The Hidden Lesson of the Good Samaritan

Hi, again, everybody! I’m your host, Wanda Thibodeaux, and this is Faithful on the Clock, the podcast where every rooster crows to get your faith and work aligned. In this episode, we’re taking a look at the story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan. But instead of looking at it from the usual angle of who our neighbor is, we’re gonna explore it in the context of continued compassion. Let’s gear up and move out.

If you’d like to follow along in your Bible today, go ahead and turn to Luke 10:25-37. Now, these scriptures are pretty well known, but the quick story recap is this: An expert in the law tries to test Jesus by asking him what he has to do to get eternal life. And Jesus has this exchange with the expert in which the expert acknowledges that the law says to love your neighbor with all your soul, strength, and mind. The expert then asks Jesus who his neighbor is, and Jesus answers with the Samaritan story. And in that parable, a man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho. And along the way, robbers come and beat him up, and they basically leave this guy to die on the side of the road. And a priest comes along and sees him, but instead of helping, he crosses over to the other side of the road. He just keeps going. Then a Levite comes along. Same thing happens. And these two guys, they are both people who should have understood the law. But then, along comes a Samaritan. And remember here, in Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along. The Jews considered Samaritans to be low-class becaise the Samaritans didn’t adhere to the law the way the Jews tried to. And Jesus is intentionally casting as the hero someone He knows listeners aren’t gonna receive well to emphasize that knowing the law and practicing it are two different things. He’s trying to help them see that people who should know better can do the wrong thing and people who don’t necessarily know the law still can do the right thing. But the Samaritan comes along, sees the guy half dead on the side of the road, and he helps him out. He takes care of the guy’s injuries as best he can, puts him on his own donkey, and takes the guy to an inn where he can recover. And you know, he gives the innkeeper a little money to cover the bill and essentially says, “Hey, if there’s any extra costs, just keep a tab and I’ll pay it when I come back.”

Now, when most people preach on this, the focus is usually on our expectations around who’s going to help, right? Like, the Samaritan, the Jews wouldn’t have expected him to be the one to do that. And it’s meant to help us see that love doesn’t only apply to certain people or groups. And that’s incredibly important even today, right? Because we still, even now, have just, so many conflicts between different people. And it’s a critical lesson when our world is so torn up by war and an us-versus-them mentality. And we see that even in business, right? Like, there are people who are like, well, I’m not gonna help Joe from accounting, he’s just, you know, whatever, I don’t wanna see him win. Or maybe we look down on certain industries as being of lower value than the industry we’re in. I can tell you, as a writer and musician, I run into that all the time, where people will just rip on what I do and insist it’s not a real job.

But today I want to focus on the last part of the story, the part where, you know, the Samaritan and the beat-up guy are already at the inn. Now, in verse 34 and 35, we see that the Samaritan actually stays at the inn with this guy for a night. He doesn’t just leave. He stays overnight with the man who was assaulted to keep taking care of him and make sure he’ll be OK, and he doesn’t leave the inn until the next day. And so I want you to notice that the Samaritan wasn’t just willing to get the guy to a safe place. He was willing to let doing the right thing completely derail his original plan, okay? Everything was on pause until he knew this stranger he’d met was stable. And why is that so important for you to take note of? Because in the business world, we’re so wrapped up in planning, aren’t we? We want to control everything and line everything up just right. But as it says in Proverbs 16:9, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” And so, you have to be willing to complete the work of helping even when it is disruptive to what else you were planning to do.

But if you keep reading, you know, the story kind of ends with the Samaritan promising to the innkeeper that he would come back. And this is what’s really key to me. Because so often, when we try to help people, we do a little bit, we leave, and then we don’t come back. We don’t check in on whether they are healing. We don’t check to see if they still might need something else. And we get complacent because we think that we’ve already done our part. And we just let the ball drop. And waaaaay back in Episode 12, I talked about how God is an ever-present help, right? And part of what I was trying to get across in that episode is the idea that we should not drop the ball. We can’t leave people on the side of the road to fend for themselves just because we’ve bought into the idea that people should be strong and independent. We have to be always ready to see it when people are trying their best and still need us. And here, what I’m trying to do is get you to just extend that idea. Not only should you always be ready to put someone in need on your donkey, but you need to be ready to continue to help over time. You need to come back and see how people are doing, rather than just swooping in once and then getting so busy with your life that you just assume everything is fine.

Now, this matters in life in general, okay? But let me frame it in the work context a little more concretely. Right now in the corporate world, everything is all about building trust, right, because trust is what builds relationships. If you don’t have strong relationships, you’ll probably have a hard time progressing. But what’s really at the heart of trusting somebody? Yes, authenticity matters. But the heart of trust, in my view, is consistency. It’s being able to see, over and over again, that another person is not going to leave you, that they’re gonna give you that same result of caring and being compassionate. Every single time, they keep helping. Every single time, they make sure you’re not suffering unnecessarily. You are consistently safe for them.

And I honestly cannot remember if I’ve mentioned it before, but there’s a book called The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen that kind of hits on this point. And the book is about the responsibility ministers have, but in the sense that we are all called in the Great Commision to minister and bring people to faith in Jesus, I want you to understand it applies to every Christian, okay? But Nouwen says this, “A man can keep his sanity and stay alive as long as there is at least one person who is waiting for him. [...] When a man says to his fellow man, ‘I will not let you go. I am going to be here tomorrow waiting for you, and I expect you not to disappoint me,’ then tomorrow is no longer an endless, dark tunnel. It becomes flesh and blood in the brother who is waiting, and for whom he wants to give life one more chance.” And so, the concept is that, when a person knows there’s somebody out there who gives a you-know-what, who’s gonna keep showing up and who’s gonna wait until we’re strong enough to move on, we can stand anything. Life becomes bearable and we know it matters that we exist. And I’m telling you, I’ve been sharing that quote every chance I get. I even put it on my new draft of my resume kind of as a life motto, because it speaks so well to the notion that we’re not supposed to bear assaults alone, and neither are we supposed to just throw people a Band-Aid and run.

And you know, assaults can have a lot of flavors. They can be literal thugs on the road, but they can be losing your job or facing a disease or watching someone steal your work or having someone question your race or all kinds of things. And I’ll point out, too, that what’s happening at work can carry over into your personal life and vice versa. So, there’s no set point on the amount of time you might have to stay at the inn or keep coming back to check on somebody. There’s no deadline to healing, and you can’t assume that there are nice, neat boundaries for where and when people are going to need you. Or, from the perspective of the one who’s been assaulted, people should be willing to cross over to the other side of the road if that’s where you are. They shouldn’t just say, well, that’s happening at work, so you know, I’m just a personal friend, I’m not gonna help with that, or that’s a home issue, so I’m just gonna keep to my role as the boss or coworker and talk about work stuff.

Now, this concept of checking back on people, this is not a foreign concept in the business world. You know it already. I mean, how many times have you heard some guru tell you to follow up on a prospect lead? You can read books about exactly how to do it. But the difference is that, when you follow up on a prospect, it’s mainly for your gain. Yes, your customer gets your service or product or whatever, but ultimately, you’re following up because you want profit for yourself, right? But when you follow up on somebody just to be loving and compassionate, everything flips. Nothing is about you. Everything is selfless and focuses on whether the other person can gain. And in fact, you might end up financially worse off than when you started. I mean, the Samaritan, he paid out of his own pocket. The innkeeper, he didn’t just say, “Oh, that’s OK, I see you’re trying to do the right thing, so there’s no bill today.” But the concept of circling back to people, that’s familiar. And I want you to use that familiarity to trust that you can follow through on this. Because you do know how to do it. You’re just going to be doing it now for a different reason.

To sum all of this up, helping others is not a checkbox. It’s messy and takes time, and it might completely disrupt what you originally set out to do. But when you actually go back and continue the care, when you prove to someone else that you will be there waiting for them and that you are going to consistently show up, you will earn a loyalty that does not come from anything else. This is essentially all true servant leadership is. It’s showing up to care today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Now, the caveat to that is that our time and resources are limited, right? We cannot put everyone on our donkey or pay everybody’s way at the inn no matter how much we might want to. And that’s why, if you really want to be effective as a leader, you teach people to go out and take action and be loving just like you are. Otherwise, what happens? You burn out and the people who need help don’t get it. So, just like Jesus tapped people He trusted to go build the church and heal God’s kids, you have to accept that you cannot carry everybody. You have to find good people who are willing to learn to bind wounds and do it for the long haul just like you do. And if everybody shares a little of that load, the number of people who can heal and get out of suffering and be successful for God is enormous.

So, I’ll just pause here and ask you to end the show by joining me again in prayer.

Lord, I thank You that, as I’ve tried to remind people, You are an ever-present help. And I pray that if we truly seek to model You, if we are genuine in our desire to love others, that we don’t see it as a quick task. Let our hearts be driven to commit to wait for every person for as long as it takes, and show us the best way to bind whatever wounds they might have. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.

I feel pretty good about this episode, everybody. My challenge is that you will take what you’ve heard and maybe be a little bit more observant to figure out who needs care around you. If you’ve got a story about how you helped someone or how someone else made a difference for you, email me and let me know about it at wandathibodeaux@faithfulontheclock.com. For the next show in two weeks, we’ll extend today’s lesson a bit and unpack the 5 W’s of servant leadership. I hope you’ll give that a listen, and until then, be blessed.