Schools for Everyone, Healing for Anyone

Today's Scripture

Luke 10:33-34 — "But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him."

Matthew 9:35-36 — "And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

Proverbs 4:7 — "The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight."

The Big Idea

Two things we now treat as basic human rights — a school for every child and medical care for any wounded person, friend or enemy — did not fall from the sky. They grew, historically, in Christian soil, planted by people who copied Jesus' double habit: he taught, and he healed. Today we trace two of those roots: the Sunday school movement and the Red Cross.

Reflection

A newspaperman and a street full of children

Gloucester, England, 1780. A newspaper publisher named Robert Raikes is walking through one of the city's poorest districts when he is struck by crowds of ragged children — children who work in the pin factories six days a week and run wild on the seventh, because school is a luxury their families cannot imagine. Raikes hires a teacher, gathers the children on Sundays, and teaches them to read. The textbook is the Bible, because it is the book that matters most and often the only book at hand.

It sounds tiny. It wasn't. Raikes publicized the idea through his newspaper, and "Sunday schools" spread like a rumor. Within a few years they were teaching roughly a quarter of a million children; by 1831, by the standard counts, around a million and a quarter children in Britain were learning to read in Sunday schools every week. For multitudes of poor families, this was the first generation that could read anything at all. Historians point to this movement as a major tributary of mass literacy — decades before the government got into the business of education in 1870.

Why did believers care so much about teaching everyone? Because their Scriptures told them knowledge is a matter of life and death. Hosea 4:6 — "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." Because Psalm 78:5-7 commands each generation to teach the next, "that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn... so that they should set their hope in God." And because Proverbs 4:7 treats wisdom not as an elite ornament but as the beginning: "Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight."

This instinct was much older than Raikes. At the Reformation, Martin Luther had badgered the German cities to build schools for ordinary children — girls included, a radical idea — so that everyone could read God's word for themselves:

"A city's best and highest welfare, safety, and strength consist rather in its having many able, learned, wise, honorable, and well-educated citizens." — Martin Luther, To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany (1524)

Wherever the conviction traveled, schools followed. The great medieval universities — Oxford, Cambridge, Paris — grew out of the church; Harvard and Yale were founded largely to train ministers; and through the missionary movement, schools multiplied on every continent, very often the first schools a region had ever seen, and very often open to girls when nothing else was. The faith that says God wrote a book has always needed people who can read it — and once you teach a child to read the Bible, she can read everything else too.

One verse with a budget

Look again at the parable Jesus told about the Samaritan, in Luke 10. We usually stop at the emotion: "when he saw him, he had compassion" (Luke 10:33). But keep reading. He bandages wounds. He gives up his own ride. And then comes the most modern verse in the story — Luke 10:35: "he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.'"

Two coins and a contract. The Samaritan's mercy did not stay a feeling; it became an arrangement, with staff and funding and a follow-up visit. That is the seed of every hospital, every relief agency, every school for the poor. Compassion that organizes itself.

John Wesley caught the scope of it a century before our period began:

"I look upon all the world as my parish." — John Wesley, Journal, 1739

A parish is the neighborhood a pastor is responsible for. Wesley's sentence erased the boundary line — and the movements that followed him took it literally, building schools, clinics, and orphanages from Lagos to Seoul.

The businessman at Solferino

Now the second story. Henri Dunant was a Geneva businessman from a devout evangelical family — a man so steeped in this activist faith that as a young man he co-founded the Geneva YMCA and helped knit the YMCA into an international movement. In June 1859, traveling in northern Italy on business, he stumbled into the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, where French, Sardinian, and Austrian armies had torn each other apart. Tens of thousands of men lay wounded in the fields, and there was almost no one to help them.

Dunant did not keep driving, so to speak. For days he organized the local townspeople — mostly women — to feed, wash, and bandage the wounded of every uniform in the great church at Castiglione. The women coined a phrase as they worked: tutti fratelli — "all are brothers." Wounded Austrians, the enemy, were brothers too.

Dunant could not unsee it. In 1862 he published A Memory of Solferino, a small book with an enormous question at the end:

"Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?" — Henri Dunant, A Memory of Solferino

Europe answered. In 1863 Dunant and four other Genevans formed the committee that became the International Red Cross. In 1864 twelve nations signed the first Geneva Convention — the agreement that wounded soldiers and those who care for them must be protected, no matter whose side they are on. The movement's emblem, a red cross on white, reverses the Swiss flag; the moral grammar underneath it — the enemy's wounds make a claim on you — is the Samaritan's, and behind him, Christ's. Dunant himself later went bankrupt, lost everything, and vanished into poverty for decades. Rediscovered by a journalist in the 1890s, he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He barely touched the money, and to the end he described himself simply as a disciple of Jesus in the manner of the first century.

He was not alone in that generation. In 1837, a sixteen-year-old English girl recorded a private experience that would eventually drag nursing out of disrepute and into a profession:

"God spoke to me and called me to His service." — Florence Nightingale, private note, 7 February 1837

It took Nightingale years to learn what the call meant. It meant Crimea, filthy military hospitals, and the founding of modern nursing. And the pattern kept multiplying: mission hospitals, leprosy clinics, and medical schools spread across Africa and Asia, so that even today church-related institutions carry a large share — by some estimates a third or more — of the health care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Why the next world built this one

Step back and ask the obvious question. Why did people obsessed with heaven keep building schools and hospitals on earth? C.S. Lewis looked at exactly this stretch of history and answered:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

It sounds backwards, but it isn't. If every ragged child and every wounded Austrian is an immortal soul whom God loves, you cannot treat them as scenery. The pattern they copied was Jesus himself. Acts 10:38 compresses his whole ministry into one line: "He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him." Teaching and healing, side by side — Mark 1:40-42 shows him touching a leper everyone else avoided: "Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, 'I will; be clean.'"

Tim Keller traces the logic from God's character to ours:

"God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to 'do justice.'" — Tim Keller, Generous Justice

But there is one more layer, and it is the deepest. The people in today's stories were not heroes rescuing inferiors. They were rescued people passing it on. Keller again:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

A person gripped by that double truth makes a strange kind of helper — too aware of her own flaws to condescend, too sure of being loved to burn out. We were the ones bleeding on the road, and a Savior we had no claim on paid for our healing and promised to come back. After that, tutti fratelli is not idealism. It is family resemblance. And Isaiah 58:10 names the reward: "if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday."

Going Deeper

Mercy became durable in these stories when it got a structure — a school schedule, two denarii, a signed convention. Today, give one of your good intentions a structure. Pick the person you keep meaning to help and put a recurring slot on your calendar, a standing order at the bank, or a weekly reminder with their name on it. One intention, one mechanism. The Samaritan didn't just feel; he booked the room.