Martin Luther King Jr. on "The Good Samaritan"

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, on the day before his death, described the road as follows:

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level [actually about 2100 feet or 640 metres^[6]]. And by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about twenty-two feet below sea level [actually 846 feet^[7] or 258 metres]. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"^[8]

A map of Palestine in the time of Jesus. Jericho is just north of the Dead Sea, with Jerusalem to the west.

However, King continues:

But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"^[8]

The Good Samaritan

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_samaritan

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.” Martin