The Parable of the Wounded One

part 1

Do you know the story Jesus told about the Wounded One?

The story is popularly known as the story of the Good Samaritan and is found in Luke 10.¹

I want challenge you to reread the story but to reframe it as the story of the Wounded One and then come back and read the rest of this post. It is part one of four. Spoiler alert, part three will bring women into the story.

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Jews and Samaritans were not friends. They agreed on just enough about God to fight over who was right about God, to be competitive about religion. Samaritans read the same Torah, worshipped the same God and observed the same festivals as Jews. But Samaritans did not worship in Jerusalem, they worshipped on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. They also had ethnically mixed with Gentiles from as long ago as 720 BC. Jews, including Jesus’s disciples, couldn’t imagine anything good about Samaritans.

In John 8:48 Jews ask Jesus, “Aren’t we right in saying you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?!” Just one chapter before the story of the Wounded Man, in Luke 9, Jesus and the disciples are kept from stopping in a Samaritan village and the disciples are so self-righteously enraged they ask if they can call down fire from heaven to destroy the village. Jesus tells them to get over themselves.

And then a few verses later Jesus tells this scandalizing story about a merciful Samaritan. Samaritans do not stop to help Jews and Jews don’t want them to. Until the Jew is naked, beaten, and abandoned in a ditch. From this position of need and vulnerability maybe, just maybe, the person who thinks he has the right ideas is ready to have his conceptions about who is good and who is merciful overturned.

We love to take this parable and place ourselves in it. The provoking questions become: What kind of neighbor are you? Priest, the Levite, or Samaritan? Are you going to show mercy, be a good neighbor? Or are you too consumed by your religious duties or moral purity or pressing schedule that you can’t be bothered to help someone in need? But that’s not the only lesson here, and Priest, Levite, Samaritan aren’t the only players in this story.

What about the bandits? Have you ever asked if you are possibly in the position of causing harm? Have you taken advantage, left damaged people in your wake, even unintentionally? Or the innkeeper? Have you ever been in the right place at the right time and someone else was blessed because of your establishment?

And then there is this wounded man. Have you ever been the wounded one? The one in need of mercy, the one in need of being neighbored? I don’t mean in the specific sense of having been attacked and lying on the side of the road necessarily, but in the sense of vulnerability, of needing help? In my experience, authentic connecting happens in the refining fire of receiving mercy from the very people we think we are supposed to serve.

Most of us probably much prefer to do the neighboring and see ourselves in that Good Samaritan character, at least that is who we want to be. And, if we’re honest, I think most Christians think we are the Good Samaritan. Maybe on a crabby day we’re the Priest but we are never the Wounded One. Not the Wounded One. Especially not in front of people we are “ministering to” or if those people are potential spiritual competition or enemies.

Who is the last person on earth you would want to come along in your time of need, maybe give you mouth to mouth CPR? Who would you never want to be indebted to? Who do you hide your weaknesses and pain from? Republicans, Democrats, LGBTQAI+, different races and ethnicities and religions, someone with different theological convictions?

From the perspective of the wounded man lying naked and half-dead, anyone, anyone who stops by to help is your new best friend, your neighbor. You don’t care if this neighbor looks like you, thinks like you, worships like you. You just care that they show you mercy when you need it most.

It is transformative to be in a position of needy vulnerability and to be served by someone.

I moved to a rural village in northern Somalia (Somaliland) in the Horn of Africa thinking I was going to be a good neighbor. I was not needy or vulnerable, I was an American! Well-educated, comparatively wealthy, physically healthy, and armed with all the right answers to spiritual questions. I was going to help people. I was ready to be the Good Samaritan.

The first day in Somalia in 2003 my 2-year-old daughter fell off the roof. The twins had been exploring the new house with my husband and climbed up a rickety ladder. My husband half broke her fall, but she hit the cement hard. In the end she was incredibly absolutely fine. But we were terrified. Our first daylight hours here and our vulnerability was totally exposed. We thought we had come to Somalia to do great things for God and it turned out that the people we intended to “serve” and maybe even “save” saved our lives time and time again and I mean this literally. They saved our physical lives as we navigated how to respond to death threats, helped me find pediatricians, stopped me from foolishly walking toward gun battles I failed to recognize, protected us during political violence, surrounded me with armed guards while I ran the inaugural marathon.

How many times in Djibouti have Somali women cared for me when I felt helpless and confused? Once outside a women’s tea shop a man started harassing me. The owner, all the employees, and all the customers saw what was happening, poured out of the tea shop and started throwing their shoes at him and he bolted. A few years ago, my teammate and four other women were camping in the north of Djibouti when a sudden storm washed away the road. Five Somali men spent ten hours walking eight miles down the mountain in front of the car as my teammate drove down. They literally rebuilt the road as they walked, ensuring these ladies would get down safely. I could tell story after story of how we have been well-neighbored by the people we were “ministering to”.

I can’t think of a more effective way to grow in faith than the spiritual practice of being vulnerable and shown mercy by a religious “other”.

Jesus is constantly exposing prejudices and overturning convention. The people listening to Jesus’s story of the Wounded One and the good Samaritan were likely scandalized. They thought they knew the answer to the question about how to inherit eternal life: love God, love neighbor. Jesus turns this upside down and makes them think about the religious enemy as capable of showing them, the Chosen Ones, mercy. He’s also saying hey, you who think you’ve got it all together as those Chosen Ones – you might end up in pain one day, wounded and needy. Will you let someone serve you, maybe even someone you despise?

Can we be honest about our pain? The wounded man couldn’t hide what he’d gone through from the Samaritan. He wasn’t too proud and didn’t insist on getting himself to the inn. He accepted the help of someone he would never have worshipped alongside.

Historically a lot of ministry has come out of a triumphant attitude, and there is triumph in Christianity but it belongs to Jesus. Christians, especially us American ones, seem to think we need to give, build, lead, create, instruct, teach…what if we actually need to receive, cooperate, follow, participate, listen, learn?

I’m not saying don’t be a Good Samaritan and I’m not saying indiscriminately spread your weaknesses all over the place. But I am saying it is okay to be vulnerable and needy. It is okay to let other people into our hardships and pain and to let them neighbor us.

When have you been well-neighbored by someone you might have been inclined to fear or who you thought you were supposed to serve?

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Next Week Part 2: When I was the Wounded One in February 2025

Then Part 3: The Women in the Story of the Greatest Commandment and the Wounded One

Then Part 4: Thinking about Race and the Body and the Wounded One

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1. I think people in positions of power came up with that title.