More Than a Story (Friday Devotional)

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

- Luke 10:36-37

“It’s only a story.”

From a parent to a child, those words come as a comfort in a darkened movie theater—the dragon onscreen isn’t real, the stakes are imaginary, it’s all just pretend. As you get older, you silently repeat those same words to yourself when a novel or a film captivates you so much that your eyes fill with tears or the hairs on your arm stands straight up—“Those aren’t real people,” you think, “you’re being silly. It’s only a story.”

Stories compel us in ways that abstract ideas do not. By putting ourselves in a character’s shoes, imagining their joys and pains, we’re able to learn something about ourselves from a safe distance. But when a story—whether told in a song or on a stage, whether it’s something you hear from someone else or even something you make up yourself—draws you in so deeply that you start to feel intensely, uncomfortably vulnerable, four simply words pull you out of the fantasy and put you back on solid ground: “it’s only a story.”

Stories are powerful, which is why Jesus used them so frequently when he was teaching about the kingdom of God. With parables about prodigal sons and unforgiving servants, pearls and mustard seeds, he made the spiritual comprehensible and brought us in on the Father’s plan. We cherish his parables to this day.

One of the best known, of course, is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When a man, seeking to justify himself, demanded that Jesus explain exactly who God was talking about when He commanded us to love our neighbors, Jesus told him a story. In the tale, a man is beaten, robbed, and left for dead, then left to his fate by two bystanders he’d have expected would help. Only when a Samaritan—a name most Jews would have spat out with contempt—comes by does the man find rescue, recovery, and restoration.

It’s a wonderful story that has much to tell us about who we are called to love (everyone, regardless of their background), what makes a neighbor (relationship, not proximity or affiliation), and what true compassion looks like (deeds, not just good intentions.) But at the end of the day, it’s easy to hear the parable and dismiss it with those four words we know so well: it’s only a story.

But Jesus is ready for those four words with four of his own: “go and do likewise.” The call to love your neighbor is not something Jesus consigns to fiction; it isn’t something he lets us explain away. With the story, Jesus shows us what mercy looks like, and with a command he makes explicit what the parable should have already made apparent: unconditional mercy is our calling. Don’t just hear the story, he’s saying, live it.

In a cynical time, it’s tempting to think of the Good Samaritan’s story as nothing more than a fantasy, the kind of fable that’s fine for children but which won’t stand up to the scrutiny of the real world. It’s easy to see the compassion on display in that parable as unrealistic and extravagant, to say that life is more complicated than the parable’s black-and-white portrayal. You can read Jesus’s words and conclude with the a mixture of sadness and self-justification that, ultimately, it’s only a story. But the cross shows us that unconditional mercy is no fiction—it’s the way of Christ. Go and do likewise.