twenties was attacked on her way home by an assailant who stabbed her repeatedly as she screamed for help, and at least thirty-eight people peering through their apartment windows witnessed the crime. Not one even bothered to telephone the police. When they were asked later why they had done nothing, the answer was unanimous: 'We just didn't want to get involved.'
An isolated incident? I'm afraid it isn't. Here's a clip from the Daily Mail. 'Motorists slowed down to watch as a man raped a three-year-old girl in broad daylight next to a busy road, but no-one stopped to help her.'
This is the sick world we live in. Jesus' parable is real life today. But in our city centres at night, there are not many good Samaritans around to give the story a happy ending. Our western society has become so preoccupied with its individualistic and materialistic priorities that nobody wants to get involved in anybody else's problem. We just don't do anybody any harm. That's how we comfort ourselves. The victims of crime, of war, of exploitation, of oppression—what business are they of ours? These human tragedies that scar the world aren't our responsibility. So, just like the priest and the Levite, we pass by on the other side, defending ourselves all the time with the excuse, 'We don't do anybody any harm.'
'Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me' (Matthew 25:45). We have it, then, from the mouth of Christ himself that sins of omission are so heinous, so culpable in God's sight, that they can damn us. For love is the fulfilment of the law. Confronted by the spectacle of human need, love can never stand idly by and do nothing.
I said in the last chapter that it was possible for social concern so to dominate the Christian agenda that we lose sight of the priority of telling the good news of God's kingdom. I don't retract that emphasis. The seed of the kingdom is the Word. But any Christian who fails to demonstrate real social concern in a world like ours, no
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