How many of you learned about the story of the “Good Samaritan” as a child in Sunday school? It’s a sweet story for kids in some ways if you don’t focus too much on the brutality. A man is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. He’s attacked by robbers, who strip him, beat him, and leave him for dead. Not too much later, a priest comes by and rather than help the man, passes by on the other side. A few minutes later, a Levite does the same thing. Then, a Samaritan comes along – and here your Sunday school teacher would have had to explain that Jews and Samaritans hated each other – and helps the man, disinfects his wounds and bandages them, then puts the man on his own donkey and takes him to the nearest inn and cares for him, then gives the innkeeper two days’ wages and instructions to take care of him and bill him for any overage when he gets back.
The story is told by Jesus in response to a question from a religious law scholar. The scholar wants to know how to inherit eternal life. The Greek phrase translated “eternal life” is zōēn aiōnion, and might be better translated as “life with the Eternal One,” or “life with God.” It’s the same concept Jesus is talking about when he teaches about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus responds to the lawyer’s question with a question: “What is written in the law? What do you find there?” And the lawyer recites to him the V’ahavta, the statement of faith recited by all good Jews every day, in Jesus’s time all the way up to our own: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” After he has recited the V’ahavta, Jesus affirms that the lawyer has given the right answer. “Do this, and live.”
But the lawyer wants to know more, or at least, according to the narrator, “wants to justify himself.” So he asks a follow-up question. “And who is my neighbor?” To answer this question, Jesus tells a story, the story that we have come to know as the story of the good Samaritan. I don’t know about you, but after my Sunday school teacher had shared this story with our class, she informed us that the answer to the lawyer’s question, who is my neighbor, is “my neighbor is anyone who needs my help.” And the beaten man certainly needed someone’s help, and the Samaritan man certainly provided it. The moral of the story is to go out and be good Samaritans, anytime someone might need us.
I don’t want to take anything away from that, because it’s certainly something we are called as Christians and just decent human beings to do. But I want to press on it a bit because the way you and I hear this story is probably not the way Jesus’s original audience would have heard it. And thinking about that context might give us a much deeper and richer understanding of what Jesus was trying to say – to the young lawyer, and to us.
Your Sunday school teacher would have explained that in Jesus’s time, Jews and Samaritans hated each other, which was true. About six hundred years prior to Jesus’s time on earth, the Babylonians had conquered Judea and hauled many of its citizens into captivity and slavery in Babylon. But not all of them. The weaker, poorer, and more rural segments of the population were left behind, to try and rebuild as best they could. The temple in Jerusalem had been razed to the ground, so they set up a new worship site on Mount Gerizim – perhaps this seemed a little safer. And when their sons and daughters became old enough to marry, they sometimes took brides and grooms from neighboring people groups – they intermarried with non-Jewish folks.
Also, it was during the Babylonian exile that much more of the Hebrew Scriptures, beyond the first five books of Torah, were written down. So when Cyrus the Persian came to power in Babylon and let the captive Jews go free, they returned to find that their old neighbors were worshipping somewhere other than Jerusalem; that they had a short, and to the returnees’ minds, incomplete Bible; and they had let their lineages become impure by intermarrying with non-Jews. So when the returnees got the Temple rebuilt, they made some rules: you had to be able to prove pure Jewish lineage on both sides going back ten generations, or you couldn’t enter the Temple precinct.
Side note here: the short First Testament book of Ruth has been considered by some biblical scholars to be not a historical anecdote but rather a work of protest literature. Ruth, the daughter-in-law of Naomi who shows incredible lovingkindness – chesed in Hebrew, which is one of the characteristics of God – by accompanying her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem and providing food for the household – is a Moabitess, another neighboring people group that the Israelites couldn’t stand. And after arriving in Bethlehem and gleaning in the fields, she finds a new husband, Boaz. The last few verses of the book of Ruth tell us that Ruth and Boaz’s son was named Obed, and when Obed grew up he had a son named Jesse, and when Jesse grew up he had a son named David.
There’s the kicker. The mighty King David, one of the greatest Jews who ever lived, would not have passed the Second Temple test. His great-grandma was a Moabite.
You might notice, if you’re looking for overarching patterns in the scriptures, that while the Jewish people, the chosen people, seem awfully concerned with maintaining racial purity, God mostly isn’t. There’s the lovely story of Ruth, and then there’s the story of Jonah, sent to preach repentance to the Ninevites – also enemies of the Jews – and there’s the healing of Naaman the Syrian and the miraculous provision for the widow of Zarephath – and that’s all just in the First Testament. And then there’s Jesus, talking with the Samaritan woman at the well and healing a centurion’s servant, and whose ancestors include both Ruth the Moabitess and Rahab the Canaanite prostitute. So when Paul took his ministry of the gospel of Jesus the Christ to the Gentiles, he wasn’t so much innovating as carrying out the logical extension of God’s workings throughout salvation history, from creation forward.
This is not really a digression.
The Jews of Jesus’s time certainly had long memories of their ancestors finding the heretical Samaritans going their own way in the Promised Land when they returned from exile in Babylon. But they had fresh memories, too – just twenty years before Jesus’s time, the Samaritans had deliberately defiled the temple in Jerusalem. Jews hated Samaritans so much that if they had to travel from Galilee to Jerusalem, or vice versa, they would go miles out of their way to travel through Perea rather than Samaria.
Imagine traveling from Springfield, Illinois, to Columbus, Ohio, without going through Indiana. You could do it, but it would add a lot of pointless miles to your trip. Imagine hating the people of Indiana that much, or feeling like you could not trust Indianans to give you a peaceful night’s rest if you had to sleep among them. That’s pretty much where most Jews were with regard to Samaritans.
So let’s think about how Jesus’s audience would have heard the story of the “good Samaritan.” Let’s look at each of the characters one by one. First of all, we meet a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. In Jesus’s time, that was a journey of seventeen miles, You could do it in a day if you left at daybreak and were in really good shape – and had really strong knees because you would lose 3400 feet in elevation along those seventeen miles. It was a rocky incline of a road.
Then we meet the robbers who accost the traveler. The Greek word translated “robbers,” lēstais, is the same word used for Barabbas when Pilate offers to do a prisoner exchange, and for the two men crucified on either side of Jesus. Bandits like this were not an unusual feature of the roads between towns in first-century Palestine, so the story is plausible.
The next character we meet in the story is a priest. The priests of the temple were the highest religious leaders in the Jewish faith. Jesus tells us that the priest noticed the man lying at the side of the road, but didn’t stop to help; rather, he “passed by on the other side.”
Why would he have done such a thing? Certainly, we have no shortage of callous and cruel religious leaders in our own day, from those calling for the execution of gay and lesbian people, to those preying on women and children in their congregations sexually, and there’s no reason to believe that every priest in Jesus’s day was a paragon of virtue, either. But a Jewish priest who saw a man lying half-dead would have had conflicting obligations: if he touched the man and it turned out the man was dead, the priest would be ritually defiled and unable to perform his duties or collect the tithes that made up his salary. So the priest, weighing the balance of his choices, decides to assume the man is dead and hurry along his way. And a Levite – basically a lay associate of the priests, like a worship leader – comes along and does exactly the same thing.
I have no doubt that Jesus was making a point about the quality of religious leadership in first-century Judaism in this part of the story. After all, he reserves considerable ire for the priests, Pharisees, and scribes at many other points in the gospels. The temple hierarchy was collaborating with the Roman occupation, and Jesus seems to see them as having a great deal of respect for the letter of the law while entirely missing the point of the spirit of God’s love.
And then along comes a Samaritan. Now, bearing in mind all that I’ve said about Jews and Samaritans, their ancient and recent history leading up to Jesus’s time, I can assure you that the lawyer and the rest of the Jewish listeners in Jesus’s audience did not identify with the Samaritan. Every good story draws us in by giving us a character to identify with, the protagonist. In our time, when we’ve lost the sense of rancor that the very word “Samaritan” would have conjured for Jesus’s Jewish audience – notice that at the end of the story, the lawyer can’t even say the word “Samaritan” out loud – instead, he refers to the helper as “the one who showed him mercy.”
And Jesus’s audience was also being invited to be critical of the actions of the priest and the Levite, so they weren’t being asked to identify with them. Nor is it likely that his audience, struggling to be good and faithful Jews, would have identified with the robbers.
So who does that leave?
The victim. The beaten man.
Jesus could have made this really, really obvious. “Imagine that you’re traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, and you get attacked by robbers…”
But he didn’t do that, because it helps Jesus to make his point if the person to be identified within the story, the protagonist, is somewhat ambiguous. If there’s tension in the mind of the listener as to which person to identify with. Not the robbers, not the priest or Levite, they did the wrong thing, not the… Samaritan…
Oh.
Have any of you ever seen the movie Crash? It was named the Best Motion Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars in 2006. Stars included Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Ryan Philippe, Thandie Newton, and Brendan Fraser. Crash tells several intertwined stories of life in Los Angeles, people interacting with those different from themselves in unexpected and sometimes tragic ways.
Toward the beginning of the film, Thandie Newton’s character, Christine, and her husband Cameron, played by Terrence Howard, are headed home from a party. They are a successful African-American power couple, wearing designer formal wear and driving a Lincoln Navigator. They are pulled over by a pair of white police officers, played by Dillon and Philippe. Dillon’s character, Officer Ryan, instructs the couple to stand with their feet apart and their hands on their vehicle while he pats them down. With Christine, he does considerably more than pat her down, feeling her under her dress for an uncomfortable length of time. Basically, he sexually assaults her. And her husband is standing beside her, knowing this is happening, feeling unable to do anything for fear of being shot by the cop.
Toward the end of the film, there is an accident on the freeway that turns into a multi-car pileup, and Christine is one of those stuck in a crashed car. Officers on the scene are aware that fuel tanks may burst into flames at any moment, and rush to get the motorists out. The officer who comes to help Christine out of her car is… Officer Ryan. She beats her palms against his chest: “Not you! Not you!”
And there, cousins and kindred is a modern-day retelling of the good Samaritan story
Here’s what Jesus’s audience was really being asked to consider and sit with: imagine that you are in serious trouble. Half dead at the side of the road. And the so-called faithful leaders of the religious establishment have nothing for you because it’s more important to them to preserve their ritual purity. And then along comes a person from the demographic you despise the most. And you have no choice, really, but to let them help you, disinfect and bandage your wounds, place you gently in their vehicle, and take you into town for help.
If you were, say, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Jesus would be asking you to consider that you might be saved by a black man. If you were a Republican senator, maybe you’d find yourself desperately needing the help of a Spanish-speaking migrant. If you were a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, your rescuer would almost certainly be a flamboyant gay person.
What would you do? Would you, like Thandie Newton’s character, beat your hands against your rescuer’s chest, shouting, “Not you! Not you!” – that is if you had the strength. Or would you have no choice but to accept the help of someone you despised – or die?
You see, Jesus was not just telling a story about “who is my neighbor?” He was telling a story about himself. It’s the story version of Matthew 25, where Jesus asserts that whatsoever we have done to the least of these: fed the hungry, clothed the naked, sheltered the homeless, visited the sick and imprisoned – we have done it to Jesus himself.
Jesus is saying something even more radical than that. That those we consider “less than” ourselves, whether because of skin color, or immigration status, or social class, or sexual orientation, or national origin, or physical or mental ability – those are the very people through whom Jesus saves us. Saves us from our greed, our self-centeredness, our inclination to rely on ourselves and let others fend for themselves. Our inclination to befriend and socialize with only those who are like us in terms of race, politics, or social class. Our inclination to love our neighbor only when they act pleasing to us. If we want to inherit eternal life, the life of the Eternal One, the ability to join Jesus in the heavenly kin-dom, we need to drop our posturing and pretense and admit to our need and be willing to learn from and be ministered to by those we think least important, least interesting, least lovable.
Jesus was telling his audience, I’m going to be leaving you soon, but I will be coming to you again and again. Will you be able to recognize me? Because I’ll be in that drunk homeless man begging for change. I’ll be in that migrant family with head lice desperate to cross the border. I’ll be in whoever you have the hardest time loving and accepting.
And who is my neighbor? The lawyer asked Jesus. Jesus responded, “I am.”
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.
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