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No Comments The Man in the Ditch
The good Samaritan, we all know the story. The priest and the Levite who passed by and ignored the plight of the man in the ditch knew the law; love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. It all amounted to parsing the words of the law by an expert in the law. Hence the question, who is my neighbor?
Fortunately for the man in the ditch, the good Samaritan didn’t know much about the law, but he did recognize his neighbor when he saw him. It’s noteworthy that the Samaritan was deemed pretty much worthless and unredeemable to the religious leaders who passed by on the other side. These were men so educated and smart that they lacked the ability to show pity. I’m sure they had better more noble things to do that day. Besides, time is valuable, and helping this nobody would require a lot of that precious time not to mention the money involved. On top of that, there was no one to witness the good deed, so obviously, no benefit would come from helping this nobody.
Yes, this story tells us our main responsibility is to look out for each other. We are to be that good Samaritan. However, the story is as much about the man in the ditch. Robbed, beaten, and left for dead, we have no firm idea who he was and neither did the good Samaritan. Maybe he was a good citizen, a family man, someone of high moral character, or maybe not. It’s certainly possible he was the opposite of all that. Maybe he deserved to be laying in that ditch.
If he was the latter then we have to consider that Jesus was telling us simply this, if you see a need then do something about it. It’s interesting that the good Samaritan did what he could at the scene and then put him on his own donkey, his own car. The guy was a dirty bloody mess. I don’t imagine the donkey got too dirty hauling this guy back to town but translate this to today, our car would get blood and dirt on the seat. Cleaning up after is part of the good deed.
To put the cherry on top of this good deed, the Samaritan takes him to a Comfort Inn, pays them to take care of his needs, and follows up with paying them for any extra they did when he returned. The Samaritan had things to do too just like the religious leaders. He had to go somewhere too, he was busy but not to busy to help his neighbor in distress. He helped him and then came back to make sure the man in the ditch was on the mend.
Our problem in this world but especially in this country, we’re neighbor specific. We’ve got to know the social messaging of the person needing help. Are they worthy of attention, of pity? America has arrived at a place where the self-righteous practitioners of woke religion are hostile to those outside of their dystopian teaching. Our young have been taught who to hate, who to pass by, and who to worship by government indoctrination centers. The school system teaches identity politics and we who live in reality are surrounded by an ever-increasing mob of intolerant mindless drones intent on our destruction.
Our job is to continually build what godless lunatics tear down. Like the Israelites in the book of Ezra rebuilt the temple of good. It eventually will be torn down again. The Church of Jesus Christ has been persecuted and torn down worldwide since its inception and now it’s coming to America. Our job is to seek and save the lost in the ditch, keep building and not worry so much about getting to the temple. There’s a lot of work along the way and it’s never finished from generation to generation. Till Christ returns there’s work to be done and much of it gets our hands dirty.