No Good Samaritan

This isn’t pretty. I’m not sure there is a happy ending.

Perhaps the picture will speak for itself.

Banteay Srei, a temple ruin outside of Angkor Wat.

When Andrea and I had visited three years earlier that’s all it was, a ruin out in the country side. We were there alone. Now a massive entry complex and parking lot have been developed and on the day we were there, thousands of others were with us, streaming in with their cameras to capture one more historical ruin.

And there on the ground at the entrance that everyone had to walk through…
What is that?” I heard someone ask.

I didn’t have an answer.

I couldn’t tell if the human that lay there was male or female. I couldn’t tell his or her age. I didn’t know how the burns and scars that so disfigured the face got there. I didn’t know if a parent had dropped this child off to beg at the entrance of the temple. And why just lying there, head into the concrete, eyes listless and unmoving? And why was no one doing…anything?

I didn’t have an answer. My eyes welled up with tears and I...like everyone else walked on.

God, have mercy...

On me, on us, on your creation that lay there all day.

My answer to the question soon came.

That…was the man lying in the ditch and we were the priests and levites and good upstanding people that walked by on the other side of the road.

And No Good Samaritan came.

That...is me…that is all of us…at the core, helpless, battered, bruised and bleeding.

And who will be our Good Samaritan?

And That…crippled, burned and disfigured, abandoned and left alone, the one from whom everyone averted their eyes and walked by…That was the image of God and perhaps, even Jesus.

God, have mercy.

Luke 10:25-37 (Two powerful reflections on this text can be found here and here.)

Duncan