Learn to live the message of the Good Samaritan and make a global
impact, using the resources already at your disposal.
If there were a popularity contest among all the parables of Jesus, the
Good Samaritan would probably win. Nobody is against the Good Samaritan
because being against the Good Samaritan is like being against Mother
Theresa or Oskar Schindler or the firefighters who ran into the World
Trade Center. In that same popularity contest, the Shrewd Manager would
probably finish last. The Shrewd Manager is lazy, deceitful, and
double-crossing. Yet in this alluringly freakish parable, Jesus actually
holds up the Shrewd Manager as an example, as he does with the Good
Samaritan.
This book is about learning to live the message of the Good Samaritan in
the context of the globalized world of the twenty-first century. This
means learning to love our global neighbor wisely by harnessing the
resources at our disposal--our time, talents, opportunities, and
money--on behalf of those who are victims of injustice, disease,
violence, and poverty.
The early disciples were pretty clueless about worldly resources such as
time, talent, and money--and unfortunately today we still don't really
get it. There are too many kind, well-intentioned twenty-first-century
people with indisputably good intentions but whose impact on the needy
is hampered by their inability to diagnose problems properly, harness
the resources available to them to solve the right problems, and
understand cause-and-effect relationships.
Shrewd Samaritan will help develop a framework to better love and care
for our neighbors in an age of globalization, when the people in our
neighborhoods, or at least those in our potential sphere of influence,
has expanded dramatically. Increasingly it will become our global
neighbor who takes us out of our comfort zone and challenges us with the
needs of a broken world.
