everything [in] between | Commentary by: Rev. Jeff Chu
Read
Luke 10:25-37
To love is what it takes to truly live In his last speech before being assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. spoke about the story of the Good Samaritan.(3)
King had visited the Jericho Road in 1959. He saw its twists and felt its turns as it wound through the hills and sank into a valley
outside Jerusalem. Along the way were so many potential hiding places for robbers to lie in wait, ready to ambush weary travelers. “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me” about the priest and the Levite, he said. “It’s possible those men were afraid.” Perhaps, he suggested, they fearfully asked themselves, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’”
The Good Samaritan, King said, “reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” Then
he urged his listeners to imagine themselves on contemporary Jericho Roads. Could they—would they—ask that same question when they saw others struggling?
King’s speech offered a master class in wrestling with complexity. He empathized with the Levite and the priest—how utterly
human to be fearful on the Jericho Road! He also praised the Samaritan’s “dangerous unselfishness.”
Another layer to King’s complexity: Privately, he had misgivings about the story. “I of course like and respect the Good Samaritan, but I don’t want to be a Good Samaritan,” King told a friend. “I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody. . . . I want to pave the Jericho Road, add street lights to the Jericho Road, make the Jericho Road safe for passage by everybody.”(4)
(3) An annotated transcript of King’s final speech can be found here: nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/02/
us/king-mlk-last-sermon-annotated.html
(4) Author John Hope Bryant recounts this conversation between Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. and ambassador Andrew Young in his article, “Fixing the Jericho Road, published on HuffPost, May 25, 2011. huffpost. com/entry/fixing-the-jericho-road_b_422612