"Now let's go down to the well. As you can tell, this is going to be a deep lesson."

So you may have noticed that I haven't posted in a couple weeks. I'll go back and post about those weeks once I get the time, which will not be tonight.

So this week we talked some about Luke's parables, which means the Good Samaritan and Luke 15's three parables about being lost.

I had never seen the parable of the Good Samaritan like this before, but there's another meaning in it that I'd never seen before. First, we consult the picture:


So we see that the man is coming down from Jerusalem. You might be interested to know that 'man' also means 'Adam' in Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus would have spoken. And the word 'stripped' is also used to mean the body being stripped from the spirit. The opposite of the word means to endow, or put a sacred garment on. Sound familiar?

In any case, you have a couple characters: first, the Jew, who wouldn't go anywhere near him; second, the Levite, who came over and looked, but wouldn't help; third, the Samaritan, who appears to have gone out looking for someone to help; fourth, the innkeeper, who clearly knows the Samaritan, and the Samaritan trusts him, even though most people would try to rip off the Samaritan.

The important part though is to apply it to ourselves, and we fit in all the categories. We are the Jew when we are too proud to help. We are the Levite when we think we're too busy to help, but when we trust the Lord and take the time to help, we will be repaid for all the effort and time that we've put in, and we become the innkeeper. Sometimes, in small measure, we can be the Samaritan, though it's normally Christ who plays that role. But we can also be the thieves, beating ourselves up as we walk along the road of life.

So remember to pay attention to what roles you find yourself playing.

The other story I want to touch on is the one about the woman taken in adultery. Now, apparently adulterers hadn't been stoned in about 600 years. I didn't know that. So she was probably very scared. (And can we just mention that the man didn't suffer any retribution for his actions?) I'd always wondered why Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground, but Brother Griffin mentioned that when He did, all eyes probably went to that, taking the attention off her. Now we don't know what he wrote, but one idea that Brother Griffin said that others had had is that he started with the youngest and went to the oldest, writing all their names, then working from oldest to youngest, wrote the names of the woman they'd last committed adultery with, and they one by one left. As Brother Griffin said, "There was only one perfect person in the temple that day, and no stones were thrown."

Know that you're loved!!