Lectionary Reflection for Proper 10C on Luke 10:25-42

THE SHAME OF NEED

Never attempt an eighty-kilometre cycle with no training. I learned that lesson the hard way.

A few years ago, I served as the minister at a church which had a very active cycling group. In my second year, they persuaded me to join them in one of the popular cycle races in Johannesburg. After months of training, I managed to complete the almost 100-kilometre course on a good-quality borrowed bike in my goal of six hours. I had thought I had done my duty, but the group kept asking me to join them, and so I relented. I bought an entry-level bike and waited for a chance to join them on a training ride. Unfortunately, it was three months before I had a chance to get back on the bike, and I hadn’t realised how long the ride would be. About twenty kilometres in, my legs were already starting to feel fatigued. When we got to fifty, I realised that I should probably have done at least some training in preparation. Somewhere around the seventy-kilometre mark, I found myself looking up a long, steep hill and questioning my life choices. I took a deep breath and started the climb, but I soon realised that I wasn’t going to make it. I was already far behind the rest of the group, so I got off my bike and accepted my fate—I would be walking the rest of the way. A few minutes later, the two leaders of the group joined me. They told me to get back on the bike and start pedalling. Each of them put a strong hand on my back and pushed me up the hill. If I contributed even ten per cent of the energy, it was a lot. The rest of the team was waiting for me at the top of the hill, and they cheered me when I finally joined them. I was grateful for their grace and for the support I had received. But I also felt ashamed that I had needed their assistance. I would much rather have been helping than being helped.

One of the great challenges of Western, individualist culture is that we have come to see need as a weakness. The admirable person is strong, self-sufficient, and in control. They help others, but they do not need help, and they do not ask for it. If they seek investment or expertise from others, it’s always a transaction—they either pay for what they want or they reciprocate in some way. It’s never framed as a situation of need, but rather as a partnership, or an opportunity to participate in some great adventure. To even suggest that these so-called self-made individuals may need—or have benefited from—help in any way is an insult of the highest order. When, in a speech on July 13, 2012, President Barack Obama dared to suggest that successful people did not build the roads, bridges, systems, and supports that helped make their businesses successful, he was attacked for insulting small business owners.^¹

But there’s another—darker—side to this culture of self-sufficiency: to need help is shameful. Even though I believe strongly in our interdependence and that we can only thrive when we work together, help one another, and share generously, I still wrestled with shame when I was the one who needed help. This sense that not being self-sufficient is a weakness, a sign of some lack in our goodness or competence, filters through our whole society and influences our relationships, social engagements, and politics. To be vulnerable or poor is to be treated with suspicion, condemnation, and rejection—no questions asked or understanding sought. Poverty is the fault of the poor who didn’t work hard enough or make good choices. Disability and vulnerability are the fault of the disabled and vulnerable ones who didn’t care for themselves well enough or protect themselves strongly enough. As Esau McCaulley notes, “Too many Americans believe that poverty isn’t enough. That we need to punish the poor—assuming that if we make it difficult enough, they will work harder to get out of poverty. We treat callousness as an act of love.”²

In some faith circles, Jesus is presented as the ultimate example of self-sufficiency. His statement, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45 NRSV), is often taken to mean that Jesus had no need. His call for his followers to be “slaves of all” (Mark 10:44 NRSV) supports the idea that good, strong people help others but never need to be helped. While we probably wouldn’t admit it, many of us resonate with Peter’s reaction to having his feet washed by Jesus: “You will never wash my feet.” And we probably don’t acknowledge how uncomfortable we feel at Jesus’ easy acceptance of Mary anointing his feet with expensive perfume and drying them with her hair. But Jesus never pretended to be self-sufficient. On the contrary, he constantly enlisted help and encouraged his followers to do the same. The Gospels tell us that Jesus’ work was supported by wealthy women (Luke 8:3); in John’s version of the feeding of the large crowd, Jesus gratefully uses the gift of five loaves and two fish provided by a young child (John 6:9); and even on the road to his death, he accepted Simon of Cyrene’s help (albeit commanded by Roman soldiers) in carrying his cross (Matthew 27:32).

We think that loving our neighbours is all about serving them. But that too easily gets distorted by our arrogance and self-satisfaction. We too easily feel superior because the power dynamics of charity in our society favour the giver and disempower the receiver. But in the Parable of the Compassionate Samaritan,³ which is the reading for Proper 10C in the Revised Common Lectionary, Jesus showed that it can be just as loving to give our neighbour the dignity of being the one to serve and help, and he undermines the power dynamics that make it shameful to be in need.

WHERE DO WE SEE OURSELVES?

One great way of reading Scripture is to place ourselves in the story or teaching on which we meditate, but when we do this, it is important to avoid being too selective about where we place ourselves. For example, where would you place yourself in the Parable of the Compassionate Samaritan? Most of us would like to think of ourselves (without thinking too deeply, of course) as the Samaritan—he’s the “good” guy. If we’re honest, though, we might be willing to recognise that we aren’t always like that. Sometimes we’re the “bad” guys—the priest and Levite who lacked compassion and just passed by.⁴ This approach to the parable is common and supported by tradition, but it doesn’t come to grips with the scandal of this text. Luke’s narrative setting and Jesus’ telling of this story in Luke’s Gospel are designed to scandalise his audience and subvert their socially constructed worldviews. As Audrey West notes, “If Jesus had told a parable with a Foreigner-Samaritan as the injured and vulnerable person and a Jewish Jesus-follower in the role of the helper, nobody would have batted an eyelash. Such a story would follow culturally expected scripts and would confirm the lawyer’s self-justification.”⁵ But this is not how Jesus frames his narrative. Rather, as with all his parables, he invites his audience to place themselves in the story as the characters with whom they would least want to identify.

Luke’s placing of this parable at this point in his narrative also adds another dimension. From the moment Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51), Luke has been challenging our social hierarchies and stereotypes. Jesus honours the boundaries of the Samaritan villagers who refuse to welcome him, rebuking his disciples for wanting to call down fire upon them. Then he sends his disciples out without resources, forcing them to live as poor, needy people who rely on the hospitality of the villagers to whom they will go. In this way, he declares the centrality of hospitality, of mutual care and help, in his message and mission, while contradicting any suggestion that only those who provide help are good or acceptable.⁶ Now, almost as an interruption in the celebration on the disciples’ return from their travels, a lawyer questions Jesus about what qualifies someone for eternal life. Luke tells us that the question is a test, but Jesus’ response, as usual, turns the test around and challenges the lawyer’s preconceptions about worthiness, compassion, and life in God’s reign. In the same way, Luke’s placing of this parable in this context invites us to enter into his narrative in unexpected and potentially transformative ways—by placing not just ourselves, but the Jesus who is heading toward his execution, in the story.

Let’s begin with the familiar approach of seeing ourselves as the Samaritan. Mark Vitalis Hoffman invites us to frame this reading in this way:

The victim was stripped, beaten, and left for dead. Sound familiar? From a Christian viewpoint, if we think of Jesus as that person, then how do we read? Are we not forced to conclude, “We are the Samaritan”? Can you imagine any self-respecting Jew in Jesus’ day saying that? From this perspective, we are forced to conclude that being a neighbor is not simply a matter of doing good but of identifying with the last, lost, least, little, and lifeless.⁷

When we remember that just a few verses before, Luke had included the story of the Samaritan village that refused to welcome Jesus, we can see how the writer had set us up to view the Samaritans as “bad” and unacceptable. But now, the Samaritan in this parable gives a completely different picture. On the one hand, like Jesus’ audience and Luke’s first readers, we would want to identify with the one who was compassionate, but not as the one who was socially, politically, and ethnically unacceptable. In this dilemma, Luke challenges the lines we draw and the definitions we believe about goodness and badness and who falls into which category.

But what if we change our approach and reread this parable differently? The one person in the story we seldom seem to identify with is the man who was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. Perhaps this is because we don’t want to imagine ourselves as the victims of crime, or we are too obsessed with avoiding the shame of being in need. But what happens if we allow ourselves to imagine being the one who is naked, wounded, and in need of help? That’s hard for most of us. It takes significant humility to see ourselves not as the ones loving our neighbours, but as the neighbour who needs to be loved. This is how Debie Thomas frames the parable using this lens:

Perhaps what we need to do is locate ourselves, not in the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan, but in the wounded man, dying on the road. Notice that he is the only character in the story not defined by profession, social class, or religious belief. He has no identity at all except naked need. Maybe we have to occupy his place in the story first—maybe we have to become the broken one, grateful to anyone at all who will show us mercy—before we can feel the unbounded compassion of the Good Samaritan. Why? Because all tribalisms fall away on the broken road. All divisions of "us" and "them" disappear of necessity. When you're lying bloody in a ditch, what matters is not whose help you'd prefer, whose way of practicing Christianity you like best, whose politics you agree with. What matters is whether or not anyone will stop to show you mercy before you die.⁸

We all have times when, out of opportunity or necessity, we will accept help. But generally, we are extremely choosy about the people whose help we will accept. If our need is met by those whom we consider to be better than us, or who have something we want, that is somehow acceptable—it can be framed in positive, face-saving ways. But we all have people whose help would be beneath us to receive. Jesus’ parable seeks to erase those lines and calls us into the deep humility—not shame—of needing and receiving help without judging the one who offers it.

THE HUMILITY OF PARTNERSHIP

Once we can embrace the humility and love of allowing any neighbour to serve us, our whole approach to the world changes. The lawyer who approached Jesus asked him, “Who is my neighbour?” But Jesus turned the question around: after telling his parable, he asked the lawyer, “Who acted like a neighbour?” Action-oriented words are the structure on which this parable is built. The lawyer asked what he must do. Jesus responded, “Do this and you will live.” Then, after he had told his parable, Jesus asked which of the characters had been a neighbour (through actions of compassion) to the wounded man. And finally, after the lawyers grudgingly admitted that it was the Samaritan,⁹ Jesus declared, “Go and do likewise.”

For Jesus, it’s not important who is helping and who is being helped. What’s important is that we all see each other as neighbours, and that we all act like neighbours to each other. As Steven Fine puts it, “The story is not just about helping a stranger but also helping and being helped by someone who looks like an enemy.” In other words, it’s about learning to see life as a partnership between us all. It’s about recognising that we all have dignity, we all have worth, we all have a contribution we can make to one another, and we all sometimes need help. It’s about allowing serving and being served to become a natural rhythm of our lives because that is how we truly love our neighbours. But it is also about recognising the scandal of embracing the way of mutual care. In 2016, Debie Thomas presciently framed this scandal in this way:

Is there anything we can do in our contemporary lives to recover the scandal at the heart of this parable? Because its heart is a scandal. Think about it this way: Who is the last person on earth you'd ever want to deem "a good guy?" The last person you'd ask to save your life? Whom do you secretly hope to convert, fix, impress, control, or save—but never, ever need?

At the risk of offending my readers, I'll throw out some possibilities:

An Israeli Jewish man is robbed, and a Good Hamas member saves his life. A liberal Democrat is robbed, and a Good conservative Republican saves her life. A white supremacist is robbed, and a Good black teenager saves his life. A transgender woman is robbed, and a Good anti-LGBTQ activist saves her life. An atheist is robbed, and a Good Christian fundamentalist saves his life.

I don't mean for one moment to trivialize the real and agonizing differences that divide us. I dare not do that—not when those differences have stinging real-world consequences. But the enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus's day was not theoretical; it was embodied and real…¹⁰

Only when we are willing to recognise that we all need one another; that our dependence on each other is a strength, not a weakness; that it is only in sharing and mutual compassion that we can all thrive together; will we be able to build the kind of lives, relationships, and world that we long for. Only when we have learned to honour the value, gifts, and capacity to help in all of us can we truly say we have begun to understand and experience living as citizens of God’s reign.

LOVING AND BEING LOVED

The Lectionary connects Jesus’ parable with his visit to the home of Martha and Mary. This story frames the tension between helping and being helped in a different, seemingly contradictory way. While Martha goes about the business of showing hospitality to Jesus and his friends, Mary crosses cultural boundaries and takes the place of a disciple, usually reserved for men, at the feet of the rabbi. Perhaps there are two additional truths that we can glean when we place this scene beside the parable. Firstly, Martha complained that Mary had left her “to do all the work” (Luke 10:40 NRSV) by herself. These words seem to indicate that Martha was serving not from a sense of joy and freedom, but as a socially dictated burden. It wasn’t so much that Martha was loving, but that she was fulfilling an expected role because she felt she had no choice—Jesus noted that she was “distracted by many things.”

One of the great challenges of our unequal society is that doing good things is often a means to selfish or ’less good’ ends. Jesus seems to be noting that the state of the heart matters.¹¹ If our care is motivated by, or stirs within us, a sense of superiority, or an expectation of applause, perhaps we have not yet learned to love and be loved. It is not that good actions done for bad reasons become bad, necessarily—Martha’s work is still called diakonia (service), which gives it the same value as the Samaritan’s care for the wounded man.¹² It’s that true love acts in the freedom of choice and in the freedom from unloving or self-serving motives, and this is what gives it its transforming, healing power.

The key attitude of the heart, then, relates to how we understand the term ‘neighbour.’ Paul Ricoeur addresses this question by stating that “one does not have a neighbor. I make myself someone’s neighbor.”¹³ This means that our neighbours are not geographically defined. A neighbour is not someone who lives in my neighbourhood or nation. It is not someone who looks, thinks, dresses, loves, or votes like me. Being a neighbour is not an accident of where we find ourselves or who crosses our path. It is a way of being, a choice to view and treat others as valuable, sacred, and worthy of love. And it is a choice to be a neighbour in the sense that we value the care, support, and help others offer us as much as we value whatever contributions we can make to their lives. As Joel Green puts it, “Neighbor love knows no boundaries.”¹⁴

Right now, as we witness human beings hating, bombing, and dehumanising one another, our definition of the neighbour matters. As we see people who claim to follow Jesus celebrating a law that takes money from the poorest and gives it to the wealthiest, our ideas of who deserves help, care, and to be treated as a neighbour have real-world implications. And as we face laws that criminalise those who are most vulnerable and marginalised, our choice of whether to be a neighbour or not has literal life-and-death consequences. To quote Debie Thomas one more time:

"Who is my neighbor?" the lawyer asked. Your neighbor is the one who scandalizes you with compassion, Jesus answered. Your neighbor is the one who upends all the entrenched categories and shocks you with a fresh face of God. Your neighbor is the one who mercifully steps over the ancient, bloodied line separating "us" from "them," and teaches you the real meaning of "Good."¹⁵

1. Andrew Rosenthal, You Didn’t Build That, July 27, 2012, in The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/you-didnt-build-that/). Accessed July 6, 2025

2. Esau McCaulley, A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth, August 11, 2023, on The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/opinion/time-poverty-money.html). Accessed July 4, 2025

3. I have borrowed this title for the parable from Joel B. Green’s excellent commentary, The Gospel of Luke (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997 Kindle Edition, p.424), because I feel it is more appropriate and helpful than the traditional title of “The Good Samaritan”.

4. As Mitzi J. Smith points out, though, no character in this parable is identified as either “good” or “bad” by Jesus. See her Commentary on Luke 10:25-42, February 21, 2021, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/good-samaritan-2/commentary-on-luke-1025-42-3). Accessed July 3, 2025

5. Audrey West, Commentary on Luke 10:25-42, March 5, 2017, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/good-samaritan-2/commentary-on-luke-1025-42-2). Accessed July 3, 2025

6. For a deeper treatment of this passage, see my Lectionary Reflection for Proper 9C on Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 (https://sacredise.substack.com/p/lectionary-reflection-for-proper-41f)

7. Mark G. Vitalis Hoffman, Commentary on Luke 10:25-42, February 17, 2013, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/good-samaritan/commentary-on-luke-1025-42). Accessed July 3, 2025

8. Debie Thomas, Go and Do Likewise, July 03, 2016, on Journey with Jesus (https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1023-go-and-do-likewise). Accessed July 4, 2025

9. As Robert P. Hoch-Yidokodiltona notes, the lawyer can’t seem to bring himself to say the word ‘Samaritan’—he simply says “the one who had mercy…” (emphasis in the original article). See his, March 9, 2025, on Working Preacher (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/good-samaritan-2/commentary-on-luke-1025-42-4). Accessed July 3, 2025

10. Debie Thomas, Go and Do Likewise

11. Robert P. Hoch-Yidokodiltona, Commentary on Luke 10:25-42

12. Ibid.

13. Paul Ricoeur, “The Socius and the Neighbor,” in his History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 98–109. Quoted in David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible), 2012 (Kindle Edition), p.147

14. Joel. B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, p. 426

15. Debie Thomas, Go and Do Likewise