The Good Samaritan

The Gospel reading for this Sunday is the parable of the Good Samaritan. A parable that, like all parables, most people get wrong. The parables are designed to do this. I can say this too from immediate experience: we discussed it in a prayer group last night.

The parable is in response to a question. With reference to the commandment to love your neighbor. Jesus has been asked, “Who is my neighbour?”

Most in my group, having just heard the parable, concluded simply that your neighbor is someone who lives near you. This, however, the parable seems to be plainly arguing against. Nobody any longer grasps the significance of “Samaritan.” In popular parlance, it has come to mean no more than “charitable person.”

But a Samaritan to Jesus’s audience was a foreigner, not a neighbor in the literal sense. And a religious heretic, from the Jewish point of view. So one’s neighbor is emphatically not, or not just, according to the parable, someone who lives near you or whom you regularly encounter in your daily life. He is not anyone with whom you have any formal bounds of nationality, family, culture, or religion.

The participants who accepted this immediately and naturally then concluded, everyone is your neighbor.

That would work if the question was whether the robbed man lying in the ditch was the neighbor of the Samaritan. The Samaritan was acting with charity towards a stranger. But the question is not whether the Jew by the road is the neighbor of the Samaritan, but whether the Samaritan is the neighbor of the Jew by the road: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell in the hands of robbers?”

Presumably, too, Jesus’s original audience would not self-identify as the Samaritan, the foreigner, but as the assaulted Jew.

Jesus gives three choices, the Samaritan, who helped, and the priest and the Levite, who did not stop and help. And he agrees that the correct answer is “the Samaritan.” Which, means, at the same time, that the other two are not his neighbours.

So according to our parable, our neighbor is not everyone, but, specifically, good people, wherever they live. Bad people, conversely, are not our neighbours.

This fits too with Jesus’s advice elsewhere that if someone has done you wrong, and refuses to admit it, you are to shun them. They are no longer your neighbour.

When I made this point, the prayer group was in rebellion against it. It defies the common image of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” who loves everyone no matter what. Andrew Klavan, who after actually reading the New Testament converted from Judaism, defies anyone to find such a “gentle Jesus” in the gospel. “Gentle Jesus” is a corporate lie or delusion we sustain out of fear of being condemned for our sins. “We are not to judge.” “Who am I to judge?” “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Yet judgement is actually Jesus’s cosmic end mission: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” And we are in all things to imitate Christ. We just do not want to think about it, so we pretend it is not there.

Is it only Jesus, as God incarnate, who has this right to judge? No; John the Baptist too judges emphatically in the gospel. He condemns Herod and Herodias; he condemns the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus does not object, but declares him the greatest of all those born of women.

If, after all, everyone is our neighbor, who exactly were those “wolves” Jesus was warning the disciples about in last Sunday’s gospel, when he said he was sending them out “like lambs among wolves”?

Okay, so what about Jesus’s commandment to “love thine enemy”? Fair question.

To begin with, the fact that one is to love one’s neighbor and also to love one’s enemy does not equate one’s enemy to one’s neighbor. More importantly, one hardly expresses love or charity to a sinner by ignoring their sin. That is just like walking by and abandoning them in the ditch, as the priest and Levite did in the parable. They have been set upon by robbers, which is to say, sins and vices, devils, and have been thrown off the path, left to spiritually die. The easy and safe thing, of course, is to ignore him as much as possible and to go about our business. Just like the priest or Levite do—that these are both religious offices hints that the import here is indeed spiritual.

The charitable thing is to call them out, get them to a church, and try to save him.