Preached by the Rev. Deacon Tim Jones
July 13, 2026 at St. James, Hendersonville
When I was on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, our group visited one of Christianity’s oldest churches: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. And it was there that I encountered a fascinating, almost unbelievable story. After I returned home and had a chance to research it a little more, I discovered that it wasn’t just another charming legend or bit of local folklore. It turns out there’s pretty good evidence that this particular story happened the way it’s been told for centuries. And so I want to share it with you today.
In the early 600s the Byzantine Empire was at war with the Persian Sasanian Empire. And in 614, the Persians invaded Syria, Egypt, parts of modern Turkey and the Holy Land. During this campaign they destroyed every church, every monastery, and pretty much all the Christian holy sites that they encountered.
But the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was spared. And the reason for this had to do with a large mosaic mural that was near the entrance. It portrayed the the story of the arrival of the Magi–the wise men, those visitors from the East who were from a part of the cultural world of the Persian Empire.
They were depicted in this mosaic wearing traditional Persian attire. When the Persian soldiers saw this. It stopped them in their tracks because they were astonished to see figures dressed in the clothing of their own ancestors and the vestments of their own religious leaders in this foreign land. And so the building was spared because of this remarkable moment of recognition.
Those Persian soldiers paused their destruction—not because they were ordered to, but because they saw themselves reflected in the sacred art of another faith—and something in them shifted. What should have been just another large church to burn became a mirror. What had been alien to them suddenly was them.
They paused because that’s what recognition causes us to do. And I believe there’s something in that which resonates deeply with the story Jesus told in today’s Gospel reading.
Jesus was a master storyteller. That means the small details that he chose to add to a story are there for a reason. It’s important to pay attention to them.
Think about the details he added to this story. Jesus could have told this exact story in response to that question, “And who is my neighbor?” without any reference to the identities of those three travelers on the road and meaning would still have been crystal clear. Three people came along at different times and encountered a brutal crime scene in a isolated area. And all three people saw a wounded crime victim. The first two went out of their way to avoid getting involved. The third person to come along chose to actively engage the situation at great personal risk and expense. Which one was a neighbor to that crime victim? Obviously, the one who showed mercy.
It’s very clear and easy to understand the meaning without ever having to know that the first two were religious leaders and Bible scholars. It’s very clear and easy to understand without having to know that the third person was a Samaritan, So the question then becomes why did Jesus choose to add those particular details to this story?
Well, it most certainly had something to do with the fact that Jesus was being asked this question by a religious leader who was a Bible scholar— an expert in the law.
And it probably also had to do with the insight that the Gospel writer adds that he was “wanting to justify himself” by asking Jesus this question. So Jesus framed his story in such a way that we’re immediately drawn to ask the question, “Why would, not just one, but two, religious experts in the Bible, not stop to help a crime victim?” If it was just one, you could say it was an isolated, individual instance, but two moves it into the realm of something systemic going on.
Over the years most of the sermons I’ve heard on this text have asked that question and they tend to focus on that very uncomfortable disconnect between knowing the Bible and practicing the Bible.
And that’s an important and still very relevant discussion we should be having, but today I want to shift the spotlight to the other question that this story invites us to ask: “What in the world made a Samaritan stop and get involved in such a dangerous and risky setting?”
Here’s what we need to know: In the time of Jesus, Samaritans were a group of people who were always “those other people” to almost everyone. They were outsiders who didn’t fully belong to one particular group, one particular side. 2000 years later that is still the case. There’s still a very small population of Samaritans in the Holy Land. The Israeli Government considers Samaritans to be Jews, but the Ultra Orthodox Jews who live there do not. Samaritans hold Palestinian ID cards, but they possess Jordanian passports. And it was just as confusing, and probably more so when Jesus first told this story. No one knew where they fit in or quite what to make of them. Pretty much everyone just knew, “they’re not one of us.”
And when we begin to understand that, the way we hear this story changes. Because it becomes a story not about someone who stopped because he had power, but because he understood powerlessness.
As a member of a group that had long been excluded and often even despised by mainstream society, a Samaritan would have known the sting of being avoided and ignored on the road. We all know how this goes: “Don’t make eye contact. We don’t know them and don’t want to know them. Keep moving and just pretend they’re not there.” That would have been something from everyday life for a Samaritan
A Samaritan would have known that very hollow feeling of being passed by, unseen, unhelped—invisible. So, when he saw a person who had been stripped and beaten, lying half-dead with no one stopping to help him, he would have seen more than a body—he saw a story he knew existentially from his own way of being in this world.
The priest and the Levite saw a problem. But more than that: he probably himself.
When we view this story through that lens, it begins to fill out our understanding of this discussion about the second greatest commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
“As yourself.” We have a word for that. It’s called empathy. The ability to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes— to feel what someone else feels. The capacity to recognize ourselves in the shared humanity of another human life.
Recognition awakens empathy. And empathy invites mercy. And the mercy and compassion that empathy produces rests at the heart of the matter of what it means to love our neighbors.
That means loving our neighbor isn’t simply some kind of impersonal, moral obligation. It’s about opening our hearts so that someone else’s life, someone else’s pain, someone else’s hopes and dreams for the future can become just as real to us as our own.
- Empathy collapses distance. It moves us away from the other side of the road and closer to someone else’s real life experience.
- Empathy overrides fear, suspicion and even ideology. When we recognize even just a sliver of ourselves in someone else’s life, it starts to feel personal. Or to use the language of this morning’s text. It moves us with pity and compassion instead of fear and inherited dogmas.
But most of all
- Empathy invites pause. It slows us down.
And that might be the most important movement of this whole story, of this whole business of loving our neighbors. When everyone else kept moving, the Samaritan paused.
Because it’s in that moment of pausing that we encounter our hardest and holiest work, which is to not just carry on as if others don’t somehow exist or as if their lives somehow don’t really matter.
It was that kind of pausing that spared the Church of the Nativity.
It’s that kind of pausing that can free us from giving in to desensitizing, dehumanizing ways of making “those other people” into people who are not like us because when they become not like us it’s awfully easy to begin to think of them as less than us.
I suspect that all of us—-everyone in this room probably has different groups of people who are “those other people” to us.
What if, instead of looking for reasons to ignore them and keep them “over there”, we instead try to look for reflections of our own hardships, our own fears, our own frailties and challenges, in their lives?.
What if it turns out that Jesus was simply trying to tell us that loving our neighbors as ourselves simply starts with seeing ourselves in someone e