The Good Samaritan

Even though the state government has relaxed their orders around gatherings during the pandemic, we are continuing our church time at home. Meeting with my dad and the kids has felt so important in order to continue building the foundataion that we have been building. This foundation is a solid understanding of who Jesus was while on this Earth and how he changed those around him. Our goal during these times is to help make Jesus real to our children and to do that by looking closely at the Word and how it matches up with history, geography, and within the larger story of the Bible itself. For church today, we continued our deep dive in the Gospel of Luke, spending our time in Luke 10:25-37. This is the section of scripture where Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

We spent a few minutes doing a quick overview of the first 24 verses of chapter 10 and you can see some of my notes in the images below. Things that really stood out to me include:

• 10:1 Jesus sends out the 72 just as he sent out the 12 early in chapter 9. They went in pairs with the same rules as before.
• This time, they came back having been much more successful in dealing with demons and healing the sick than they had the first time.
• We can see the disciple’s growth and that Jesus is finally getting through to them.

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We then discussed the man of the law who questioned Jesus. When Jesus asked him what he believed was necessary to receive eternal life, the man essentially summarizes the ten commandments. The first five of which are about loving and following God and the last five are about loving people. Then he asks Jesus about who is neighbor is. We learned that in the Jewish tradition, the word neighbor meant people that believed as you did. So, the Pharisees’ neighbors were other Pharisees. Jesus then tells this parable to help show that their definition of ‘neighbor’ needed to change, as does ours.

We watched the video below to help tell the parable in a more visual manner.

After discussing this futher, we then watched this video about the ‘bystander effect’ and how even people today often struggle with taking care of others that they clearly see in need.

We closed out our time with the Lord’s Supper followed by this song video which fit wonderfully with our discussion.