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Special to United Methodist Insight | July 9, 2025
I work with people who are in ditches: not metaphorical or spiritual ones, but real ones. Ditches made of poverty, paperwork, silence, and suspicion. Ditches dug by border patrols, broken English, and bureaucracies that label people as illegal before they even know their names.
These are people who came seeking a better life in a new land, only to find themselves cast down and beaten not by robbers but by systems and policies and bruised not by fists but by the slow, grinding indifference of the powerful.
You don’t see much from the ditch, but what you do see, you never forget.
The Sky Looks Different from the Ground
When you're lying there, bleeding, the world shifts, the sky feels like a ceiling. People pass by, their footsteps feel like drumbeats. You don’t see faces; you see the soles of shoes. You see the undersides of clothes. Most of all, you realize no one is stopping. This is indifference as a concrete reality.
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We are not used to that perspective. Most of us are conditioned to look down, sometimes at others, and always down the street. Looking down at our phones is a habit that, while organizing our lives, keeps us from seeing most of the world around us. We rarely look at the ditch because we’ve never been in it. Or if we have, we pretend we haven’t.
But the ditch changes everything.
A Samaritan Knows the Ditch
The story of the Good Samaritan is not about charity. It is about proximity and perspective.
It is a story about someone who knew the ditch. The Samaritan was a man who had been walked past too many times. He was used to being ignored, hated, and labeled.
He did not stop because he was morally superior. He stopped because he knew what it was like to be left behind.
Two truths must be spoken here.
First, there is no shortage of people in ditches. Our cities are packed with them. Our classrooms, shelters, border crossings, food pantries, waiting rooms, and jails are full of them. The ditch has never been empty.
Second, we no longer live in a world where we stumble across a wounded stranger on the road to Jericho. We live in a world where the ditches are crowded and visible, if we would only look. These people do not appear as interruptions. They are already here.
It is we who must find the courage to see.
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This Is Not a Thought Experiment
We view the parable as a moral lesson, as if Jesus is teaching about kindness and compassion. He was doing something much more difficult. He was condemning the religious leaders and exposing how the holy often fails to be humane.
The question is not whether we will find someone in a ditch. The question is what we will do when we do.
Most of us will walk by. I know I have. We will justify it. We will tell ourselves we are late for a meeting. We wonder if it is a trap. We will offer our thoughts and prayers as we step over them, and we will pat ourselves on the back for doing so.
Some will walk along the side of the road, staying close to the ditch because they expect to find someone there. They will learn the names of those who are wounded, lift and carry them, bandage wounds, and cover the costs. When they finish with one person, they will move on to the next.
This work never ends.
There is always another ditch and another body, always another need. The kingdom of God is a messy, disorganized place that requires constant attention.
The View That Saves Us
We often want to be the Samaritan. But before we can act like him, we must see like him. Before we can see like him, we must feel the weight of the ditch ourselves.
Jesus did not share this story to encourage Christians; instead, He told it to confront everyone. It aims to remove our excuses, identify our fears, and challenge us to move beyond our safety into the suffering of others.
If we cannot see the world from the ditch, we will walk on by.
When we walk by, we are not neutral. We are complicit, as if we are collaborating with the thieves who initially attacked the man.
The priest and the Levite had their reasons, but the reasons did not matter. Their absence nearly killed the man. Inaction is not innocence.
What If We Made the Road Wider?
We live in a world with far too many ditches. We've drawn the lines so clearly. This side is the road. That side is the ditch. If you’re in the ditch, you stay there. But what if we blurred that line? What if we moved from ditch to ditch, pulling people up, healing wounds, bearing the costs, refusing to ignore it? That could mark the start of a story we haven't finished yet.
Richard Bryant
The Rev. Richard Bryant is an elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his Substack blog, Elevate the Discourse.