The Good Samaritans of Skid Row

Recently a paraplegic was “dumped” near Gladys Park.

The LA Times described the man as having been essentially thrown out of the hospital van where he was receiving care. He had no walker or wheelchair and was dressed in a soiled hospital gown. In his teeth he clutched a plastic bag containing the sum total of his personal effects. The LA Times piece painted the van driver as especially callous, offering no help to the man, instead complaining he soiled the van seat. Also, she did not respond to witnesses’ questions about the man’s well-being because she was applying makeup. The man said he did not ask to be “dumped” in skid row, but when the hospital informed him that his course of treatment was over, he said he had no place to go.

Recently I listened to a Rob Bell pod cast about the story of the Good Samaritan. I couldn’t help but see the parallels here. The paraplegic man was essentially in the same boat as the victim in the Good Samaritan story. I don’t know if priests or Levites passed him by but I do know I spent most of the day a mere stone’s throw away, indifferent to his plight. Just as the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable became the unlikely hero, so too did a host of homeless people who knew Gladys Park as home – carrying him to safety, finding him a chair and getting him back to a place where he could receive care.

Rob Bell likens the Good Samaritan’s actions to those of a priest, as he offered him oil and wine, in contrast to the priest and Levite who passed him by. The half dead man had been coming back from a temple where he believed the presence of the Lord dwelled. Yet he encountered the presence of the Lord on the side of the road vis-a-vis a religious bastard.

Here the paraplegic was “dumped” by a hospital – our vehicle of modern healing in the twenty-first century – only to find healing through the most unlikely aid… a host of homeless people in a section of our city that is abandoned by most.

JH