Divine Mercy is Even for Your Enemy

13 July 2025   Luke 10:25-37

“And who is my neighbor?” Luke 10:29

The Bible is loaded with stories about forbidden contact. It is a major theme, especially in the Old Testament. Forbidden contact stories fall roughly into two groups.

One is contact forbidden because it involves people in idolatry and other forms of mortal sin. This would include stories like eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17), the Golden Calf (Exodus 32), stories forbidding child sacrifice (The Valley of Hinnom, or “Gehenna,” is a synonym for hell in the New Testament because of its association with child sacrifice), and the many stories condemning Israelite kings for hobnobbing with foreign gods like Baal, Ashtart, Moloch and others. These things are forbidden to believers still.

The other group is contact forbidden because of various human conventions. In this group would be all the references to food that is clean and unclean, all the events and behaviors that make people ritually unclean, and contact with people who were idolaters, sinners or enemies. Although these things might have been allowable and useful in certain times and places, pretty much all of the rules forbidding contact in these stories were eventually rejected in the New Testament because they interfered with the mercy of God. The Scribes and Pharisees were scandalized when Jesus socialized with tax collectors and prostitutes, and healed on the Sabbath, and Jesus rebuked them for not understanding that God demands mercy, not mere rule-following. The teaching of the Bible is medicine, not a barrier or a fortress, and medicine requires contact with sick people.  

The Parable of the Good Samaritan falls into this second group. The rift between the Jews and the Samaritans is one of the most tragic in the Bible. The Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., deporting all the potential leaders of Israel, and replacing them with people forcibly removed from Syria and Mesopotamia. The newcomers were converted to Judaism, and lived as Jews thereafter. Meanwhile in 586 B.C. the Babylonians conquered the southern kingdom of Judah, deporting all of its leaders to Babylon. When Cyrus the Great allowed the Babylonian captives to return, the Samaritans, who by that time had been Jews for almost 200 years, welcomed them, and offered to help them rebuild Jerusalem. The returning exiles spurned this offer, regarding the Samaritans as half-breeds and only pretend Jews. This led to generations of hostility which continued into Jesus’ time and beyond. In fact, the Samaritans and Jews never reconciled. What remains of the Samaritans today (about 800 people) are regarded under Israeli law as a separate religious group.

Jesus had no patience with rules that interfered with divine mercy, nor with preferring the maintenance of feuds to reconciliation. He told the Parable of the Good Samaritan to a “scholar of the law” who would no doubt have been shocked that the hero of the story was a despised Samaritan. The nature of divine mercy is so radical, however, that your neighbor is precisely the person who is in need of mercy, even if that person is your sworn enemy.

Of course, regarding someone who is your sworn enemy, someone who may have gone out of his or her way to harm you, as your neighbor requires spiritual maturity of a pretty high degree. It is useful therefore to remember that the Parable of the Good Samaritan began as a Bible Study between Jesus and a scholar of the law. To acquire the discernment necessary to recognize the difference between contact forbidden because it involves idolatry and mortal sin, and forbidden contact that has worn out its usefulness and now interferes with divine mercy requires a great many hours of reading, thinking, talking and praying over the Bible. It is one of the things Jesus meant when he said, “Do this, and you will live” (Matthew 10:28).