Thought for the Day
A one-minute read to inspire or challenge. Written by members of the church and updated every few days.
13th February 2026
SAMARITAN COMPASSION
A week or so ago I read this: ‘Minutes after Renee Good was shot in Minneapolis, a doctor who witnessed the shooting pleaded with federal agents to be allowed to examine her, shouting “You just killed my neighbour!”’ This suggests to me that our modern world still needs to read the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The Samaritans diverged from mainstream Judaism in three ways – first, their ethnicity was compromised following the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE. Secondly, for them sacred scripture was confined to the Pentateuch, and thirdly, they believed God designated Mount Gerizim as the true place for worship and sacrifice, not Jerusalem.
Thus when Jesus, in answer to a lawyer’s question, identifies the heart of the law to be ‘love God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself’, he establishes a mandate on grounds that both Jews and Samaritans could agree. But the lawyer persists by asking: ‘And who is my neighbour?’
Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan with its ethnicity-blind message. An assault on the Jericho road leaves a man, presumably Jewish, robbed and half-dead on the wayside. Three men encounter this pitiable scene. The first two – a priest and a Levite – see the man’s predicament but choose to ignore it and ‘pass by on the other side’. Only the third, a despised Samaritan, stops to tend to the wounded man’s troubles with no half measures, looking also to his future welfare.
So how is our neighbour to be defined – not by location or ethnicity, but first by need, and then by action to meet that need. How should the Good Samaritan story be read in Minneapolis today? There seems to be conflict between a national government set on ethnic exclusion, and local people motivated by a properly Christian compassion. From a distance the Minnesota situation is helpful because instead of philosophical ethics, it puts a variety of human faces on the concept of neighbourliness.
But where do we stand?
John Briggs
11th February 2026
Today is celebrated by many as the Feast Day of Our Lady of Lourdes. It was on this date in 1858 that the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to a 14-year-old French peasant girl, Benadette, in a cave. She experienced the same vision on several subsequent occasions until she was told to dig […]
6th February 2026
Whilst working out how best to engage with distressing news stories, I am also drawn towards more heart-warming reports. At a recent conference researchers described their progress towards improving lives of those living with various medical conditions. There was special focus on solving problems of inequalities in healthcare provision. For instance, for organ donation for […]
4th February 2026
I invite you to reflect on the strain being placed on truth, trust, and public life. News cycles move quickly, outrage is amplified, and it can feel hard to know whom or what to believe. In such a climate, Jesus’ call to honesty, humility, and love of neighbour feels both challenging and deeply relevant […]
30th January 2026
Growing up in the Anglican Church with Sunday School tales of the Northumbrian saints Aidan and Cuthbert, I was always aware of the significance of Iona for the evangelisation of the north east of England. It was from Iona on the west coast of Scotland that Aidan travelled with his monks to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) […]
28th January 2026
Sunday 8th February has been designated as Racial Justice Sunday. I am dismayed that, over fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (at the time), we still need to set aside time each year to explore what it means truly to love our neighbour. In recent […]
23rd January 2026
Curiosity. That’s a word that has caught my attention this week. It has popped up at work, as one of those skills that the company seeks to encourage in its engineers. Mindfulness meditations encouraged me to be curious about the sounds around us and the sensations of the body. As I caught up with some […]
21st January 2026
At Swakopmund in Namibia, once a German colony, there is a historic steam locomotive abandoned there in 1895 and known to the locals as Martin Luther because “Here I stand, I can go no further”. I am writing this in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. At least in England the churches stance about […]
16th January 2026
I’m writing on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth in 1929. A Baptist minister, his prominent part in the 1960s Civil Rights movement is honoured on this day as a federal holiday across the USA since 2000. A favourite time for me in teaching was playing to pupils a recording of MLK’s ‘I have […]
14th January 2026
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. W. B. Yeats’ words, penned in the turmoil following the 1914-18 conflict and war in Ireland, ring tragically true today. […]