A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. Luke 10:30 (NKJV)
A Priest, a Levite and a Man Left for Dead – Part 4
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3
There was a man walking down the road when he was attacked from behind, stripped, robbed, beaten bloody and broken and left on the side of the road without a care as to whether he would live or die.
Jesus doesn’t tell us much else about this man. We don’t know his name, we don’t know what he did for work, whether he was leaving the temple after sacrifice or whether he was a healer on his way to visiting those in need. We don’t know if he had a family or if he was hated, slave or free… We don’t know anything about him except that he was abused, attacked for no reason, and then thrown down on the side of the road like rubbish, like a chewed up piece of fruit left to rot in the sun. Not only did this man nearly lose his life, but he lost his dignity too. His own personhood was deemed worthless.
He could have been anyone. He could have even been a member of that listening crowd. Perhaps they could have all put themselves in the man’s position and identify with his heartache and pain. Perhaps some of them had had the same experience or had lost a loved one or a neighbour in a similar way. His identity and details were kept obscure and in this he became instantly relatable to all.
“The lawyer had asked about eternal life — he should rather be worried about those left half dead. So should commentators. And yet half dead is still alive; the man is, despite being naked (as would be a corpse before shrouding) and prostrate, alive. Listeners, identifying with him, can only hope that rescue will come. And because they identify with him, their question — and so our question — is: “Who will help me ?”” Amy-Jill Levine “Short Stories by Jesus.”
And as he lay unconscious in the dirt, his wounds roasting in the sun, his life leaking onto the ground beneath him, two men walked right on by. There’s a lot of debate in the theological world at large as to whether or not these two men had reason to stop. Some say that as a Priest and a Levite, they would have broken Sabbath rules, or would have been made unclean if they touched the man. This idea asks us to give these two guys a break. However, it flies in the face of how others interpret the Torah. A Priest, Rabbi, Levite, ANYONE was permitted to break the law, all of them, to save a life. But these two men didn’t stop. They kept on going.
The day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his now famous speech, “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” to a crowd of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. He spoke of this parable, of the Priest and the Levite and said, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road… In the days of Jesus, it came to be known as the ‘Bloody Pass.’ And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”
Have you ever thought those thoughts? Has fear ever held you back from stopping on the side of the road to help a complete stranger? Me? yes.
However, perhaps the parable has more to do with who did stop than who didn’t. A man is lying in a ditch, dying, and everyone he thought would come to his rescue, everyone he expected to stop and help, kept on going. They all walked right on by acting like he wasn't even there.
Until help came from the unexpected.
Go to Part 5 – Beaten Half to Death
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