Week 12 Day 5 Devotions
Love
“But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on
him.” Luke 10:33
This parable must surely vie with the parable of the Prodigal Son for the position of the most well-known or most popular of all the parables. It is sometimes forgotten that the context of this parable has to do with love. An expert in the law had approached Jesus and asked him what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus had replied by asking him what he thought the answer was to which the law expert replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind,” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” The law expert didn't have a problem understanding the love part of it, his problem was in understanding the neighbour part of it. The truth is, however, that his lack of understanding in the neighbour area was due entirely to his lack of love. In the parable it is not a lack of understanding on the part of the Priest and the Levite regarding who their neighbour was that was the problem, it was their lack of love. The parable of course also teaches us that love of neighbour can be dangerous (stopping to help opened the Samaritan up to possible attack himself), time consuming, costly and ongoing. Fear of these things did not stop the Samaritan from showing his love, neither should it stop us from loving our neighbour as ourself.
Jesus says to the law expert and to us: “Go and do likewise.” Wesley says: “Let us go and do likewise, regarding every man as our neighbour who needs our assistance. Let us renounce that bigotry and party zeal which would contract our hearts into an insensibility for all the human race, but a small number whose sentiments and practices are so much our own, that our love to them is but self love reflected. With an honest openness of mind let us always remember that kindred between man and man, and cultivate that happy instinct whereby, in the original constitution of our nature, God has strongly bound us to each other.”
The words from the following hymn might well, in a sense, be on the lips of someone you
pass today:
O thou good Samaritan,
In thee is all my hope;
Only thou canst succour man,
And raise the fallen up:
Hearken to my dying cry,
My wounds compassionately see,
Me, a sinner, pass not by,
Who gasp for help to thee. (108)
© 2006 JohnWesleyProject.com
