, probably wondering if he’d ever see this Samaritan again. Wondering what kind of fool guarantees the debts of an enemy.
And then the Samaritan left. Back to the road, back to his journey, back to his life that would be forever marked by this detour into someone else’s disaster.
Jesus finished the story and looked at the lawyer who had asked, “Who is my neighbor?”
The lawyer, who had wanted to justify himself, who had wanted neat boundaries around his obligations, who had wanted to know exactly how far love had to stretch before it could snap back to safety, stood there with his careful categories in ruins.
“Which of these three proved to be a neighbor?” Jesus asked.
The lawyer could not even say the word “Samaritan.” His throat closed around it like a fist. “The one who showed mercy,” he managed.
“Go,” Jesus said, “and do likewise.”
Not “go and think about it.” Not “go and feel inspired.” Not “go and debate the theological implications.”
Go and do.
The story ends there, but the road doesn’t.
The Blood Way still winds between Jerusalem and Jericho. It runs through every city, every neighborhood, every comment section where humans wound each other with words sharp as stones. The thieves still strike—they wear different masks but leave the same wreckage. The wounded still bleed in plain sight while the righteous calculate the cost of involvement.
The priest and Levite had their reasons. Good reasons. Sacred reasons. They were protecting their purity for God’s work.
But God’s work was lying there bleeding in the road.
The Samaritan had his reasons too. Five centuries of them. A library of legitimate grievances. An ancestry of exclusion that should have justified walking past.
But mercy doesn’t check your papers. Love doesn’t verify your theology. Compassion doesn’t ask for your pedigree or your voting record or your position on the issues that divide us into armed camps.
It just sees the blood and brings the wine.
It sees the wound and tears the cloth.
It sees the enemy and recognizes the neighbor.
The road is still there. The wounded still lie in the dust.
And you. You with your clean hands and your good reasons and your careful calculations about what helping might cost—you are approaching the bend where decision waits.
Who is crossing to the other side?
<3EKO
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I agree that Sunday School version of the parables are like breast milk compared to raw, red meat of the truth contained therein. But don’t we all start out as infants in this faith journey? A heart that recognizes “separation was always an illusion” has been given grace to grow in faith and discern the truth by reading and re-reading God’s Word. Thanks be to God!
When love costs us more than we budgeted. Hmm. These stories help us; they help us to wake up to reality, to truth. This is the kingdom of heaven, not a place but a way of being in this world. These stories aren't told to help us be better people. These stories are told to open us up. To face our own shadow, to break us open. Then to break us open, again and again, until there is an opening in us. In the process, we will have repeated opportunities to surrender. None of this is an intellectual exercise. It is pure spirit. We will surrender, and we will do it again and again. Our egos will no longer control us. Spirit will guide and keep us until we leave this iteration of what we call our lives. Thank you, EKO.