In a sermon at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference preached from Luke 10:29–35, Reginald Sharpe Jr. circled a phrase that refuses to let the church remain comfortable: “You don’t know the half.”
Sharpe did not give us a scholarly sermon title. “You don’t know the half” is not offered gently or as a pastoral shrug; it’s a theological accusation aimed at a church that sees suffering often enough to recognize it — but rarely long enough to be changed by it.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is among the most familiar stories in the Bible. And that familiarity, Sharpe suggested, is part of the problem. We know the story so well that we think we already understand what it demands. We get it: The Samaritan is the hero, the Levite and priest are the villains — let’s move on.
“Sharpe slowed the story down and forced the church to sit with the human body in the ditch.”
Sharpe slowed the story down and forced the church to sit with the human body in the ditch.
The man is beaten, robbed and “left for dead.” Sharpe was specific that this man is not dead; he’s still breathing, still salvageable, still existing in the space between survival and restoration or wholeness. That detail matters. His condition exposes not just individual cruelty and self-preservation, but communal failure. People passed him by while he was still alive.
“You don’t know the half,” Sharpe repeated — not because the church never has encountered suffering, but because it has learned how to look past it.
One of Sharpe’s most unsettling observations was that the priest and the Levite are not ignorant and may even be well-meaning folks. Sharpe concluded the issue isn’t blindness but formation.
They are religious professionals — technicians of holiness — trained to keep things moving, to protect ritual, tradition and status. They did not cross the road because stopping would disrupt the systems that give them security.
Sharpe refused to turn them into caricatures. The sin here is not hatred; it is efficiency and self-preservation. They are what happens when religion and religious leadership are shaped more by institutional survival than by proximity to pain and the marginalized.
The modern church, Sharpe suggested, has perfected the art of acknowledgment without interruption. We issue statements, we offer prayers, we hang the flags, we “talk” about race, and we preach compassion in theory while structuring our lives to avoid contact with those who are bleeding and “left for dead.”
We know something. But we do not know the half that would cost us.
Sharpe’s sermon sharpened when he refused abstraction.
When he named contemporary immigration enforcement as an instrument of terror — drawing a straight line between state-sanctioned violence and older racialized systems of fear — he was not reaching for shock value.
“Y’all didn’t want an AKA, so you got the KKK,” Sharpe said, referring to Trump and his immigration enforcement. Here, Sharpe rejected the church’s habit of hiding behind neutral language, fear of Greek life and complicity in white supremacy.
Many Christians are quick to say they did not vote for such harm. Fewer are willing to examine how they benefit from it. Distance becomes a moral anesthetic. Silence becomes a form of participation.
“You don’t know the half because knowing it would require more than sympathy.”
“You don’t know the half,” Sharpe suggested, “because knowing it would require more than sympathy.”
The Samaritan’s power in the parable is not kindness alone — it is interruption and confrontation.
The Samaritan does not do a risk assessment; he does not focus on worthiness, he does not worry about cleanliness, he does not ask if the road is straight or if the robbers are waiting in the darkness for him, and he does not spiritualize suffering. He stops.
Sharpe reads the Samaritan not as an ethical ideal but as a Spirit-shaped witness. True faith, he suggested, moves toward those crushed by systems and left behind by convenience and confronts them head-on.
The Samaritan crosses the road, binds wounds, lifts the body, spends money and promises presence. He enters a story that is not his and assumes responsibility anyway. That is the cost of seeing the whole picture.
Sharpe closed not with resolution, but with realism. Even after help arrives, the wounded man is not whole. He is still hurting, still carrying trauma, still alive — but changed forever.
This, Sharpe implied, is where many communities live today: Still standing, still believing, still gathering — yet carrying trauma that has been ignored, minimized or rushed past by a church and religion eager to get back to normal.
“You don’t know the half” is not a sermon about charity; it is a warning about partial discipleship. Until the church is willing to see suffering up close, to name it honestly, confront the systems that sustain it and allow itself to be interrupted, we will keep mistaking religiosity and comfort for faithfulness.
Braxton Wade
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.