Introduction
This past Lord’s Day, we again considered the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This time we sought to understand and see what mercy looked like in real life. We saw that mercy comes near to those in need, flows from compassionate hearts, and is costly when demonstrated. But there is another dimension of the parable that deserves greater attention than we were able to give it in the sermon: mercy crosses borders.
That is the aspect of the parable we want to consider more closely here.
Who Is My Neighbor?
To see this, we need to take a step back and remember how the parable began. The lawyer asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). Luke tells us that he asked this because he was “wanting to justify himself.”
That detail matters. The lawyer is not simply looking for a definition of neighbor. He is looking for a boundary.
If God commands him to love his neighbor as himself, then he wants to know exactly who qualifies as his neighbor—and, perhaps more importantly, who does not. He wants to know where his obligation to love ends and thereby assure himself that he has kept the command.
The Wrong Hero
Jesus answers by deliberately placing a Samaritan at the center of the story. That choice would have been jarring to His Jewish audience. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans was deep and longstanding. John captures it succinctly when he tells us that “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9).
Their differences involved ancestry, history, worship, and competing religious claims. A Samaritan was not simply a stranger, rather he would have belonged to a class of people whom many Jews regarded with suspicion and contempt.
That is precisely why Jesus makes the Samaritan the man who acts as a neighbor. Jesus could have told essentially the same story with an ordinary Jewish traveler stopping to help the wounded man. The lesson about mercy would still have been there. But Jesus intentionally makes the merciful man someone His audience would have been tempted to despise.
The Samaritan’s identity is not incidental to the parable. It is part of its punch.
Loving Our Own Is Nothing Extraordinary
Jesus makes a similar point in the Sermon on the Mount:
“For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?”
— Matthew 5:46
Loving our own is nothing extraordinary. Tax collectors do that. Pagans do that. Every tribe, political party, social group, family, and community does that.
We naturally care for people who look like us, think like us, appreciate us, and belong to us. Jesus does not condemn such love. His point is that there is nothing distinctly Christian about merely returning affection to those who already give it.
The test comes when mercy is needed by someone who is not “one of us.”
Mercy Crosses Borders
This is where the character of Christ’s kingdom becomes visible. Kingdom mercy crosses the borders we are tempted to draw around it and why the hero was a Samaritan.
It crosses ethnic borders, social borders, political borders, economic borders, and even borders created by old grievances. It refuses to say, “I owe mercy to these people, but not those people.”
The lawyer wanted Jesus to identify the boundaries of neighbor-love. Jesus refused to give him one.
This does not mean that every distinction between people disappears or that every relationship carries identical obligations. Scripture recognizes special duties toward family, church, and those God has particularly entrusted to our care. But those special obligations must never become excuses for withholding mercy from someone simply because he stands outside our circle.
The Samaritan had every cultural and historical reason to regard this wounded Jewish man as “not one of us.” Yet he showed mercy anyway.
He Could Not Say “Samaritan”
There is also a subtle but revealing moment at the end of the exchange. Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?”
The lawyer responds, “He who showed mercy on him” (Luke 10:36–37).
He does not say, “The Samaritan.”
We should be careful not to make that omission bear more weight than the text allows. Yet given the hostility between Jews and Samaritans, it is difficult not to notice. Jesus has forced the lawyer to acknowledge that the despised outsider was the one who actually fulfilled the command to love his neighbor.
The very man the lawyer might naturally have placed outside the boundaries of neighbor-love turns out to be the example Jesus commands him to imitate.
The Mercy That Crossed the Greatest Border
The lawyer began by asking, “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus ends by asking, in effect, “To whom will you be a neighbor?”
There is a world of difference between those questions. The first searches for limits; the second searches for opportunities. The first asks, Whom am I required to love? The second asks, To whom can I show mercy?
And ultimately, this is the kind of mercy that we ourselves have received in Christ.
For there was a far greater border than the one separating Jew and Samaritan. There was the divide between the holy God and sinful man, between the righteous One and the unrighteous, between those who were “far off” and the God against whom they had sinned. Yet Christ did not remain distant.
He crossed that divide.
Jesus came not because we were already His friends, but “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). Indeed, “when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son” (Romans 5:10). The eternal Son took on flesh and came near to those who had made themselves strangers and enemies through sin. As Paul says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13).
That gives the command, “Go and do likewise,” even greater force. We do not cross borders in order to earn the mercy of God. We cross borders because the mercy of God has crossed the greatest border to reach us.
May we as a body in Christ remember and be motivated by this glorious truth.
HCC Blog: https://holycovenantchurch.com/blog/
Sermon Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev3G66XgeRw
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