Good Samaritan?

Conservatory Orchid, Ginter Botanical Gardens, Richmond, VA

Jesus said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to

Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers.

They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away,

leaving him half dead.  A priest happened to be going down

the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by

on the other side.

Luke 10:30-31

If a preacher wanted to update this parable of the Good Samaritan, they would have to look no further than the morning newspaper and the story from China about the death of a little girl.  Last week, a two-year-old toddler wandered away from her home and into the path of a delivery van.  As she lay bleeding in the street, people walked by or drove by on scooters, some pausing to look at her or swerve to avoid her, but no one stopping to help or call the police.  She was struck by a second van before a Good Samaritan, in the form of illiterate trash collector Chen Xianmei, lifted her out of the road and made the effort to find her mother.

Closed-circuit camera footage from the market revealed eighteen people who either walked or scootered by the body of this child, either ignoring her completely or pausing to look and then continuing on their way – all of them before she was struck by the second van.  If just one of those eighteen people had stopped to carry this child out of the middle of the street, she might still be alive today.  How those eighteen people can look themselves in the mirror is beyond my comprehension.

Life is so incredibly precious; for some people, however, it is only their life that matters.  One Chinese official told the New China News Agency, “We should look into the ugliness in ourselves with a dagger of conscience and bite the soul-searching bullet.”   Indeed, it is easy for people around the world to say, “I would have acted differently!” when, in point of fact, we have no idea how we would react until we are faced with the situation.  In the biblical narrative, the Good Samaritan totally inconvenienced himself in order to save the life of a total stranger.  If I am ever faced with similar circumstances, I pray that I will have the courage and compassion to react in the same manner.

Today’s Prayer Needs

For the family of Yueyue as they grieve the death of their child

For each of us, that we might live a life of compassion