Grantsdale Community Church
2026-05-31-The Spirit Wakes You Up
  • Introduction
    Here’s a social experiment we should try. Oh, it’s going to be outside our comfort zone. As we walk through public places, a parking lot, a street, a grocery store, pay deliberate, intentional attention to the faces of the people we pass.
    Not a long stare. Just a moment of actual notice. Most of us, myself included, have developed a remarkable capacity to move through crowds of people without registering any of them as fully human.
    We’ve learned to process people the way we process furniture, as objects in our path to be navigated around, instead of a person to be seen.
    We don’t do this because we’re bad people. We do it because we’re tired. Because providing full attention is expensive. Because if we let every face land on us, every story reach us, every need touch us, we’d be traumatized before we got to the cereal aisle.
    So, we develop a kind of protective numbness. A managed inattention. A practiced, socially acceptable form of not-quite-seeing the person right in front of us. The theological word for it, is sleep. And Jesus told a parable about it that has been poking people’s conscience for two thousand years.
    Last week we watched the Spirit blow the disciples out of their upper room and into the streets of Jerusalem. The wind came, the fire fell, the languages flew, a sleeping church woke up and walked out the door into the world.
    But here’s the question that immediately follows, “once we’re out in the world, what exactly are we supposed to be awake to?” The answer Jesus gives in Luke 10 is clear, demanding, and told so well that even people who have never opened a Bible know how it ends.
    Today we’re going to work through Luke 10:25-37 carefully. Not to arrive at the usual moral conclusion, but to let the text surprise us in places where we’ve conditioned ourselves to look away.

    The Expert and His Agenda

    (Luke 10:25–29)
    In verses 25–26 we see a lawyer set up Jesus with a question that’s designed to manage God. An expert in the law has an agenda. It says,
    Luke 10:25–26 CSB
    25 Then an expert in the law stood up to test him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the law?” he asked him. “How do you read it?”
    Before we meet the Samaritan, we need to meet the lawyer. Luke introduces him with a detail that we can’t overlook. “He stood up to test Jesus.” The Greek word translated “to test” means to put to the test in a hostile way. He asks Jesus a question for which he already has his preferred answer. He’s not curious. He’s probing.
    His question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” sounds devout. It’s the kind of question that, if asked in Sunday school, would earn you a gold star and possibly a juice box. But Luke has already told us his motive. He’s testing. Which means the question is not really about eternal life. It is about winning.
    Jesus, being Jesus, doesn’t take the bait. He turns the question back around on the questioner: “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” In doing so, Jesus invites the lawyer to answer his own question. Which is a remarkably effective teaching technique and also, I suspect, mildly irritating to someone who came prepared for a debate.
    Luke 10:27 CSB
    27 He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and “your neighbor as yourself.”
    The lawyer quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 (the Shema, the central creed of Jewish faith) and Leviticus 19:18 (love your neighbor as yourself).
    Jesus affirms his answer,
    Luke 10:28 CSB
    28 “You’ve answered correctly,” he told him. “Do this and you will live.”
    Here’s where most of us, if we are honest, would have stopped. We got the right answer. Teacher confirmed it. Class dismissed. But the lawyer doesn’t stop there.
    Luke 10:29 CSB
    29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
    Wanting to justify himself. Luke’s clinical in his diagnosis of what’s happening. The lawyer already knows the right answer. What he wants is a definition of “neighbor.” A definition narrow enough that he can satisfy it without too much inconvenience.
    He wants to manage God. He wants love bounded. He wants a fence around the obligation so he can stay inside it and feel righteous without having to look too hard at the person on the other side.
    This isn’t just a first-century problem. Every generation of Christians has tried to draw the same fence. Oh, we call it different things, “our community,” “our people,” “those we have capacity for.” The form changes, but the impulse is identical. We want the question “who is my neighbor?” to have a short, manageable, and comfortably familiar answer. Jesus is about to give the lawyer, and us, an answer we’re far less comfortable with.

    The Road and the Man

    (Luke 10:30–35)
    In order to really understand the story we must do some good exegesis. That means we must understand the context compared to it’s original setting and build a bridge to how it applies to us today.
    Luke 10:30 CSB
    30 Jesus took up the question and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead.
    Jesus begins with geography that every listener in his audience would have recognized immediately. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho descended roughly 3,300 feet over seventeen miles through the Judean wilderness. It was rocky, winding, and notoriously dangerous.
    Travelers in the first century called it the “Way of Blood.” Robbers weren’t a hypothetical risk on that road. They were a standard feature. Jesus’ audience would have nodded at the opening sentence the way we might nod when a story begins “A man walks into a bar.” They know the terrain.
    The victim is stripped, beaten, and left half dead. Note what the stripping accomplishes beyond just the physical violence. It removes all identifying markers.
    A first-century traveler’s clothing, accent, and possessions would have told you immediately whether he was Jewish, Samaritan, Gentile, rich, or poor. Stripped and unconscious on the road, he is simply a man. A body. A human being with no visible category. The very anonymity of the victim is a key part of the parable’s design.
    The suffering person could be anyone.
    Luke 10:31–32 CSB
    31 A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
    Two religious professionals. Two men whose entire identity was fully wrapped in the service of God and the care of His people. And both of them, upon seeing the beaten man, cross to the other side of the road and just walk on by.
    Commentators have spilled considerable amounts of ink trying to excuse them. Perhaps they feared ritual defilement from contact with a corpse. The man was half dead, after all, and Numbers 19 made corpse-contact a serious matter for priests.
    Perhaps they feared the robbers were still nearby and were using the man as bait. Perhaps they were late for something. Perhaps they were simply afraid.
    Perhaps. But Jesus offers none of these explanations, and I think that’s intentional. The text doesn’t tell us why they passed by. It only tells us that they did. They saw him, and they crossed to the other side.
    Whatever their internal reasoning, however sophisticated their justification, the outcome was the same. A man bled on the road while two religious professionals walked right past him on the other side.
    The Greek word translated “saw” is doing some very heavy lifting here. It means, to have realized, perceived, to have experienced, learned to know. Both the priest and the Levite saw the suffering state of the man.
    This is not a story about people who missed the suffering because they weren’t looking. They registered what was in front of them. And then they made a choice about what to do with what they had seen.
    They chose managed inattention. They chose the other side of the road. They chose the very kind of protective numbness we described in the introduction. Except they chose it while wearing holy vestments.
    The parable isn’t subtle about its target audience. Jesus is speaking to a lawyer who asked how to manage his obligation to love. He begins by showing him what managed love looks like from the outside. It looks like a man bleeding on a road while the most visibly religious people in the story just walk right by.
    Luke 10:33–34 CSB
    33 But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. 34 He went over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
    Luke 10:35 CSB
    35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll reimburse you for whatever extra you spend.’
    If you want to understand why this parable detonated like a grenade in its original context, you need to understand what a Samaritan was to a first-century Jewish audience. Samaritans weren’t simply foreigners.
    Samaritans were the Jews who had willingly intermarried with Gentiles around Jerusalem after Babylon conquered Jerusalem.They were a people regarded by many Jews as ethnically impure, theologically compromised, and socially toxic.
    The hostility between Jews and Samaritans ran deep in both directions. A first-century Jewish listener hearing this parable would have been waiting for a Jewish layman to be the hero who finally does the right thing. Instead, it’s a Samaritan in the hero’s seat.
    This isn’t a gentle point. It’s a theological atomic bomb.
    And notice what the Samaritan does when he sees the man. He “had compassion!” The Greek word translated “compassion” means, to have great affection for, to love. It originally denotes the “inward parts” of a sacrifice, specifically the noble parts meant for God.
    This isn’t a polite feeling of mild sympathy. This is a deeply raw emotion. This is the body responding before the mind has even finished debating. The Samaritan’s compassion isn’t a decision he arrives at after weighing the pros and cons. It’s a physical response to human suffering encountered face-to-face, at close range, without the buffer of the other side of the road.
    Look at the sequence of verbs. He went to him, he bandaged his wounds, he poured on oil and wine, he put him on his own animal, he brought him to the inn, he took care of him through the night, he paid for his lodging in the morning, and he promised to cover any additional expenses upon his return.
    Seven distinct acts of care, each one costing something. Time, supplies, the use of his own animal, money, and the open-ended commitment to come back. The Samaritan doesn’t make a single gesture of charity and then return to his schedule. He stays awake to this man’s suffering until the man is genuinely cared for.

    The Question That Reframes Everything

    (Luke 10:36–37)
    Then Jesus asks the question that reframes everything.
    Luke 10:36–37 CSB
    36 “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 “The one who showed mercy to him,” he said. Then Jesus told him, “Go and do the same.”
    The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” He wanted a definition. A category. A border. Jesus answers the question by replacing it with a different one entirely. He doesn’t say “Here’s who qualifies as your neighbor.” He says, in effect: “Stop asking who deserves your attention and start asking whether you are the kind of person who gives it.”
    The lawyer wanted to draw a circle around the people he was obligated to love. Jesus draws the circle differently, around the person who is suffering. Wherever they are, whatever they look like, whoever they are to us culturally, religiously or socially. Jesus asks, “will we go to them or cross to the other side?”
    Notice something quietly devastating in the lawyer’s final answer. Jesus asks which of the three proved to be a neighbor. The lawyer responds: “The one who showed mercy to him.”
    He can’t even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. After everything Jesus has just described, the bandaging, the oil and wine, the overnight care, the denarii, the promise to return.
    The lawyer still can’t get the word out. He says “the one who showed mercy” as if naming the Samaritan directly would cost him something he’s not yet ready to pay. Which is, in itself, a quiet and devastating portrait of a man who understood the parable intellectually and hadn’t yet let it reach his heart.
    I love how Jesus doesn’t press him on it. He simply says, “Go and do the same.” Five simple words. He doesn’t say “Go and think more carefully about who qualifies.” He doesn’t say “Go and develop a better theology around love your neighbor.” He says, go and do the same.

    What This Means for Us Today

    The Good Samaritan isn’t just a lesson in kindness. It’s an exegesis of what spiritual wakefulness looks like out in the world.
    We’ve spent weeks building the interior architecture of watchfulness. We learned in Gethsemane that drowsiness has a cost. We learned from Samuel that we have to be trained to hear God’s voice. We learned from Hannah and Mary that sustained watchfulness requires surrender rather than grasping.
    And last week we learned that the Spirit sends us outward, that the upper room was always preparation, never destination.
    The Good Samaritan adds to all of that. The world we’re sent into is full of people lying on the road, and the primary spiritual danger is not that we’ll fail to believe the right things about them. It is that we’ll cross to the other side.
    Staying awake to suffering means seeing people, not categories.
    The priest and Levite didn’t fail to notice the man. They failed to let what they noticed actually touch their hearts. There’s a kind of seeing that processes without feeling, that registers without responding. A kind of seeing that observes human pain from a careful distance and keeps walking.
    The Samaritan’s compassion was deeply heartfelt. He didn’t shield himself against what he saw. He let the man’s suffering land on him at full weight. That’s terrifying. It’s also the only way the story ends well.
    Staying awake to suffering means staying, not gesturing.
    Count the Samaritan’s verbs again. Seven acts of care, not one. He didn’t just toss a coin at the man and feel virtuous. He bandaged, he poured, he lifted, he walked, he paid, he stayed, he promised to return.
    The wide-awake life isn’t the life that makes charitable gestures from a safe distance. It’s the life that gets close enough to the suffering to significantly inconvenience itself. And it keeps showing up.
    James 2:16 puts it with characteristic directness. If you tell someone who is cold and hungry “Stay warm and eat well” without giving them what they actually need, your words are worthless. Watchfulness without action is not watchfulness. It’s just a dream we’re having about being awake.
    Staying awake to suffering means not debating who deserves our help.
    The lawyer’s question was a boundary question. He wanted to know the minimum required circle. Jesus’ answer expands the circle to include anyone who is suffering within your sight and reach. Regardless of what side of the social, ethnic, religious, and cultural line they’re standing on. The church that is genuinely awake to the world doesn’t spend its energy deciding who qualifies for its compassion. It spends its energy simply providing the compassion.
    Conclusion: Go and Do the Same
    There’s a reason this parable has endured for two thousand years. It’s not just because it’s in the Bible. It isn’t because it’s easy. It ’s because it’s exact. It describes with surgical precision the condition of every person who knows the right answer, can quote the correct theology, and has still developed a remarkably efficient system for not-quite-seeing the man on the road.
    The priest and the Levite aren’t villains. That’s the uncomfortable part. They’re professionals. They’re busy. They have responsibilities. They have very good reasons for being where they need to be.
    They are, in most respects, upstanding members of their community who genuinely love God and generally mean well. They could be any one of us. They’re also the people in the story who left a man bleeding on the road.
    And the Samaritan, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion, the wrong everything by the standards of His audience. The Samaritan is the one who woke up when he saw the man on the road. Not because he had better theology. Rather, because he had not yet learned to cross to the other side.
    Jesus closes with the simplest charge in the Gospels. Five words. No qualifier. No committee to form. No assessments to complete first. Simply go and do the same.
    Stay awake to suffering, and stay until the work is done.
    That’s what the Spirit blew us out of the upper room to do. That’s what it means to be Awake to the World. Not to have the correct opinions about suffering from a comfortable distance, but to let it reach our heart and soul. Get your hands into it and keep showing up until the man on the road is genuinely cared for.
    The road from Jerusalem to Jericho hasn’t changed. It still runs through our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our social media feeds, our communities. The people on it are still stripped of the markers that would make them easy to categorize.
    And the question Jesus is still asking, to the lawyer, to the disciples, to every person who claims to be awake and walking in the Spirit, is the same question it’s always been:
    Which of these proved to be a neighbor?
    Go and do the same.

      • Luke 10:25–26ESV

      • Luke 10:27ESV

      • Luke 10:28ESV

      • Luke 10:29ESV

      • Luke 10:30ESV

      • Luke 10:31–32ESV

      • Luke 10:33–34ESV

      • Luke 10:35ESV

      • Luke 10:36–37ESV

Grantsdale Community Church
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