Like most of us, I’ve heard the Parable of the Good Samaritan all my life, and one thing has remained constant. The Samaritan has always been presented as a second-class citizen to the Jews and as undesirable and unclean as a Gentile. The Samaritan is always the underdog – the victim – and the object of scorn, derision and even persecution.
So naturally, I’ve been trained to think of them as victims who did nothing to deserve the injustice they suffered. Isn’t the point of the story that it’s the people we least expect to be compassionate who reveal our hypocrisy? Isn’t it those who have been demeaned who show us up for who we are?
After all, Jesus used them as a foil to expose the pride of the Pharisees.
Of course, most good stories weave together many threads, and this is certainly one of them. Still, I think there is value in arguing that the Samaritans were not victims. They had betrayed their own family by giving up their identity and adhering to a rival and false religion when the Jews returned from Babylonia.
What incensed the Jews in particular was the Samaritan’s insistence they were basing their beliefs solely on Scripture and that it was the Jews who had adopted views that were misinterpretations. They had created and purposefully widened a rift between what had once been family, and we all know there is no fight like a family fight.
It’s ironic that we have converted the Samaritan into a symbol of a “good” person. We have scores of ministries and nonprofits that use the term “Samaritan” to denote kindness, mercy, self-sacrifice and compassion. We even have Good Samaritan laws that protect people who stop to offer aid. We’ve made him one of us.
I suspect one of the several themes of the story is that people we feel have betrayed us may also offer our best examples of compassion. Our beliefs are right. Our worship is right. Our values are right, but the one Jesus holds up as the example of being a true neighbor is one of the people we have labeled disloyal and a traitor to the family.
So what do you do when someone who is against your most treasured values and beliefs – not merely an underdog – becomes the very symbol of what Jesus says it means to be a neighbor?
Even Jesus would have seen them as apostates, and yet he intentionally uses a Samaritan when he could have used a publican or a prostitute and not have caused such a visceral reaction. Why alienate and intimidate all your listeners? Why make it so difficult to overcome all their resistance to make the point?
Because the point has to be almost impossible to imagine if we are to understand the nature of nearly everything Christ teaches – including kindness. Flannery O’Connor said, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” Jesus is dealing with the deaf and the almost blind – then and now. It is not a warmness and mere empathy that he is offering but something deeper and far more difficult. It is not easy charity. It is sacrifice.
We never know what God will do with our enemies and those with whom we vehemently disagree. Many in Jesus’ audience would likely have stopped listening the moment he said “Samaritan,” and we are tempted to do the same. We are angry and offended and with good reason, but we cannot predict how God may turn our own minds to realize, in spite of ourselves, it is those very enemies and heretics who personify charity, compassion and kindness.
“Go and do likewise.”