Unhurried Grace- Exploring the Parable of the Good Samaritan
"I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'"
–Martin Luther King Jr.
Unhurried Grace
We often like to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own spiritual lives. If we are honest, whenever we listen to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we automatically cast ourselves as the savior. We imagine ourselves walking down that sun-baked road from Jerusalem to Jericho. We see the battered body in the dirt, we imagine our hearts swelling with immediate compassion, and we picture ourselves bandaging the wounds, lifting the stranger onto our backs, and paying the innkeeper. We find ourselves whispering to ourselves, "I am a good person. I am a Good Samaritan."
But there is a profound, disruptive untruth to that casting.
As the progressive historian and theologian Diana Butler Bass sharply reminds us, most of us sitting in comfortable Western churches do not actually possess the cultural standing to be the Samaritan. In the ancient world, Samaritans were not the wealthy philanthropists or the respected do-gooders we think of today. They were the despised outsiders, the marginalized, the ethnically and religiously suspect.
Historically, Samaritans and Jews shared a bitter, centuries-old rivalry rooted in deep theological and ethnic divisions. Following the Assyrian conquest, Samaritans established their own temple on Mount Gerizim and rejected the Jerusalem temple, leading mainstream first-century Jewish society to view them as religious heretics and ethnic adversaries. To a Jewish audience in the ancient world, a "good Samaritan" was a jarring contradiction in terms—the Samaritan represented the ultimate cultural enemy, making Jesus's choice of protagonist a radical subversion of social boundaries.
To look at a text through a progressive, liberationist lens means we must stop misreading our own social location. Butler Bass writes bluntly: "You have too much privilege to be a Samaritan. That’s for the queers, the immigrants, the trans, the blacks, the homeless... Stop making it about you. Confess your dependence."
If we are not the Samaritan, then who are we?
Perhaps we are the religious elites. Perhaps we are the priest and the Levite who see the suffering body and actively choose to pass by on the other side of the road.
We often excuse them by thinking they had deep theological reasons—maybe they were trying to avoid ritual defilement. But social psychology offers a much more convincing reality. In 1973, social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted what is famously known as the "Good Samaritan Experiment" at Princeton Theological Seminary. They took a group of divinity students—people actively training for ministry—and asked them to prepare a short sermon. For half of the students, the assigned topic was the Parable of the Good Samaritan itself.
The researchers then told the students they had to walk across campus to another building to deliver their message. To some, they said, "You're late, hurry up." To others, they said, "You have plenty of time." Along the pathway, the researchers placed an actor slumped over in an alleyway, groaning and coughing in obvious physical distress.
The results were devastating. Whether or not the student was literally thinking about the Good Samaritan story made absolutely no difference in whether they stopped to help. The only factor that mattered was time.
When the seminary students were rushed, only 10% stopped. Some literally stepped over the groaning man to get to the building where they were scheduled to give a speech on... the Good Samaritan.
This is the religion of hurry. It is the capitalism of the soul. We build systems of urgency, productivity, and rigid scheduling that completely insulate us from the flesh-and-blood suffering right in front of us. When we are consumed by our own perceived importance, our own deadlines, and our own institutional survival, we don’t have time for a gut-wrenching, visceral response to suffering. We become the very hypocrites we preach against.
But this is not just a personal failure of time management; it is what the father of Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, calls a manifestation of structural sin. Gutiérrez teaches us that sin is not just an individual misstep; it is institutionalized in historical, social, and economic structures that oppress and isolate. The road to Jericho was notoriously dangerous, a systemic trap for travelers. The priest and the Levite were cogs in a larger temple machine that prioritized institutional survival over human life. When we allow the rush of capitalism and the preservation of our own institutional comfort to dictate our pace, we participate in structural sin. We step over the broken because our systems tell us that our schedules matter more than their survival.
If we are honest enough to see our own reflection in the hurried priest and the entitled lawyer, we are finally ready to look into the ditch.
In her breathtaking book This Here Flesh, the womanist writer and liturgist Cole Arthur Riley forces us to look at the theology of the body—specifically the vulnerable, fragile, and marginalized body. In the modern empire, certain bodies are treated as disposable, easily bypassed, and readily stripped of dignity.
Jesus notes that the man in the ditch was stripped of his clothes. As Harvard theologian Francis Clooney observes in his analysis, this detail is crucial: when you strip a man in first-century Palestine, you take away his identity markers. You can no longer tell if he is rich or poor, Jew or Samaritan, insider or outsider. He is reduced to an anthropos—simply a human body in need of care.
Why was it so easy for the religious leaders to look away from this body?
Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes provides a powerful diagnostic tool for this in her work on the "cultural production of evil." Townes argues that society creates sophisticated cultural narratives, stereotypes, and "fantastic hegemonic imaginations" that normalize the suffering of certain groups. These narratives train us to see the person in the ditch as responsible for their own misfortune, or as an invisible, expected feature of the landscape. The cultural production of evil makes us numb. It tells us that the marginalized body is naturally prone to violence, naturally poor, or naturally "other."
Cole Arthur Riley reminds us that true liberation begins when we honor the sacredness of the body in its fragility. In her liturgies, she writes prayers that speak directly to this: "God of all flesh... Speak over our flesh now: Our bodies are good."
The Samaritan did not ask the man for his theological credentials, his legal status, or his moral history before helping him. The text says the Samaritan’s guts churned—the Greek word is splagchnizomai. It is a physical, visceral emotion. His spirituality was not an abstract set of rules; it was a bodily, empathetic response to another physical being. The Samaritan descended into the dirt, knelt by the body, touched the open wounds, and poured out his own wine and oil. He allowed his own day, his own budget, and his own safety to be completely disrupted by the immediate physical needs of a stranger.
So where does this leave us, the modern church?
It leaves us needing a complete inversion of our spiritual imagination. If we want to truly experience the Gospel in this parable, we must stop trying to be the heroes. We must accept that we are the ones lying face-down in the ditch of our own making—battered by our anxieties, isolated by our privileges, and numbed by our hurried lives.
Gustavo Gutiérrez famously articulated God's "preferential option for the poor." This does not mean God loves the marginalized more than others, but that God is physically and politically present in the ditch. If we want to encounter God, we cannot do it while rushing past suffering to get to our theological meetings. We must go to the ditch.
Our salvation does not come from our ability to fix the world on our own terms. Our salvation comes when we allow ourselves to be rescued by the very people we have spent lifetimes looking down upon, policy-making against, or ignoring from our car windows.
As Diana Butler Bass writes: "Your neighbor is the other one. You call them rapists and they pick your fruit. You call them shiftless and dangerous, and they build your economy. You abhor them and they bless you."
Our healing is bound up in the hands of the marginalized. It is the immigrant, the queer youth, the unhoused neighbor, and the historically oppressed who hold the mirror to our collective brokenness and offer us a way forward. When we receive their care, we are saved from the illusion of our own self-sufficiency.
Emilie Townes calls us to practice a "deeply disciplined hope." This is a hope that refuses to settle for easy charity. It is a hope that unmasks the systems that beat people up on the Jericho road in the first place, while simultaneously tending to the wounds right in front of us.
Cole Arthur Riley beautifully captures this dynamic of communal healing and truth-telling when she writes: "In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place."
When we slow down enough to let our guts churn for one another, when we abandon the exhausting rat-race of the empire to sit in the dirt with the wounded, we are asserting that this world—and the bodies in it—are profoundly worthy of goodness.
Friends, let us repent of our hurry. Let us lay down our clean, spiritual excuses. May we have the courage to slow our pace, to honor the sacred flesh of the neglected, and to humbly allow ourselves to be loved, healed, and carried by the neighbors we least expected.
Amen.
(music by Annemieke McLane and the UCS Choir)