When the Samaritan comes down the road, he sees the robbed man differently than those that had previously passed him by. It doesn’t matter to him that he doesn’t know this man; he makes the decision that he can’t just walk by and do nothing. This is the mentality that we called to have as followers of Jesus. The mindset of, “I'm going to have eyes for the one that God put on my path.” God allowed something to shift inside of him because when it started happening inside of him, God was going to start to move through him.
This is a divine intersection in this man's life. He knows he has got to get this beaten man to a place where he can really heal and where there are other people around him that can do some things that maybe the Samaritan can’t do himself. But the Samaritan knows he can’t just pray for him or help him from a distance; he’s got to get close.
Jesus calls his followers to go do likewise, as the Samaritan did. Jesus is asking us to love the hard-to-love people that we come across in our own lives. This directive even applies to the mean and messy people that we have met along the path. We need to reach out to them with extra-mile kind of love, because that’s the kind of love that God extends to us on a daily basis even though we can messy or mean ourselves.
Comments