The Good Samaritan: sermon on the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

By a Dominican Friar   |   27 August 2025

“Going up to him, he bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.”

Who is this unfortunate man lying by the wayside? Who is this man going down from Jerusalem, and attacked by thieves, and left naked and wounded? He is not just a nameless man in a story: he is a symbol of mankind itself. This man’s story is our story. So, our Lord used the parable of the Good Samaritan to explain our situation, and why we need His help.

One thing we should always remember about our lives on earth is that this is not how God intended things to be. We are a fallen race. When our first parents sinned, we left paradise. This is represented in the parable by the man going down from Jerusalem, the beautiful city where God was worshipped, toward Jericho, the lowest point in all the Holy Land, where the Dead Sea is. When Adam and Eve fell, they and all their descendants were stripped and wounded. How is this? We have been stripped of sanctifying grace. If there had been no fall, babies would have come into the world in the state of grace, and there would have been no need to baptise them. As it is, they come into the world supernaturally naked, and that is why we baptise them as soon as possible.

But how exactly are we wounded? The parable says that the robbers, by which we can understand the demons, “stripped the man and wounded him, leaving him half dead”. How does this apply to us? It means that the powers that we are left with, after the fall, do not always function as we need them to, if we are going to reach heaven. Take our intellect, for example. You meet intelligent people who don’t recognise some fundamental truth, such as the existence of God; you meet others who don’t realise that some obvious sin (for example, fabricating babies in a laboratory) is wrong. As a result of the Fall, we are born suffering from the wound of ignorance, and different people find different truths harder to acquire. Our minds are like a chandelier where some of the bulbs are missing, and so not all the room is lit up.

But sometimes the problem is slightly different: we know what is right to do but do something else. St Paul puts these words into the mouth of fallen man: “The good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, I do.” He’s not speaking here about the wound of ignorance, but some other kind of wound. If it is pleasure that keeps us from doing what we should, we can call that the wound of intemperance. But if it is fear of something, or someone, that turns us aside from the path of duty, we can call that the wound of weakness.

So, here we have three wounds that afflict this poor man lying by the wayside, who represents each man coming into the world: the wounds of ignorance, intemperance, and weakness. How does God in His mercy bend down and come to our aid? 

We know the answer to that: He sends us His Son, Jesus Christ, who in this parable is represented under the figure of the Good Samaritan. As you know, the Jews and the Samaritans did not get on well, and perhaps this is one reason why our Lord uses the image of a Samaritan to describe Himself. As St John says, “He came to his own [that is, to the Jews], and his own received him not.”

But notice who comes to the wounded man before this Samaritan. It is a priest and a Levite. We all know what they do: they pass by on the other side. But why does Jesus put this detail into His parable? Is it just to warn us priests against thinking that our service of God exempts us from having to fulfil the ordinary duties to our neighbour? That might be part of the reason. But there is something else as well. This priest and Levite together represent the old Law, the religion that God gave to the Jews before the coming of His Son. This religion was carried out by the Old Testament priests, and their assistants, the Levites. And this Old Testament religion, which came through Moses, was good, but it couldn’t cure people of their wounds.

This is also what St Paul is talking about in the epistle. He is drawing a contrast between the law that came through Moses, and the gospel that he and the other apostles now preach. The first was “graven with letters upon stones”: that is a reference to the ten commandments, which were engraved by divine power on the two tablets of stone. But the old law, though it was given by God in such an impressive way on Mount Sinai, and though it was accompanied by all kinds of animal sacrifices and other rituals, couldn’t change the hearts of the Jews. It was all too external. God gave it to the Jews not to heal them, but so they would be led to hope for something better, when the fullness of time had come.

And that better thing was the coming of the Good Samaritan, with His wine and His oil. That is to say, the coming of Christ, with the sacraments of grace. St Paul calls all this “the ministration of the spirit”, since Christ gives us His Spirit through the holy sacraments. What does the parable say? “Going up to him, he bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.” Jesus comes near to fallen man, because He took on a human nature Himself. He pours in oil and wine, because unlike the old Jewish religion, His grace is not something outside us. It comes within. Sometimes it soothes us, as oil would; sometimes it stings, as when wine disinfects an open wound. And sometimes it does both at once. 

But by means of all the sacraments, Christ is healing our wounds: of ignorance, intemperance and weakness. Whether it is baptism, enlightening us about the reality of a supernatural world; or confirmation, strengthening us against the world and the devil; or penance, purifying our consciences so that we can see what actions please God; or the Blessed Sacrament, helping us to overcome bodily pleasure; or finally extreme unction, delivering us from the fear of death. It is not a process that we should expect to be finished in a day; a person doesn’t recover in a day from being attacked by bandits and left half-dead. But provided we remain in “the inn”, that is, the Church, we can convalesce in safety. And when the Good Samaritan returns, that is, when our Lord comes for us at the end of our lives, we will be fit and well, and able to go with Him into eternity.