A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, 13 July 2025
Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Psalm 25:1-10; Luke 10:25-37
Unfortunately, there were technical problems which prevented this service from being livestreamed.
About thirty years ago I was the minster of a URC congregation in Liverpool where the children and the young people of the junior church were leading the Sunday morning service. They decided to present an updated version of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The plan was for a young person, wearing a Manchester United top to stroll on at the front of the church as someone began reading the parable from Luke’s Gospel. He would be set upon by a crowd, all wearing Everton tops, who would leave him lying on the ground. He would then be found by others passing by – ones who were all wearing Liverpool tops. These Good Samaritans would not be put off by the Manchester United top, but would care for his wounds, pick him up, and carry him off stage…
The first obstacle to this plan was finding someone in Liverpool who owned a Manchester United top, but an anonymous donor was located. The next problem, which arose on the day itself, was nerves. The drama had been practised and perfected prior to the church service. On the day, however, the “man” had only just appeared on stage, and the reader had barely got, “A man was going down from Jerusalem …” out of their mouth, when the Evertonians rushed forward to launch their attack.
They delivered a swift series of over-enthusiastic blows, then disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Even before they had exited stage right, however, the Liverpudlians sprinted forward, dragged the Man-U supporter to his feet, and then, quick as you like, they too all disappeared from view. The Bible reader had got about as far as, ‘and fell into the hands of robbers’ but it was all over.
The congregation were bemused by this un-signalled, quickfire series of events. “What on earth was all that about?” asked those who had not blinked at the wrong moment and so missed all of the action. It was, in a way, a successful telling of this biblical tale in that people could not let the familiar words just slide over them. They had to ask themselves, “what is this all about?”
At first it seems obvious what the Parable of the Good Samaritan is all about. ‘An expert in the law’ asked Jesus ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life.’ (10:25) Jesus turned the question around by asking this lawyer what the law had said on the matter. Law here, was the Torah – the religiously based law for life which appeared in the Pentateuch; the first five books in our Bibles: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Hence our first reading from Deuteronomy, which says that abundant life comes to us ‘when you obey the LORD your God by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law.’ (Deut.30:10) God’s law, which guided people into right living, enabling community to flourish, was seen as a gift from God, as today’s psalm declares: ‘Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation.’ (25:4, 5)
As far as summing up the law is concerned, the lawyer is a good interpreter; ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself’ (10:27); a combination of verses from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This sparks the question about the identity one’s neighbour (10:29), which leads Jesus to tell the parable, where, to the grudging agreement of all, it’s the Samaritan who showed mercy to the man on the road. (10:37a) Therefore, says Jesus, ‘go and do likewise.’ (10:37b)
So, then, the parable is about setting us a good example of how we should relate to others – neighbours – including those we find it less easy to love. Except that it’s about more than that, and to better appreciate this consider the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.[1]
A young blonde woman goes for a walk in the forest where she finds a house which belongs to Daddy, Mummy and Baby Bear. They are away so Goldilocks has a nose-around inside their house. She finds three bowls of porridge, all of which she samples. The first is too salty, the second too sweet, but the third is just right and eats it all up. Likewise she tries out three chairs. The first two are too big, but the third one is just right, and she sits down on it. Then she’s off to the bedroom, where the first bed is too hard, the second too soft, but the third is just right, so she lies down upon it and goes to sleep.
At this point the three bears return, and we go through a similar sequence of three bowls examined in turn, three chairs examined in turn, and finally the three beds, with the intruder discovered in the third one. Goldilocks wakes up, screams with fright, and exits the house faster than a scouse junior church member.
That story has endured in part because it obeys “The Rule of Three” – three bowls, three chairs, three beds; each examined by three bears, so that makes for a three times three sort of story. It has that process of one, two, three, where three is the best of the bunch – it’s just right – and any problems are resolved: the appropriate porridge, the best chair, the comfortable bed.
If I told you a United Reformed Church story that follows this rule of three you expect the third to be the best of the bunch – to be just right. There was a URC minister, a URC Elder, and … a URC member … There was a Jewish priest, another Jewish religious worker (Levite), and a good law-observant Jewish religious person …
Except, that’s not what happens in the parable. Instead of the third person being a good law-observant everyman (or woman) … it’s a Samaritan. If Jesus had told the parable just to provide a good example of how people should behave he would have made the third person Jewish – like himself and like his listeners.
Instead, Jesus makes the third person a Samaritan. Thinking back, perhaps that Liverpool junior church production should have had the Manchester United supporter as the Good Samaritan, not the victim. In the parable Jesus is encouraging us to be good to our neighbours. However, he is also doing something more; he is asking us to contemplate an alternative world; God’s world; the one where even enemies help each another.
I wonder how the lawyer reacted to Jesus’s ‘Go and do likewise’? I imagine that his reaction (and that of many around him) might have something like, “Yeah, a world where Samaritans help out Jews (and vice-versa); that’s never going to happen.” Just possibly, though, perhaps his eyes were opened to the possibility of a different world, to a world that is coming, but which has not yet fully arrived; the world in the new era when God’s will is done on earth as it is done in heaven.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is hugely challenging; more so than we might realise or wish to imagine. It’s hard enough to respond to it by trying to be the good neighbour to everyone as Jesus seems to demand, whether they be Liverpool or Manchester, Newcastle or Sunderland, Jew or Samaritan. But Jesus is also asking us to believe that a whole new world is coming, one where the apparently irreconcilable are reconciled. So which to you find harder to believe – that you might love everyone or that God is going to change everything?
The Parable of the Good Samaritan describes a world that does not exist. It’s one where Ukrainians and Russians, Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis rush to help each other out when the other suffers injury. Can you see it? I’m struggling to do so. And yet Jesus insists on telling a parable in which the “just-right” person is a “wrong-un” – a representative of the ones with whom you can never be reconciled, at least not in this world.
Instead we’re invited to look forward to a different world, the new world that God is bringing into being. It’s the world of heaven come to earth. God begins to bring it in through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus; and he points to it in his parables. And we’re invited to follow him, taking the first steps of that journey to this new world. So may God make us good neighbours as we set out on that journey whose destination in the kingdom of God come upon earth. Amen.
[1] I got the idea for this from Tom Long’s book, “Proclaiming the Parables”