Crowd Church
Back to talk

Jesus the Revolutionary

When Helping Someone Costs You Something

19 July 2026· Ade Birkby

Most of us are happy to help people. What we are less keen to do is help when it is going to cost us something. In this talk from the Jesus the Revolutionary series, Ade Birkby takes us on a journey through the Good Samaritan, walking the Jericho road that people called the Path of Blood, explaining why the priest and the Levite had a genuinely good reason to keep walking, and tracing the nine hundred years of hatred that made a Samaritan hero unthinkable. Ade, along with Dan Orange and Mike Harris, then explores why receiving help can be so much harder than giving it.

Most of us are happy to help people. We give to charity, we hold doors, we check in on a friend who is having a rough week. What we're less keen to do, though, is help if it's going to cost us too much. Time we don't have. Money we'd earmarked. Sleep we need. Safety we'd rather keep.

And this is where we are challenged by the story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan. It's a story so familiar to some of us that it has, which is why it's easy to miss what's happening in it. This week, Ade Birkby, joining us from Wales, took us on a journey through Luke 10:25-37, and what came out wasn't just a moral about being kind. But rather it was a deeper question about how far we are willing to go to help people who aren't even in our tribe.

Why We Sort People Into Sides

Tribalism is loyalty to your own group over others. Us and them. We're wired for it, because we're wired for belonging, and belonging works within a boundary. We trust and forgive the people inside our circle and view the people outside it with suspicion.

You can see it in politics, in football (shouting "Yay, Liverpool!" or "Yay, Everton!" in the wrong room in Liverpool will get you a response), and online. A University of Bath study of Brexit-era social media found Remainers cast as arrogant elitist traitors and Leavers cast as racist, ignorant and uneducated.

Tribes can build real support and strong networks but the trouble is they stop at the self-imposed boundary.

The Road Called the Path of Blood

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a seventeen-mile mountain pass. It descends around three thousand feet, flanked on both sides by limestone caves. If you wanted to design a place for an ambush, you'd design that. Bandits could step out of the rock and be on you before you'd registered a sound. In the culture of the time it had a nickname, too. The Path of Blood.

So when Jesus says "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead", nobody listening was surprised. That road did that.

Why the Priest and the Levite Walked Past

Under Jewish law, touching a corpse made you unclean. For a priest or a Levite that wasn't just a technicality. It disqualified them from temple duties until they'd been through a long and expensive purification ritual. Seeing a body on the roadside, half dead and possibly all the way dead, they were doing a calculation. Help this man and I lose my role, my income and weeks of my life.

Which explains the calculation (but it doesn't excuse it). They weren't cruel. They were busy, and they had a good reason.

Nine Hundred Years of Hatred

Around 930 BC, after Solomon died, Israel split over heavy taxes. Ten tribes formed the northern kingdom, Judah and Benjamin stayed south. In 722 BC the Assyrians conquered the north and scattered most of the population, and those who remained intermarried with the incomers. Their descendants became the Samaritans.

From there it escalated. The Jews saw them as half-breeds corrupting the bloodline. The Samaritans built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, claiming that was the real holy mountain, and in 128 BC the Jewish king John Hyrcanus destroyed it. Around 6 to 9 BC, not long before Jesus was born, a group of Samaritans scattered human bones across the temple courtyard in Jerusalem during Passover, defiling it and stopping the feast.

Nine centuries of that. This is not two groups who don't get on. This is generations of hate with bodies attached. And Jesus makes one of them the hero.

What It Actually Cost Him

The Samaritan does three things, and each one costs more than the last.

He stops. Samaritans kept the first five books of the Bible too, so touching a body carried the same uncleanness for him. And by kneeling on the Path of Blood he made himself a stationary target. Whoever did this could still be in those caves. He put his body on the line, not just his afternoon.

He meets the need out of his own pocket. Bandages, oil, wine, time, his donkey, a bed at the inn. He was travelling on a road you don't linger on, so he had somewhere to be. All of that went out the window.

Then he covers what hasn't happened yet, paying the innkeeper in advance and saying, "Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have." He commits to a bill he can't see the size of.

Leviticus 19:18 says, "love your neighbour as yourself." Notice we're told to love our neighbour, not to like them. Love here is a set of actions with a price tag, not a feeling.

Carrying Isn't the Same as Lifting

Galatians 6:2 says, "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ."

Look at the verb. You don't carry something for a second. You carry it from one room to another, or from one end of the country to the other. It's sustained effort over distance. It isn't pick it up, put it down.

Mike Harris put a number on it. Imagine saying to a friend, you've got a hundred grand left on your mortgage, I'm taking fifty of it onto mine and I'll pay it for the next thirty years. Most of what we call kindness is giving out of surplus, on a day when we happen to have the energy. Paul is asking for something else.

Conversation Street

What if you're busy doing what God has called you to do?

Sharon asked how to balance genuine busyness against stopping for the person in front of you. Whatever we're doing in church or in ministry, the thing we're called to is loving God and loving our neighbour, so the tasks can't become the reason we stop doing it. You can't stop for every single person. You also can't shut yourself off until only the to-do list exists. In most churches roughly ten percent of people do most of the work, which is part of why the busy ones have no room to stop.

Ellis pointed out that the priest would have been unable to do his duty once he was unclean, but that using it as a reason not to help was still wrong. By helping, he'd have fulfilled the greater duty.

Why is receiving help harder than giving it?

Alicia said she sometimes finds it easier to help people outside her tribe, because a lot of the people she loves grew up believing that accepting help is a sign of weakness. On receiving, she gets hung up on whether she deserves it.

Ellis noticed something about the man in the ditch. He had to let a rival help him. And giving is easier because you stay in control, rather than depending on someone with good intentions who might not know what they're doing. Ellie raised the other fear, that accepting help makes you dependent on the person who gave it.

To receive well, you have to accept that you don't deserve it and that it's a gift. The moment you think you've earned it, it becomes about your behaviour, and on a bad day you'll decide you don't qualify. Mike was honest that his pride gets in the way. He described doing a bit extra for a customer and watching them insist on paying for it, because nobody wants to owe anyone anything.

Ade knows the outsider seat well. An English kid growing up in Ireland in the eighties, he still finds it easier to help strangers. They don't judge him.

What do we do when our reaction is the wrong one?

Mike was gardening for a customer. Walking back from his van he saw a woman, and what seemed obvious to him was that she was struggling with addiction and probably homeless. He took a wide berth around her and carried on into the garden. He was listening to a Christian podcast at the time, preparing a sermon he was about to preach.

"I just thought, oh man alive, how far am I from where I want to be right now?"

He went back out intending to help her, and found it had got awkward. What changed afterwards wasn't willpower. He'd been reading about Jesus and the man with leprosy, and the fact that Jesus reached out and touched him. The more he focused on that, the more his own reactions started to shift. Slowly. He's clear it's a process and not a finished one.

When you hear the Good Samaritan you can end up in one of two places. Either you feel condemned, because you know you stick to your tribe and you're not like that man. Or you become a rules-follower who does the right thing with your heart nowhere near it. Mike offered a third option, which is to say honestly, "Jesus, I'm not like the Good Samaritan yet, and I need You to change me."

He was equally clear about the other half. If you're waiting for a warm feeling before you go and do these things, you'll be waiting a long time. There was probably fear in the Samaritan's chest the whole time he knelt on that road. Do the thing, and let the emotions catch up.

Ade closed with 1 Corinthians 12, one body with many parts. We're built with different gifts, which means we're built to need each other. As Alicia put it in the comments, that idea also cuts down comparison. It isn't a competition. It's just love.

Where to Start This Week

  1. Pick one person outside your tribe. Someone who isn't in your circle, doesn't vote like you, doesn't believe what you believe. Do one concrete thing for them, not a donation, something with your name on it.
  2. Check what your kindness is costing you. Giving out of surplus is good. It isn't the same as carrying a burden.
  3. Let somebody help you. If receiving is the harder one, say yes to something without working out how to pay it back.
  4. Act before you feel ready. The Samaritan almost certainly felt afraid. He knelt down anyway.

Which One Are You

Are we the priest and the Levite, using our other responsibilities to let ourselves off the hook? Or the Samaritan, helping across the tribal line at our own expense? Most of us are a mix. Ade aims for the Samaritan and can look back on plenty of times he was the other two, justifying himself by being busy.

There's one more character, though. Mike pointed out that the place most of us actually occupy in this story is the ditch. We're the one who got beaten up and left on a dangerous road, and Jesus is the one who stopped when there was every reason not to.

This isn't complicated teaching. You can read it once and do it minutes later. So the question for the week ahead is simple. Is there something you could do for someone outside your tribe that would genuinely make their life better?

Notes

When Helping Someone Costs You Something

Most of us would stop to help someone. The harder question is what we do when stopping costs us something.

About this episode

A man is robbed and left half dead on a notorious mountain road. Two respectable religious men walk past him. The person who stops is a member of the one ethnic group his community has hated for the better part of a thousand years. This week, Ade Birkby takes us on a journey through Luke 10, looking at why the priest and the Levite kept walking, what made the Samaritan's decision so scandalous, and what it actually cost him.

Key points from Ade's talk

Tribalism is normal, which is what makes it hard to spot

Human beings are wired for belonging. We find our identity in a group, and once we are in it we naturally favour, trust and forgive the people inside it. The flip side is that we start viewing people outside it with suspicion. Ade pointed to political loyalty passed down through families, to football rivalries in a city like Liverpool, and to the Brexit years, when a University of Bath study found tribalism scaling on social media in a way it never had before. Remainers were painted as arrogant elitists. Leavers were painted as ignorant and uneducated. Very little of it was about policy.

Tribalism is not all bad. It builds mutual support, teamwork and strong social networks. The trouble is that it usually stops at the edge of the tribe.

The Path of Blood

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a seventeen-mile mountain pass dropping around 3,000 feet, flanked on both sides by limestone caves. Perfect ambush country. In that culture it had a nickname, too. The Path of Blood, because of how often travellers were jumped on it. Everyone hearing the parable would have known exactly what kind of road Jesus was describing.

Why the priest and the Levite kept walking

Under Jewish law, touching a corpse made you unclean. For a priest or a Levite that wasn't just a technicality. It meant being barred from temple duty until they had been through a long and expensive purification ritual. From a distance, a man beaten and left half dead looks a lot like a dead man - which explains what was going through their minds (but it doesn't excuse them).

Nine hundred years of hatred in one word

Around 930 BC a dispute over heavy taxes split the kingdom of Israel, ten tribes to the north and two in the south. In 722 BC the Assyrians conquered the north, scattered most of the population, and those who remained intermarried with the Assyrians. Their descendants became the Samaritans. The Jews regarded them as half-breeds who had corrupted the bloodline. The Samaritans built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, and in 128 BC a Jewish king destroyed it. A few years before Jesus was born, a group of Samaritans scattered human bones across the temple courtyard in Jerusalem during Passover.

That is the backstory sitting behind the word Samaritan. Jesus was not choosing a neutral stranger for His hero. He was choosing the person His audience would least want to owe anything to.

It started as a trap

An expert in the law stands up to test Jesus, hoping to expose a flaw in His theology. Jesus answers the question with a question, which puts the man in the position of answering himself. By the time he asks "and who is my neighbour?", he is on the back foot and trying to save face. Jesus uses the parable to move the whole thing off legal ground and onto the question of mercy.

The three things it cost the Samaritan

  1. He stopped, and stopping was dangerous. Samaritans also kept the first five books of the law, so touching a body carried the same risk of uncleanness for him. On top of that, lingering on the Path of Blood meant he could be attacked himself while kneeling over someone else.
  2. He met the need out of his own pocket. Bandages, oil, wine, time, his donkey, a journey interrupted. He was travelling a treacherous road, which suggests he had somewhere to be, and he gave all of it up.
  3. He covered a need that had not happened yet. He paid the innkeeper in advance and promised to come back and settle whatever else was owed.

Ade lingered on Galatians 6:2, "carry each other's burdens". Carrying implies distance and sustained effort. It is not pick it up and put it down.

Love is not the same as like

Leviticus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves. Ade's point is that we are told to love our neighbour, not to like them. Jesus then raises it further in John 13:34, love one another as I have loved you, because human self-love is flawed and God's love is not.

Which one are we

Ade turned the camera round at the end. Like the priest and the Levite, are we making ourselves too busy to help? Are we using other responsibilities to let ourselves off the hook? He was honest that he can look back at his own life and see both. His challenge for the week ahead was simple. Is there something you could do for someone outside your tribe that would be of genuine benefit to them?

The Bible passage

Luke 10:25-37 — An expert in the law asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and then, wanting to justify himself, asks who counts as his neighbour. Jesus tells him about a man attacked by robbers on the Jericho road. A priest and a Levite both pass by on the other side. A Samaritan stops, treats his wounds, puts him on his own donkey, takes him to an inn and pays for his care. Jesus asks which of the three was a neighbour, and then tells him to go and do the same.

Other verses referenced

  • Galatians 6:2 — Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.
  • Galatians 6:9 — Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
  • Galatians 3:28 — There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
  • 1 Corinthians 9:22-23 — I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.
  • 1 Corinthians 12 — One body, many parts. Every part has a different function and the body needs all of them.
  • Leviticus 19:18 — Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge, but love your neighbour as yourself.
  • John 13:34 — A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you.
  • Romans 8 — God is at work changing us into the likeness of Jesus.

Quotes from the talk

"We're not taught to like our neighbour, we're taught to love them." — Ade Birkby

"This is milk. This is simple. This is something we can read once and do minutes after." — Ade Birkby

"It's the original pay it forward story." — Ade Birkby

Conversation Street highlights

Carrying a burden is not the same as an act of kindness

Mike Harris picked up the Galatians line about carrying each other's burdens and put a number on it. Imagine saying to someone, you have got £100,000 left on your mortgage, I am taking £50,000 of it onto mine and I will carry it for the next thirty years. That is bearing a burden. Most of what we call kindness is given out of surplus, on a good day, when we have the energy. Paul is describing something else entirely.

Dan Orange said the detail that surprised him was that the Samaritan put his body on the line, not just his time and money. He was on the same dangerous road, and he stayed there.

What if you are already busy doing what God asked you to do

Sharon asked how you balance being busy with the things you have genuinely been called to do. Ade took it on. Whatever the task is, the law we are working to is still love God and love your neighbour. There is a balance to find, because you cannot stop for every single person, but you also cannot shut yourself off until only the tasks in front of you exist. He added an uncomfortable observation from decades in churches. If you are lucky, around ten per cent of people do ninety-nine per cent of the jobs. If more people shared the load, the busy ones would have room to stop.

Receiving help is harder than giving it

This was the thread the community drove the conversation towards, and it went somewhere honest.

Alicia said she sometimes finds it easier to do things for people outside her tribe, and that when help comes her way she gets hung up on whether she deserves it. Ellis noticed that the injured man had to let a rival help him, and made the point that giving is easier because you stay in control, whereas receiving means depending on someone who has good intentions but might not know what they are doing. Ellie raised the worry underneath all of it, that accepting help leaves you dependent on the person who gave it, and that sometimes you end up feeling like a duty.

Ade recognised it from the other side. As an English kid growing up in Ireland in the eighties, he was the black sheep, and he still finds it easier to help people he does not know, because they do not judge him and they do not nitpick.

Mike's take was that receiving well means accepting that you do not deserve it and that it is a gift. The moment you think you have earned it, it comes down to whether you are having a good day or a bad one. He was open about his own pride getting in the way, that he does not like being in anyone's debt, which is exactly what makes it hard to let someone do something good for you.

The day Mike walked the other way

Mike told a story about gardening at a customer's house. Walking back from the van he saw a woman he assumed was homeless and struggling with addiction, and he took a wide berth around her. He was listening to a Christian podcast at the time, preparing a sermon he was about to preach.

"How far am I from where I want to be right now?"

He went back into the garden and carried on reading, and what he was reading was the account of Jesus reaching out and touching the man with leprosy. He described his heart changing slowly after that, not in one moment but over time.

His other observation was that hearing this parable usually pushes people into one of two camps. Either you feel condemned, because you are not like the Good Samaritan and therefore you are not good enough. Or you become a rules-follower who does the right thing with your heart nowhere near it. His third option was a sentence rather than a strategy.

"Jesus, I am not like the Good Samaritan yet." — Mike Harris

Mike also pointed out where most of us actually sit in the story. We are not the Samaritan in this parable. We are the man on the side of the road who needed rescuing.

One body, many parts

Ade closed with 1 Corinthians 12. We all have different functions, which means we are all going to need help with something. That is not a design fault, it is the design. We were made to need each other, and the differences between us are building blocks rather than things to compete over.

Alicia added a comment near the end that Dan read out, that the one body many members idea helps with comparison thinking, the sense that other people are doing more than you. As Dan put it, it is not a competition, it is just love.

  • Come and explore more at crowd.church
  • Every week finishes with Live Lounge, an open Google Meet where you are welcome to say hello
  • Questions or prayer requests are always welcome at crowd@crowd.church

Crowd Church — a community for those who might not see the point of church.