The Good Samaritan (But Not the Way You Think) - Jeremy Duncan

February 23, 2026·31 min·2 clips

The story's point is that “your neighbor is anyone you see as holding the same value as you.”

Jeremy starts with Lent and the color purple, using the season as a doorway into the text. He says the church has long treated these weeks before Easter as a time of preparation, reflection, and repentance. He reaches back to 325 AD and the first council of Nicaea to show how old that rhythm is, with a reference to the 40 days before Easter as a period of preparation. Then he jokes, with some understatement, that people doing the calendar math may think he is early, because there are still more than 40 days left before Easter. That opening is not window dressing. It sets up the sermon's main move, which is that the framing matters before the point lands. Jeremy turns to the lawyer who asks how to inherit eternal life. He likes the answer the man gives: love God and love people. But he slows down on Jesus' reply and notes that the usual English rendering misses part of the force. The Greek word ionios can mean eternal, but in a Jewish context it also points toward the life of the age to come. That distinction matters to him. He says the lawyer is not only asking about life after death. He is asking how to step into a life that does not end, and to do it now. Jeremy contrasts that with a future-only way of thinking that treats faith as preparation for some distant event. He insists that Jesus is talking about a present reality, one that can be lived today. From there, he is able to read the parable with fresh eyes. The point is not that Levites are automatically bad guys. The point is not that Samaritans are cute, cuddly heroes either. The point is that our mental model of the world is not always an accurate predictor of outcomes. That is why the story lands as an inversion rather than a simple lesson. Jeremy keeps circling back to the mismatch between expectation and outcome. He wants listeners to notice how often we draw lines around neighborliness before Jesus does. The sermon asks the listener to hear the familiar road from Jericho again, but without assuming the roles are as obvious as they first seem. In the end, the Good Samaritan becomes less about identifying the right character and more about receiving a different kind of life. That life is not postponed. It is something to enter now. And once you see that, the command to love your neighbor gets much harder and much richer.

As heard by us

A familiar parable is slowed down and re-aimed toward the life God wants now.

Jeremy Duncan takes the Good Samaritan and slows it down until the parable's central inversion does the real work. He starts with Lent, purple, and the season of preparation for Easter, then moves into Jesus' question about what it means to inherit life that never ends.

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If you want the Good Samaritan read through Lent and the life of the age to come, press play.

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