The Good Enemy: The Good Samaritan and Loving Our Enemies

Joshua Liem · Pilgrim Church, Vancouver
July 12, 2026 · Luke 10:25–37 (NET)

Sermon overview

Joshua Liem explores the Good Samaritan as a story that unsettles our prejudices. Beyond offering help, Jesus invites us to imagine receiving compassion from someone we consider an enemy. The sermon connects mercy, humility, reconciliation, and the love of Christ.

Editorial summary above; the sermon manuscript and reflection questions below are drawn from Joshua Liem’s source document. The manuscript may differ from the delivered recording. Section headings have been added for navigation.

In this sermon

Why Jesus tells unsettling stories
Mercy as a way of life
The Samaritan as the unexpected neighbour
Where do we stand in the story?
Receiving compassion from an enemy
Christ’s reconciling love and communion

Reflection questions · Further reading · Visit Pilgrim Church

Sermon manuscript

Why Jesus tells unsettling stories

Jesus often chose not to speak in a straight-forward, fact and truth and hammer-manner. He instead asked a lot of questions. He told stories.

Eugene Peterson notes that on the road towards Jerusalem, where Jesus would be crucified and buried and resurrected from the dead, instead of getting more and more urgent, instead of increasing his intensity and high decibel rhetoric, instead of giving a 10 point checklist for his disciples to mark down as a rule of life or preaching repentance before it is too late, instead of all that, he told stories of neighbours, of friends, of losing a lamb, and proper hospitality.

Jesus’ language almost becomes less direct. More conversational.

And these stories, or parables, that Jesus told, weren’t exactly clarifying or simplifying salvation and the kingdom of God. Instead, they complicated it. These parables confused the crowds and even his own disciples. After telling the parable of the sower, where seeds are scattered and some grow into a bountiful harvest and others wither and die, Jesus’ disciples ask him for an explanation and he said to them: wait, you don’t get it? [Mark 4:13] You don’t understand this parable? How will you understand any of them?

And so in our anxiety to not be talked down to by Jesus, we take a simple explanation for his parables and say: we’ve got it! We’re not going to be like the confused crowd or confused disciples: we know exactly what Jesus meant in this parable: be good. Come back to God like the prodigal son. Pray like the persistent widow. Give to the poor, don’t accumulate wealth like the rich fool who would die the next day. Don’t assume you’re holier than thou like the Pharisee to the tax collector.

Which, yes, those are fine takeaways, yeah, that’s all part of following Jesus, but these basic principles already exist all throughout Scripture. And Jesus could have just quoted Scripture and said: go do these 10 things.

But instead, why does he speak in parables?

Because these stories are meant to unsettle us. To disturb us.

Para-bole, in Greek, means: something thrown alongside. I think of a banana peel thrown on a path that makes you slip.

Religion or preaching is often seen as designed to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Amy Jill Levine wrote: we would do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. If we hear a parable and think “I really like that” or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough. We might be better off thinking less about what they “mean” and more about what they do in us: provoke, refine, confront. So this summer we will sit with six of these parables. And let’s do our best to not try and grasp for a simple meaning.

Let’s do some spiritual cross-fit, some gym training, as Soong-Chan wonderfully described last week. Let’s get uncomfortable with the text and allow it to challenge and disturb our sensibilities. Let’s live in the story and put on the shoes of different characters and figure out: what does love look like? What is the will of God and the kingdom of heaven on earth look like, and what’s my part to play in it?

So today we’ll start with the most famous parable, other than the prodigal son, which I preached a couple months ago. We’ll start with the parable of the “Good Samaritan.” This parable is probably the most domesticated parable there is. Charities and hospitals are named after this parable. An American president casually referred to this parable to cast a vision of a nation that would compassionately care for the wounded traveler. We have “Good samaritan laws” that mean we can’t get sued for helping someone in an emergency.

I just read a CBC article about a doctor who got a $250 ambulance bill for performing CPR on someone, and they were surprised it cost them to be a Good Samaritan. So if we can get unsettled by sitting with this heavily popularized text, then maybe we can be challenged by all of Jesus’ stories.

So, would you please stand if you are willing and able for the reading of Scripture?

[Luke 10:25-37 NET] 25 Now an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you understand it?” 27 The expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” 28 Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

29 But the expert, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him up, and went off, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, but when he saw the injured man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too a Levite, when he came up to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan who was traveling came to where the injured man was, and when he saw him, he felt compassion for him. 34 He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring olive oil and wine on them.

Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever else you spend, I will repay you when I come back this way.’ 36 Which of these three do you think became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 The expert in religious law said, “The one who showed mercy to him.” So Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same.”

The word of the Lord. [Thanks be to God] You may be seated.

Mercy as a way of life

So the plain reading of this text is: be merciful; be the good Samaritan. Care for the wounded, the robbed, the naked, the helpless and vulnerable. And if the 2 billion Christians in the world did exactly this rather than living life turning a blind eye to the suffering and hurting— hey, the world would be in a better state.

This parable is beautiful because even its most plain reading is still so worthwhile and challenging.

And the way it’s framed: what must I do to inherit eternal life? It’s beautiful and telling— Jesus doesn’t reduce it to: you must say the prayers and recite the creeds, go to church, and believe in me. He asks: What does the Law say? Love. Do mercy. Be a neighbour. Show mercy not just once, but like this Samaritan who opened a line of credit and paid for this guy’s hospital bills and promised to return. Be a neighbour, which is not a one time action but an identity.

Being a christian isn’t just saying the prayer of confession once, saying the vows, getting baptized, and believing— even the demons believe, as James the Apostle says. Being a follower of Jesus is a whole life identity, evidenced by our actions day in and day out.

The plain reading of this parable is already fantastic. Plenty to work out here and get uncomfortable with.

The Samaritan as the unexpected neighbour

But, if you’re willing to continue on, let’s get even more unsettled.

When you hear, “good Samaritan,” do you think: “that’s racist?”

Probably not.

How about “good Chinese?” That’s a good chinese person! Good immigrant? Good Muslim? “good Indian?” Good Republican or Democrat? Good.. as opposed to… bad? all the rest are bad? Terrorists, job stealers, bigots, fill in the blank?

So the Samaritans are a real people group that still exist today. They are one of the smallest surviving ethnoreligious groups, with about 900 people as of 2024. About half live in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, where they perform passover in the Exodus 12 manner of animal-sacrifice, the only place on earth to do it this way. I think it would be quite fascinating to visit Mount Gerizim during one of those rituals. I just wouldn’t go up to a Samaritan and ask: are you one of the good ones?

Judeans and Samaritans, in biblical times, were often at odds with each other. They had conflict over whether mount Gerizim or Zion was God’s sacred mountain. And there were moments that they pillaged or killed each other. One Jewish ruler, John Hyrcanus, went and destroyed the Samaritan temple on Gerizim. So there would be some real hatred or prejudice between the two groups. And notice that the “expert in the law” didn’t reply to Jesus’ question about who was the good neighbour with — “it was the Samaritan.” It’s almost like he couldn’t even utter that name on his lips. He said “the one who showed mercy.”

We could imagine “Samaritan” being almost like a dirty word to this Judean.

In one sense, this story is about the “good enemy.” The one we have the most prejudice towards— and imagining them as compassionate and caring.

It was offensive to Judean sensibilities, it would have been deeply unsettling to this “expert of the law” to imagine a Samaritan in this way.

To add another wrinkle: the Samaritans weren’t law-less.

“Law expert” means expert of Torah. Moses’ 5 books; Genesis to Deuteronomy in our bibles. The Samaritans also have those same 5 books of the Law, and they quite enthusiastically observe it as best they can, according to their interpretation of it.

So when the Priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan line up, and we’re asked to spot the difference, all three have the Torah, the Law, the Scriptures. All three had the commands: love the Lord your God with everything, love your neighbor as yourself. But only one kept the command. It’s not the hearers of the Law, but the doers. Maybe God doesn’t care so much about the hills we make holy, the hills we’d die on, but rather embodying the mercy he has for those on every hill.

I’m sure this expert of Scripture would love to spend his days debating on the proper interpretation of Scripture. I’d be right there with him in the passion for Scripture. I love to be on the ‘right side’ of interpretation. I also have my prejudices towards people in certain interpretive camps. We all have our own Zion and Gerizim. Maybe it’s the complementarian/egalitarian splits, or the SSPX Catholic split over traditional latin mass versus translated worship to our mother tongues, or the lines we draw around LGBTQ inclusion.

We all got the same Scripture, and I love a good debate, and it’s easy to make caricatures of the opposite side… but at the end of the day, who showed mercy? If our interpretation of Scripture doesn’t lead to God-like mercy, then could we dare to be wrong? Can we be unsettled?

Where do we stand in the story?

Now notice something about these parables. We like to put ourselves in the shoes of a character. For this one, in our modern western perspective, usually we put ourselves in the shoes of the Samaritan. The one with resources, transportation, 2 days wages to freely give and a line of credit that we can offer someone hurting. Or sometimes, we place ourselves in the Levite or priest’s shoes— the one who will look away, carry on with our lives. But rarely, if ever, do we put ourselves in the shoes of the man in the ditch, half dead, needing rescue.

But that was one of the more usual ways to read this text in the early church: to make Christ the Samaritan, and humanity as the beaten down, left for dead traveler. Origen in the 3rd century allegorized the inn as the church and innkeeper as pastor. And Augustine saw the oil and wine as the sacrament of Christ, poured on you, for your healing, And Ambrose said the return of the Samaritan is the day of resurrection. This is the comfort for the afflicted.

This can be a beautiful picture of Christ as healer, who gives so generously of himself, even risking traveling a dangerous road to a place where he wouldn’t be welcomed, as Samaritans weren’t particularly welcome in Jerusalem or Jericho, giving a line of credit to the church, so that they have every resource they need to bind up the wounded.

We could also flip that and put Christ in the place of the wounded. He did identify with, and was in solidarity to the poor, the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned. In Matthew 25:40, he tells another parable of the king, the sheep, the goats, and the king says: I was hungry and you fed me. Thirsty and you gave me a drink. A stranger and you welcomed me. Naked and you clothed me. Sick and you cared for me. In prison and you visited me. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. By showing mercy to ‘the least of these,’ we love Jesus himself.

The beauty of parables is that these different angles work well. Christ can be the wounded, or the Samaritan. We can be the innkeeper, the priest, the Samaritan, the one in need. Each afflicts us differently. Each challenges us.

Receiving compassion from an enemy

But if I can give one more reading some air, it’s the most challenging one for me. It was something sparked by Amy-Jill Levine’s book, Short Stories by Jesus, where she recounts a moment in the 1970s where one citizen in Sierra Leone interpreted this parable as proclaiming that one should take aid from whoever would offer it, even the enemy. If a communist, atheist country like the Soviet Union would lend a hand, they are free to take it. And it made me wonder: what if our healing, our wholeness, will only come from the help of our enemy? Someone or some group of people we hate?

I resist this reading most because it does not give any room for pride. It demands humility. Everything in our culture and media pushes us towards never backing down, never surrendering, never giving an inch to our enemies; the ultimate humiliation would be to get help from them. Our newsfeeds and social media feeds and youtube algorithms all are built to show us the worst of the other side— their stupidest takes, their cruelty and outrageous things they’ve done. All because outrage keeps us scrolling. And our attention is their profit. And so we get more and more polarized. We come to believe that the other side is not necessary.

That they are diametrically opposed to our flourishing. We dehumanize the other. We never see the other side being kind, so we lose our imagination for the compassion, empathy, and love in the other. And that is what this parable asks of me, maybe even you, today: to reimagine compassion in “the other.” The person, people group, ethnic group, political group, that we despise. Imagining them as the compassionate and merciful Samaritan, who gives of themselves. And to even put ourselves in the shoes of the one who needs their mercy and compassion, in order that we would be made whole. That we cannot be whole without the other.

Who is “the other” for you? Can you imagine them as the Samaritan, binding up the wounds of the hurting, giving generously? Do you believe that some people are truly hopeless, incapable of change and compassion?

I will be first to admit that I don’t spend my imaginative capabilities on characterizing those I disagree with as compassionate Samaritans. It’s hard.

Case in point. Franklin Graham. I strongly disagree with his version of Christian nationalism and how comfortable he is being so partisan in politics. Yet he’s literally the CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, which is one of the largest humanitarian aid organizations out there. During the COVID pandemic, when New York was the epicenter and hospitals were begging for beds, they set up a 68-bed field hospital in Central Park. That was controversial because the organization basically will not employ or let anyone even volunteer if they affirm same-sex marriage, which doesn’t jibe well with quite a lot of New Yorkers.

But New York, at that time, was wounded and in a ditch, and Franklin Graham offered a hand through the Samaritan’s Purse. And so many parts of me want to look at that skeptically, to find some kind of scandal or misuse of funds. But they acted well. And the very pro-LGBTQ mayor, Bill de Blasio, accepted their help. But the city also kicked them out as soon as they could get by without their help.

In this parable though, notice that the wounded traveler had zero dialogue. Jesus doesn’t say how he responded to the Samaritan. I usually imagine him being unconscious… but what if he was awake, aware of exactly who was giving him the aid? What if he saw the priest and Levite walk by? And after he recovered, would he then go on to hate Samaritans, as usual? Would he be anxious to pay back the Samaritan so he wouldn’t owe him anything? Or would he humbly seek this one out and even become friends? The ending is unresolved.

Now the grievances are still very real. Judeans and Samaritans killed and looted each other and burned the temple to the ground. We have sinned or have been sinned against with some instances where reconciliation will not happen in this life, this parable doesn’t discount any of that. Don’t confuse the Samaritan with the Robber.

Yet this parable asks us to imagine enemies acting as neighbours. And to love our enemies; or harder still, to potentially even receive love and help from them. To imagine receiving the hand of, insert whatever caricature of an enemy you have, in a time of desperation, and to receive their mercy. This story asks us to be offended by it.

Christ’s reconciling love and communion

If that is hard, or even impossible to imagine, then we can first remember Christ. [Romans 5:6-8] That while we were helpless, while we were still sinners, Christ demonstrated his love for us by dying for us. While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through his death.

And Paul goes on:[5:10] how much more will we be saved by his life?

What new possibilities are there with Christ alive, reigning on the throne, and living inside of us through his Spirit? Surely, if God’s Spirit could raise the dead, then our imaginations for enemy love can be ignited and renewed.

And the life of Christ is offered here, at this communion table. [invite servers up]

On the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, broke it, and said: this is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Remember the costly love he gave for sinners. Those who make themselves enemies of God. His body is broken for reconciliation. Then he lifted up the cup of wine and said: this is the new covenant in my blood, for the release of sin. His blood, I believe, can release the grasp of sin and its grip on your imagination. His blood frees you from the need to hate your enemy, your neighbour.

And he makes the promise: I will return to drink of the fruit of the vine again with you, in my Father’s kingdom. With this bread and cup, we can say: may we become what we eat. We can judge ourselves wherever we are not like Christ. We can take Christ to help us see this parable to afflict us into imagining the love of neighbour, love of enemy, and the need for one another for healing. And then to go and do likewise.

So church, I’ll invite you up now to receive the bread and cup, the body and blood of Christ, as gifts, symbolized by open palms. To take these elements back to your seats and to reflect on where this parable disrupts you. And then to partake of the elements as an act of confession and faith— that Christ is the power for us to be neighbours.

Come on up.

Reflection questions

Before this week, who did you picture yourself as in this story? The Samaritan, the priest, the lawyer, the robber, the wounded? Why do you think that is?
Who would you find hardest to receive help from?
Who is someone you stopped believing is capable of compassion?
What is harder for you — to give help, or to receive it? What does your answer tell you?
How would you go about changing your social media / Youtube etc. algorithm to feed compassion and re-humanization of “the other” — a political or theological tribe that you disagree with? a. As a spiritual practice for this week: go watch/listen to one long interview with someone you disagree with, and hear them speak for themselves. Some great interviewers that I recommend: Theology in the Raw, The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast, The Diary of a CEO (non-Christian). Imagine their guest as the Samaritan.

Meet Joshua Liem and visit Pilgrim Church

Joshua Liem is the lead pastor of Pilgrim Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. Read his official pastoral biography.

Pilgrim gathers on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. at 6075 Inverness Street, Vancouver, BC V5W 3P8. Plan a visit and check the church website for current details.

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