Kindness, Rescue, and Superman's Shorts

on the Good Samaritan

Hi folks, still away for vacation, then speaking gig.

Next week we’ll have a guest post from a friend—the minute I read his piece, I knew I wanted to share it. Wise and so so charming. I’ll also be sharing some goodies that have brought me joy this summer.

But first, this week: again I share the sermon from last Sunday. I had fun with this one. It’s good to laugh right now, yes? And thanks to the parishioner who called it a “mic drop.”

~

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Trinity Presbyterian Church
July 13, 2025
Luke 10:25-37 (I read from The Message translation)

We’re going to start with a little quiz this morning. Now I know it’s summertime, and for those of us who follow the school schedule, we’re on a bit of a mental break... but let’s see how awake we are this morning, eh? I will give you a list of two items; your job is to fill in the third. We’ll start out easy:

Larry, Curly, __________
The Good, The Bad, _________
This one is too hot, this one is too cold, and ________
Bacon, lettuce, ______________
Snap, crackle, ______________

Let’s kick it up slightly:
Can anyone name the Three Musketeers? (Athos, Porthos and Aramis)
How about the three races that make up the triple crown? (Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes)

Now let’s get biblical:
Gold, frankincense and ___________
Father, Son, ______________

What we’re seeing here is the rule of threes, which is a basic structure used in literature, folktales, and yes, scripture. Master storytellers know this structure and use it either to provide a predictable pattern, or to disrupt the audience’s expectations... although good ones do that carefully and intentionally.

Here’s one more:

Priest, Levite, ________________.

We say Samaritan because that’s how the story goes that we’ve received. But that’s not what Jesus’ audience would have been expecting. According to Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament, the expected order at this time would have been Priest, Levite, Israelite.

Priest, Levite, Israelite. Boom, boom, boom. Expected.

So imagine Jesus, the master storyteller, spinning this yarn, as the lawyer and other people listen on. They know what’s coming. And they’re probably starting to feel pretty good about themselves, until:

Samaritan.

“Samaritan” is the last thing they would have expected Jesus to say.

Imagine if I had disrupted the rule of three in our little test, if I’d said, “Larry, Curly, and Sir Anthony Hopkins.” Or “gold, frankincense, and paper towels.”

That would be a little uncomfortable. It would feel a bit wrong. Jesus takes that discomfort and turbocharges it to make a theological point.

We often hear about the Samaritans as the down and out, the persecuted; but according to Levine, Samaritans were not just the downtrodden people. They were enemies of the people of Israel.

How dare Jesus elevate one of “those” people? How dare he make the priest and the Levite the villains and the Samaritan the hero of this story?

And yet there it is. The person who fulfilled the greatest commandment—to love God and love neighbor as we love ourselves—is the last person you’d expect it to be.

Now this is one of those stories that’s familiar not only to those of us who are part of churches, but it’s the rare story that jumps the barrier into broader culture. We know the message: Be like the Samaritan.

What keeps us from doing it?
In keeping with our rule of three, I’ll suggest that three things keep us from “showing mercy”:

The first is time. I’ve shared with you before about the Good Samaritan study at Princeton Seminary, where researchers set up a series of elaborate scenarios to see what makes someone stop to help a person in need. What they found is that the primary predictor for Good Samaritan behavior is whether the person feels they have time for it. The busier we get, the less likely we are to respond with compassion to someone in need. That’s not good news in our world of perpetual motion. As Paul Ricoeur says: “Being a neighbor lies in the habit of making oneself available.”

The second is the sheer immensity of the need. Who is our neighbor? Potentially everyone and anyone. The GoFundMe for our co-worker’s cousin’s fiancé with cancer. The family we heard about on the news who lost their home to a fire. Technology has connected us in amazing ways, but it also connects us to tragedy like never before. It gets to be too much sometimes. So we shut down, tune out, ignore. In his sermon on the Good Samaritan years ago, Pope Francis lamented what he called “the globalization of indifference,” which “makes us all ‘unnamed,’ responsible yet nameless and faceless.” ...The globalization of indifference.

The third is a sense that we don’t have anything meaningful to contribute. Our culture loves heroes. What we think we need are strong people who will swoop in and save the day, leaders to take charge, and few of us feel up to that. And yet take a look at the Samaritan’s response. He goes to the man, tends his wounds, takes him to a safe place...

...And then he leaves.

My whole life with this story, I’ve always wondered where he goes. Isn’t he supposed to drop everything and devote himself to this man’s full-time care and healing? He’s the Good Samaritan, after all!

Nope. The Samaritan helps him, he pays for the man’s care, and then he goes about his business. His part in this drama, important as it is, is over.

But it’s also really important to note that what he does is infused with basic human kindness. The Message version emphasizes the point: the neighbor was the one who behaved with kindness. Kindness that isn’t glamorous, kindness that often seems in short supply in a world that worships strength and dominance, even cruelty sometimes.

But in the realm of Jesus, what we call the kingdom of God, kindness is a primary currency. Kindness. Not force. Not dominance. Not credentials, or even technical skill: there’s no indication that the Samaritan was a trained healer. He just cared. I’m guessing the Samaritan didn’t have a first aid kit on hand. I bet he had to make do with what he had. Maybe he ripped off the hem of his robe to make a bandage, or snapped his walking stick in half to fashion a splint for a broken bone. And then he put the person on his own donkey because he didn’t have a stretcher, walking the rest of the treacherous road himself.

And the basic kindness we see in this story, it turns out, is deeply healing. My friend Joe Clifford likes to tell the story of the early church, when a plague of dysentery racked the Roman empire. When people contracted dysentery they were put out of their homes and left for dead. In the midst of this, Christians would take in the sick people, keep them warm and give them fluids—which is in fact the treatment for dysentery. It turned out to be the greatest evangelism effort of the early church. People thought it was a miracle. It was simply loving care, which is in fact its own miracle.

Or consider Scott Ruskan. I bet his picture came across some of your social media feeds this week. Scott Ruskan is a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who was responsible for helping some 165 girls evacuate from Camp Mystic outside Kerrville. And there’s a certain swagger in the picture, he’s in his uniform in front of a helicopter, helmet held casually under one arm, and you can imagine him dangling from a rope ladder or cutting through choppy water to get to stranded flood victims, barking orders over the chopper blades. Because that’s what we picture heroes doing and we love our heroes. But what he actually did was remain on the ground where the girls had congregated and helped calm them down and triaged who would be rescued and when. He carried them across rocky ground because many of them weren’t wearing shoes. And my favorite detail is that many girls asked if they could bring their stuffed animals with them and he said every time, Of course you can. That’s the spirit of the Samaritan. Stuffed animals. Not swagger. (Source)

Here’s one final rule of three for you to ponder:

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s ______________.

There’s a new Superman movie out in theaters, which I haven’t seen yet so don’t worry, no spoilers. But I did see the actor who plays Superman, David Corenswet, in a podcast interview reflect on a question that I promise relates to this story of the Good Samaritan, and that question is:

Why does Superman wear his underwear on the outside of his costume?

Superman, as you recall, historically wears these brightly colored red trunks. And as they were making the movie, the filmmakers had to contend with the fact that they look really silly. Apparently this time around they tried various things to make the trunks work or look better, like maybe they have some kind of purpose to them, some utility to them. That didn’t work out.

And so what David Corenswet said is that I think the dorkiness is kind of the point. He said, Superman has so much power, he can catch falling buildings. But he also wants to be approachable. He doesn’t want children to be scared of him, he wants them to feel like they can ask for help with their homework or to get their cat out out of a tree. So he wears bright colors and trunks. (Source)

Looking a little silly, in other words, is a strategic choice. A person with almost unlimited power doesn’t have anything to prove, he doesn’t want to be worshiped or groveled to. A truly Super-Man, or person, is willing to risk looking out of place if it helps them be a neighbor.

We as followers of Jesus claim this world-changing power—the idea that death itself is defeated and that God can make the impossible possible. And yet that power comes through kindness and care, which is very unsophisticated stuff:

A man walking beside a donkey.
People taking in dysentery patients.
A water rescuer who stays on dry ground and holds a little girl’s hand on the worst day of her life.

There are some who say that kind of gospel is passe now: weak, feeble and embarrassing. We need a Jesus more like Batman: a masked vigilante, dominant, feared.

Don’t let yourself fall for it.

We see it here in Jesus’ most famous parable about the most important commandment. Kindness is the currency of the reign of God.

And so:

1. A priest walked by.
2. A Levite walked by.
3. And then one of us walked by.

What happened next?
We get to decide.