From the Ditch

Throughout my twenties, I spent a significant amount of time in mission work—specifically in Haitian orphanages—and I remember how the stories we told back home were subject to becoming more than just narratives. At best, they were means for connection; at worst, they were weapons for perpetuating harm. Stories of mission can make us feel good. They can make us feel needed. They can make us feel, in some quiet and unexamined way, superior. The children in such stories are often treated as props for goodness, evidence of generosity, or fuel for fundraising. It took me years to trace this back to the very scripture we claimed as our foundation. The parable of the Good Samaritan, as most commonly read in the Western Christian tradition, has served a particular kind of love—one that William I. Orbih calls “colonial love”: a love that is “pretentious, racist, dehumanizing, and violent,” one that “segregates human societies, stifles human life, violates human bodies, and exerts domination on human groups” (Orbih, P1). I do not think this is the love of the gospel that Jesus was teaching.

This paper argues that the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) enacts a deliberate narrative repositioning that subverts white colonial savior theology by placing the listener not in the role of heroic helper, but in the position of the wounded, dependent recipient who must accept mercy from their despised “other.” This repositioning—visible in Jesus’s grammatical pivot from “who is my neighbor?” to “who was neighbor to the wounded man?”—is the theological heart of the parable. A decolonial reading, informed by postcolonial and African American biblical scholarship, reveals that traditional helper-centered interpretations perpetuate the very colonial hierarchies they claim to transcend, and that the parable’s subversive power lies in its invitation to imagine ourselves as the one on the ground—vulnerable, dependent, and in need of mercy from an enemy.

The parable begins with a lawyer’s question, and even the language of that question is telling. The New Revised Standard Version (Anglican) records him asking what he must do to “inherit” eternal life, while the Common English Bible translates this as “gain” eternal life—a crucial distinction between receiving a gift and earning an achievement. That the lawyer reaches for inheritance language while seeking to draw the tightest possible circle around his obligation reveals the passage’s central tension: he wants the benefits of grace without the humility it requires. He wants to know who qualifies for his help. He is not asking who he might need.

The NRSVA’s choice to say the Samaritan “took pity” (Luke 10:33) in contrast to the CEB’s “was moved with compassion” is equally significant. Pity operates from above while compassion, rooted in the Latin “to suffer with,” suggests mutuality. The Samaritan is changed by what he witnesses. Most importantly, all translations preserve the grammatical turn in verse 36 that is the key to a decolonial reading: the lawyer asked “who is my neighbor” (a question of categorization), but Jesus responds “which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The question has pivoted. The listener has been repositioned. We are no longer standing over the scene deciding who deserves our help. We are lying in the ditch, wondering who will stop.

Fernando Segovia and R.S. Sugirtharajah’s A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings establishes the hermeneutical frame that makes this reading possible. While the commentary does not explore Luke 10 directly, it observes that Luke-Acts is “notably preoccupied with power, pulsing with the energy of charged exchanges between centre and periphery—rich and poor, urban and rural, Jew and Gentile” (p. 133), and has been read “both as radically subversive and as skilfully accommodationist in relation to the forces of imperialism and colonialism” (p. 133). This ambiguity is not a weakness, but rather a strategy. Luke, they argue, employs Rome’s own political values to interrogate the empire’s injustice, “thereby wedging open room within which a persecuted people might manoeuvre” (p. 139). The Good Samaritan’s “ambiguous and subversive” structure (p. 139) works the same way: it does not announce its subversion too loudly, but quietly repositions the listener as the one in need of mercy. I see this as decolonial strategy, not didactic lesson.

The commentary’s attention to the “converted centurion” figure throughout Luke-Acts (p. 136) deepens this pattern. The centurion in Luke 7 declares himself unworthy for Jesus to enter his home, positioning himself as recipient rather than benefactor. This recurrence—the powerful made small, the authoritative made vulnerable—suggests that the transformation Luke envisions is not simply the powerful extending charity downward, but the powerful recognizing their own need for mercy from those they have dismissed, taking us beyond benevolence to conversion.

Brian Blount’s work in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary sharpens this argument by drawing attention to what the text does not say: “Luke does not designate the Samaritan as ‘good.’ Neither does he specifically identify the race of the beaten man” (p. 214). The “good Samaritan” is our name for him, not the gospel’s. And the wounded man could be anyone—including the listener. Blount also notes that “the parable shifts from a who to a which, meaning which person acted neighborly” (p. 214), moving from the lawyer’s identity politics to relational ethics. Who acted as neighbor? The one who showed mercy. Go and do likewise—but do likewise how? The text is subversively ambiguous: go and show mercy to your enemies, or go and receive mercy from your enemies, or go and be the kind of person who knows that on any given road, you might be the one left for dead?

Blount’s connection to the Underground Railroad is illuminating: “The destitute, fleeing enslavement depended on the kindness and hospitality of Black and white strangers for food, shelter, clothing, and a little rest” (p. 214). The enslaved person had no luxury of choosing whether to receive help; survival required accepting mercy across lines of danger and difference. Blount argues this is the posture discipleship demands: “A person who risks her life in following Jesus must rely on the mercy of others, just as she surely had to rely in every circumstance on the mercy of God” (p. 214-215). The wounded man, like the person fleeing north, has no option but to receive. And this vulnerability, Blount suggests, is not shameful, but is the true shape of faith.

Orbih’s “Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa” is largely compatible with this argument. He rightly names colonial love as violent and dehumanizing, traces its roots in the logic of coloniality, and uses the Good Samaritan as a paradigm for widening our horizons of neighbor-love (Orbih, P1-P2). This is necessary work, and yet I find myself pressing a question his article does not fully answer: Is widening the circle of who we help sufficient to dismantle colonial logic? Colonial love is not merely about who we exclude from our charity. It is about the structure of charity itself—the assumption that we are always the helpers, that our help is what is needed, and that the helped exist to receive what we determine to give. Orbih acknowledges that “the unfortunate man beaten and robbed in the parable of the Good Samaritan can be an apt metaphor for the experience of Africans in the hands of colonial actors” (Orbih, P10). If that is true, the question the parable presses toward is not simply “will the colonizer help the colonized?” but “will the colonizer recognize that they need the colonized?”

Orbih notes that Christian love “must be founded on the basic principles of Christian anthropology, which include the equal human dignity of every human being, irrespective of race, gender, orientation, or social status” (Orbih, P10). I affirm this, and I would push it further. Equal dignity requires more than expanded generosity from the powerful. It requires the powerful to locate themselves in a posture of need, to understand that their wholeness is tied to the wholeness of those they have harmed. Activist Lilla Watson put it plainly: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This mutual liberation is what the parable, read from the ditch, compels.

The most significant counterargument is one Orbih himself raises: Jews and Samaritans were not sworn enemies but neighbors in what scholar Martina Bohm calls a “community of convenience,” making it potentially inaccurate to frame the parable as crossing lines of hostility (Orbih, P8). And the wounded man’s unspecified identity, one could argue, simply means “anyone who needs me, and whom I can help, is my neighbor” (Orbih, P9)—a straightforward call to universal charity. There is something true and beautiful in this reading. But I think it runs the risk of flattening the text. The parable is not just a lesson in who to help; it is a story with a structure, and that structure deserves to be examined. The lawyer came with a boundary-drawing question. Jesus answered with a story that repositioned the lawyer as the one in need. If he merely wanted to expand the category of neighbor, he could have said so. Instead, he told a story, and in that story, the listener ends up in the ditch. I don’t believe this is an accident. I believe this is the point.

A decolonial reading of Luke 10:25–37 does not ask us to stop caring for those who are wounded. It asks us to recognize that we, too, are wounded—lying in the ditch of our own limited vision, our self-justifying theology, and our colonial love. It asks us to imagine that our healing might come from the one we have feared and dismissed. It asks us to receive. We are living in a moment when colonial Christianity, manifested as Christian Nationalism in my country (the United States), wields the language of love as a tool of domination, when those who claim to be helping cause tremendous harm. A world shaped by a decolonial reading of this parable—one where the powerful acknowledge their need for the marginalized, where charity gives way to mutual vulnerability—is one where the word “love” cannot so easily be replaced by the word “power.” That is the world the parable imagines. And it begins the moment we stop asking who we should help and start asking with whom is my liberation bound, and what transformation does our interdependence make possible?

Works Cited

Blount, Brian K., ed. True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Common English Bible. Nashville: Common English Bible, 2011.

Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version, Anglicized Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Orbih, William I. “Decolonizing the Gospel of Love in Africa.” Theology Department, University of Notre Dame. Accessed 2026.

Segovia, Fernando F., and R. S. Sugirtharajah, eds. A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings. London: T&T Clark, 2007.