'The Good Samaritan' (1994) by Dinah Roe Kendall
This past Sunday the Gospel reading was Luke 10: 25-37, which is the parable of the Good Samaritan. I'm not including the full text here because I think it's safe to say that this is one of, if not the most, well-known of Jesus' stories. Found
only in Luke's gospel, it is such a part of our Christian narrative that I
suspect sometimes we forget that it's a parable and not an actual biblical
event. We know the story so well: a man is traveling the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho and is robbed; then two people come upon him--a priest and a Levite--but walk past; finally, a Samaritan comes upon the man, takes him to an inn, cleans up his wounds, and makes sure he has a place to stay. Who is it, then, that we wish to emulate?
Well, it's obviously the Samaritan, right? Of course. So engrained is this story in our
minds that we name hospitals after the Good Samaritan, and we consider anyone
who performs some act of kindness to be a Good Samaritan. Yet do we ever really stop to think just how
radical this text is. If so, we might be less inclined to want to identify
ourselves with the Samaritan, and we might not be so eager to agree with Jesus.
To understand the fullness of this story's power we have to
understand who the Samaritans were. The Samaritans were not Jews; in fact, they
were as different from Jews as you could be and yet still consider yourselves followers of the One True God. They, like Jews, were descendants of Abraham,
but while Jews had been scattered during the Babylonian exile, Samaritans stayed put, resulting in a different version of Torah and other sacred texts being written. They believed the holy site
not to be Jerusalem but atop Mount Gerazim, which was the mountain that Moses and the Israelites worshipped upon when they first laid eyes on the Holy Land. Samaritans were considered foreigners in the land, even though they actually
weren't, and they were so cutoff from their Jewish cousins that Jews considered
them to be of an even worse stock than Gentiles. Simply put: the Samaritans were the very embodiment of
the Other, of the absolute worst kind of people. And the
Jews despised them.
So the lawyer who compelled Jesus to tell this story of a man being cared for by such an extreme form of the Other would have likely expected the Samaritan to end up being the one who kicked the man into the ditch in the first place. Instead, the no-good foreigner turns out to be the good guy, the one who acted with mercy. When the lawyer asked Jesus, 'Who is my neighbor?' he
would've expected the response to include any Jewish male. Even
though Leviticus 19: 18 says, "make no vengeance and love your neighbor as
yourself," that language was vague enough that religious authorities were
able to put their own spin on it. Yes, they said, you should love your
neighbor, but women, foreigners, Gentiles, and sinners were not your neighbor.
Your neighbor was one of us, not one of them, and you should absolutely take
care of someone who is one of us. Let God worry about the rest.
Yet in Jesus the notion of neighbor is redefined, and in
this story the one who embodies what it means to love your neighbor is the very
one that the lawyer would've dismissed. The Samaritan, the Other,
shows mercy toward the man in the story, cleaning his wounds and giving the innkeeper
enough money to take care of him for several days--two denarii would've
afforded the man roughly two months stay at the inn. "Go and do likewise,"
Jesus tells the lawyer. Go and show mercy. Go and be neighborly, be loving to
the Samaritans in your midst, to the Gentile, the foreigner, the sinner. Don't
be like the priest and the Levite who were only concerned with themselves. Make
this Samaritan your model because he is your neighbor. Forget about us and them. Those are outdated concepts. Jesus presents a new
concept: there is only us.
There is only us: beloved and beautiful children of God. When we really think
about what Jesus is saying it's pretty jarring. It flies in the face of the
systems in which we have operated for centuries. Everything we know about who does and does not deserve our respect and mercy are thrown out the window. The ancient Israelites saw little to no value
in people who were not of their tribes, and they passed that mindset down through
the ages until Jesus finally comes along and tears down that social structure.
We hear this story, then, and we are all on-board with Jesus. Yeah, Jesus, you're right! Samaritans are ok and deserve mercy! Still, what if Jesus tearing down our own modern social structures, rather than those of 2000 years ago? What if the parable were told in a slightly different way? Like this:
An Episcopal bishop was walking down a dangerous street and saw a young white girl, who
had been beaten and robbed lying in a ditch. The bishop felt bad, but he had an importance service to get to, so he walked on. In the same way a Methodist
pastor walked by, and though she drew close and even prayed over the girl, she passed along because she had her own issues that she needed to deal with. A few moments later, a dark skinned Muslim man walked by. He saw the girl in trauma
and took her to the hospital, got her cleaned up, and gave her money for a
place to stay. Which one was a neighbor to the girl?
This is the power of this parable. The Good Samaritan is any Other. He is the one that you despise, the one that you cannot possibly imagine showing any act of kindness. As such, we can substitute any type of Other for the Samaritan:
A
gay man came upon a straight person lying in the ditch. A black teenager in a
hoodie came across a fallen police officer. An illegal immigrant came upon a hard-working farmer. A conservative Republican came
across a liberal Democrat, his opponent in the next election. You get the idea.
This parable is meant to show us
what the kingdom of God can and should look like here on earth: a kingdom without labels, where people reach
down into the ditch and pick up our brother or sister and say, 'Come on! Let me take care
of you. Because God loves you!' That's a radical dream, but it
is Jesus' dream, and it can be achieved by showing the mercy of the Good Samaritan, by loving
our neighbor.
Love your neighbor. Love your Episcopal neighbor. Your
Methodist neighbor (and we got a lot of those in our section of North Carolina!). Your
gun-owning neighbor. Your pacific neighbor. Your black neighbor. Your gay
neighbor. Your Muslim neighbor. Your atheist neighbor. Your poor, begging
neighbor. Your rich, affluent neighbor.
Love these and all those in-between, for all, ALL are your
neighbor.
