A Samaritan Theology

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.^*262728 ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘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 neighbour as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

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But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ³⁰Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³²So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” ³⁶Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ ³⁷He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

The Good Samaritan. In “Along the Road”, the sociologist Robert Wuthnow chronicles that, in fact, this classic story of Christian faith matters, and matters greatly. Wuthnow undertook the task of trying to figure what difference the Parable of the Good Samaritan has on American society. He interviewed scores of Christians and non-Christians alike, asking them to retell the story and about what significance it had on their lives. Wuthnow found that those who knew the story, and had heard it in the context of regular church attendance and particularly by experiencing the story either as the Samaritan who helped or as the wounded man who needed help, were much more likely to sign up to help other people. The great moral tale, the Good Samaritan, is helpful. It formed people to go and do likewise. The people had gotten it, we were looking at a real live Biblical success story. There’s only one problem. This parable, this well-known tale of helping and do-gooding, is not a parable primarily concerned about ethics, about doing good. It’s a parable of theology – it is, a word about God.

We all know the story. A man was on his way to Jericho and got mugged. The robbers stole his money. They took his clothes. And so he couldn’t get away, they beat him. They might have kicked him. If they had a weapon they probably used it on him too, maybe cutting and slashing him to a bloody pulp. The attack was so thorough, so complete, that they left him for dead, not even bothering to hide the body or get him off the road. When people across the street saw him, he looked half-dead.

Two religious officials, one a priest and another a Levite, maybe on their way to the temple, passed the man on the other side of the street. The Bible says that they saw him, yet they passed on by. They could have thought he was dead. They could have kept walking because they didn’t want to be ritually defiled by a dead body. We don’t know. All we know is that they kept on keeping on and they too, left him for dead. Then, a third man appears, a Samaritan. He sees the man, has mercy on him, bandaging, rubbing oil and wine on his wounds, and securing lodging for the man. He was the neighbor. Go, and do likewise. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

You see, the Samaritan isn’t just any neighbor. He’s not Uncle Joe or even the nice little man who lives down the street. The Samaritan is Hillary Clinton to the wounded man’s James Dobson. The Samaritans and the Jews had been fighting since about the eighth Century B.C.E. It shouldn’t surprise us that the Samartian woman Jesus met was shocked when he asked her for water. The hatred between Jews and Samaritans was so bad, that according to Josephus, during one particular Passover some Samaritans scattered bones of a dead human in the temple, not only defiling the temple but also preventing the celebration of the feast. Georgia Tech students stealing UGA have nothing on these guys.

The fact that the Samaritan is a sworn enemy makes things a little different. Whereas modern do-gooder interpretations tend to focus on the parable as a moral exemplar for helping the needy in society, Patristic interpreters of the early church had a different take. The parable was not about an ethical imperative – to help the needy in the world – but it was an allegory of God’s plan of salvation and an entry path for persons into the church. Whereas moderns tend to understand themselves as passing by the man on the road – in a position of power – Patristic interpreters looked at the parable and saw themselves on the ground, beaten and left for dead, waiting for someone to help.

Jesus’ tale is Gospel, it is powerfully good news. It is good news for the lawyer – he gains insight into the law of love. It is good news for the Samaritan – he is a hero. It is good news for the wounded man – he gets taken care of. And it is ultimately good news for its hearers, who whether we know it or not, are ourselves beaten and broken, callous and cut up along the road. That’s because Jesus isn’t offering a tale about what to do in this passage. In this well known parable he is revealing just who God is. The parable of the Good Samaritan is ultimately a revelation of the character of God.

But before we can talk about God, we need to talk about us. It’s not as much in vogue to talk about it much these days, but from the Apostle Paul way back when to Reinhold Niebuhr only a little back when, Christian theologians have affirmed that humans are sinful. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, Paul writes. Wesley said that the goal of the Christian life was to recover the image of God that was lost through sin. Whatever the words say, we know that most of the time we are working against the will and plan of God. God desires reconciliation and we foster division. God desires sharing – take the cloak off your back and give them your tunic too – but from the day we leave the womb we are constantly clamoring for ourselves. Wasting water in a drought, cashing a big check while another can’t eat, or hiding my Halloween candy so my little brother can’t have some. We know just who and what we are.

The Samaritan in the parable didn’t leave his enemy bleeding on the ground. And neither does God. For even though we are often God’s enemy, fomenting rebellion and living against God’s desire for the world, God still sees us. God still sees us and has compassion. God, like the Samaritan in the parable, saw our needs. God sees that, like the man in the story, we are hurting. God sees that the sin and evil have ransacked us along the road, beating us beyond repair and leaving us for dead. But our sin and our sad, sad, state does not prevent God from seeing that we need help, and then crossing the road to heal us. The Apostle Paul spends the first half of Romans slaying us, slicing and dicing us by detailing all the ways that we sin and rebel against God. But at its height, the text sings as Paul declares, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

The turning point of the parable comes when the Samaritan sees the man, and “has compassion” on him. The Greek word that is translated as having compassion is used twelve times in the New Testament, all in the Gospels. Nine times it refers to God’s compassion as revealed in the Incarnate One, Jesus. The Samaritan isn’t a unique man willing to transcend religious politics or an extraordinary guy walking down the road one day. The compassion that he shows isn’t an attribute to be imitated. Instead, his compassion reveals that the Samaritan is nothing more or nothing less than a description of the Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. We see in the compassion extended to the man lying in the road the compassion God extends to each and every one of us. The Good Samaritan is a reflection of the love of God.

Over Thanksgiving I listed to a sermon. The focus: What must I do to be saved? My uncle, an avowed agnostic and the song leader in the local Church of Christ, is mad at God. His eyes getting wider and his hair flying every which way as he leaned forward, he couldn’t understand why God did it. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t ask for God to put me here and see if I could live up to all this. Give all your money to the poor. I’m selfish. I can’t do it, but that’s what the Bible says. Leave your mother and your father. I would never do that. I can’t do that, but that’s what the Bible says. If it was up to me, I would never have been born. The point of the whole thing is to get to heaven, and I know I’m not making it. It’s going to be hot where I’m going. What kind of God is that, who creates you and knows you are going to fail, knows you are going to be damned? I didn’t ask for that.”

His misreading of this parable and the New Testament is a tragic one. He is haunted by his own texts of terror, the ones that keep him up at night and the ones which prevent him from loving God instead of fearing God. What he doesn’t get is what the lawyer in our tale didn’t get. The lawyer asked Jesus the question about his neighbor wanting to justify himself. My uncle thinks that he has to justify himself too. But the message of the New Testament is that we don’t justify ourselves; God does that, and already has.

Terrifying thoughts like the ones that tormented my uncle helped Luther to the claim that this parable speaks to. How can I be righteous before a holy and righteous God. Impossible. But what is impossible with man is possible for God. We are justified, made righteous, not by works of our merit, but by faith apart from the works of the law. Sola Fide: Faith alone. The wounded man didn’t pick himself up by his bootstraps, dust himself off, anoint himself with oil and wine and make his way to an inn. The Samaritan did, risking himself for the sake of that wounded traveler. We don’t reconcile ourselves and don’t heal ourselves from the sin and evil that has ravaged us. God does that.

The story of the Good Samaritan is about a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, but the hope in the story is in the one who is on his way to Jerusalem, and who will die there. The fundamental claim of the Christian faith is that God is made flesh in Jesus, who is crucified and resurrected for our sake. God crosses the road, for us. The great mystery of faith. Thanks be to God.

Wuthnow, Robert. “On the Road”, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, 157-87

Donahue, John. The Gospel in Parable, 130

Hultgren, Arland. The Parables of Jesus, 98-99