The Rev. Brandon C. Ashcraft
Trinity Church in the City of Boston
Luke 10:25-37
5 Pentecost / Proper 10C (July 13, 2025)
The Guidepost to Eternal Life
My family and I just returned from a vacation to Norway. A journey that took us deep into the Arctic Circle as we sailed along miles of jagged, majestic coastline. Our guides at one point noted that alongside the beauty of the fjords lurks a real-and-present danger. Rockslide tsunamis are an inevitable consequence of erosion. It’s not a question of if but when. Indeed, from a very young age, inhabitants of the low-lying villages become accustomed to drills, training them to race for higher ground at the sound of the warning siren. This dichotomy of the natural world – beauty alongside peril – is not unique to the Norwegian fjords. Last week, from halfway across the world, I read the horrific news that flash floods had ravaged the picturesque hill country of Texas.1 Edgar Sandoval and Pooja Salhotra, “Families Wait for Word of Missing as Texas Floods Death Toll Hits 120,” The New York Times, July 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/texas-floods-missing-search.html. Flooding that claimed more than 100 lives, many of them young girls from a Christian summer camp.
Any loss of life in a natural disaster is a cause for sadness, but the loss of young life is a sadness without comparison. Over the last year in our life at Trinity Church, we’ve explored the complex questions at the intersection of human suffering and our faith in an all-loving God. And while seeking to reconcile these questions is a part of faithful living, I’m convinced it’s a futile endeavor when it comes to the loss of young life. Efforts to make sense of such senseless loss will inevitably fall short. Theological constructs are no balm for this kind of grief. Far more powerful than words are gestures of compassion and solidarity with those who are suffering and grieving.
For many years, a man named Ayman Soliman provided this kind of compassionate pastoral care at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, serving as a chaplain in the Neonatal ICU. A setting where senseless suffering is in no short supply. In the words of one of Mr. Soliman’s colleagues, “Ayman faithfully accompanied families through some of their most painful moments…Words can’t fully express the comfort and hope his presence brought in these agonizing moments.”2 Elizabeth Diop, Facebook, July 9, 2025, 5:28pm, https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DomDeuSde/. Chaplain Soliman immigrated to the United States from Egypt just over ten years ago. Having reported on the Arab Spring uprising as a journalist, he feared the retribution of his government, so he sought the protective shield of asylum that had been a hallmark of our nation’s immigration policy. Last week, Chaplain Soliman was inexplicably detained by authorities from ICE and is now threatened with deportation. And it goes without saying: he can no longer provide pastoral care to grieving families from the confines of his prison cell.
I became acquainted with his story because it has been shared widely in recent days by people of faith. Faithful Christians anticipating the parable that would be read today in churches throughout the world. This parable that defies any efforts to narrow or restrict our definition of “neighbor.” This parable that calls us to show mercy and kindness without regard for ethnicity or creed. Although the word “Samaritan” has become synonymous with kindness and compassion in the 21st century, in Jesus’ first century world, it had a radically different meaning. A Samaritan was a foreigner. The quintessential outsider. A Samaritan was one who practiced the wrong religion and the wrong customs. Amid a political climate hostile to immigrants and foreigners, Chaplain Soliman – an Egyptian Muslim – is something of a modern-day Good Samaritan. Not least because his ministry of compassionate care mirrors that of the Samaritan.
His story and others like it beckon the Church to offer a prophetic indictment.
To critique those in power whose rhetoric and policies seek to narrow our understanding of who is worthy of being considered our neighbor. When “Alligator Alcatraz” becomes an emblem of our immigration policy, the Body of Christ must condemn such initiatives as antithetical to the teachings of our faith.3 Hamed Aleaziz, “Florida Builds ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center for Migrants in Everglades,” The New York Times, June 23, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/us/politics/florida-alligator-alcatraz-migrant-detention-center.html. Turning our gaze inward, we at Trinity Church can find comfort knowing that we have recently launched an immigration ministry. A ministry that has adopted the name “Trinity Neighbors” in a nod to today’s parable. In the work of this ministry, we join faith communities across the Church in witnessing to another way than the way of the powers and principalities. Against this backdrop of growing oppression, we seek to extend the mercy of the Good Samaritan, as Jesus calls us to. And with all that said, it would be tempting – indeed, quite satisfying – to drop the mic and end this sermon right here. But that would not do the parable justice.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best-known stories in scripture.
And the peril of such familiarity is that the parable ceases to surprise us. We become convinced we know the moral of the story, and that moral goes something like this:
- The priest and the Levite are the bad guys, because they failed to love their neighbor.
- So as Christians we should identify with the Samaritan, the good guy, the one who kept God’s law by loving his neighbor.
This is a very straightforward and dare I say satisfying take on the parable. But the parables of Jesus are not intended to satisfy us. They are intended to shock and scandalize us. To challenge and convict us.
Amy Jill-Levine, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Jesus’ parables, goes so far as to say that “our reaction [to the parables] should be one of resistance rather than acceptance.”4 Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2014), 3. There is nothing wrong with using this parable to level a justifiable critique. And it is good to use the parable to affirm our ministry. But we cannot let ourselves off the hook in the process. Before we know it, we’re engaged in the very “otherizing” the parable forcefully condemns. Simply put, we cannot identify only with the Good Samaritan.
While we are indeed capable of emulating the Samaritan’s mercy, we should acknowledge that we are also capable of playing the part of the priest and the Levite. There are times that we, too, choose to pass by on the other side of the road. Once we acknowledge this, we grow our capacity for extending mercy and compassion, and we widen the circle of those who can receive it. I have confidence that we all, like the Samaritan, can feel genuine compassion for the one lying “half dead” on the roadside. But I wonder: can we also feel compassion for the priest and the Levite? Can we show mercy to the ones who fall short in loving their neighbor? Perhaps it becomes a bit easier when we can see ourselves in them. When we narrow the distance between us. Dr. Levine, the parable scholar, suggests that we shouldn’t stop there. That we should also put ourselves in the place of the person in the ditch. That we should try to identify, too, with the wounded traveler on the side of the road. And then we should ask ourselves, “Is there anyone, from any group, we’d rather die than accept help from?”5 Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 148-149.
These are difficult questions with which to grapple. You might prefer the simpler, surface-level take on the parable, but we have so much to gain by forcing ourselves to dig deeper. Remember, my friends, why Jesus tells this parable in the first place. This discourse begins in response to this question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This parable is not a simple morality tale. It is a guidepost to eternal life. And the biblical concept of “eternal life” isn’t just about a life after death. A life that never ends. Eternal isn’t just the quantity of life. It’s also the quality of life. The “eternal life” Jesus offers is a life of generosity, reconciliation and wholeness. A life that shares in the quality of God’s very life. A life that can be ours now. Today. When we resist the fear-based impulse to cross the road and choose instead to see our neighbor’s suffering as our own. When we expand our definition of neighbor until no one is excluded from its reach. Eternal life is ours when our compassion knows no bounds. When our mercy extends as wide as those arms that were nailed to the hard wood of the cross. Amen.