Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE JERICHO ROAD. In my last address I told you that our Lord composed the parable of the Good Samaritan in order to teach a certain lawyer that his idea of what constituted neighborly kindness was a very narrow and unworthy one, and that neighborhood was limited to no one class, or nation, or religious sect, but was as broad as the race. Any man who was in need was the neighbor of any man who could help him; because God made all men in His own Divine Likeness, and willed that they should be dependent on each other for mutual helpfulness and support. To-night we begin the study of the parable itself. Just where the parable was uttered we do not know. It may have been in a synagogue where the Jewish lawyer worshipped, or it may have been just outside of the city of Jerusalem, on the road which led down to Jericho. If the Jericho road was the place, of course it would naturally suggest the scenery and incident of the parable; for our Lord begins by saying,
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, leaving him half dead. His hearers would at once appreciate the realism of the parable, for this road was notoriously insecure and dangerous; and without doubt many of those who listened, or elsetheir friends, had suffered from attacks of the Bedouin Sicarii, who often waylaid and robbed travelers on this road which led from Jerusalem to Jericho. Possibly our Lord had in mind some actual instance of robbery which had recently startled them and had been much discussed; and if so, then their interest in His parable would be all the more acute. It was always our Lord’s habit to draw His illustrations and the material for His parables from places and things with which his hearers were very familiar; and in this, …