The Ones Who Passed

"Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side." (Luke 10:31)

The priest and the Levite are not villains, and if you read them as villains you will miss yourself entirely. They are the two most religious men on the road. They are on their way to serve God, perhaps to the temple, and touching a body that might be dead would have made them ceremonially unclean and disqualified them from the very service they were traveling to perform. They had reasons. Good reasons. Scriptural reasons. And they crossed the road.

They almost certainly did not feel like monsters that day. They felt like men making a difficult, responsible decision under time pressure, and they got where they were going, did their jobs well, and slept fine. That is what should frighten us. It is entirely possible to cross a road on the way to preach a sermon about not crossing roads.

The most dangerous position a person can occupy is to be doing something genuinely good, urgently, on a schedule. In that state you will walk past almost anything, and you will have a defensible reason for each one, and you will never once feel like the man in the story you disapprove of. So watch your good and busy days most of all. The interruption you are stepping over to go do ministry may be the ministry, and a full calendar has blinded more compassion than open wickedness ever has.