Note: From The Good Samaritan (Baker 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Many contemporary Christians privilege an interpretation of the Luke 10 passage that equates the good Samaritan with Jesus. Sitting in a Barnes & Noble while reflecting on this chapter, I overheard this interpretation from a neighboring table. It is understandable why contemporary readers prefer this interpretation. It is even spiritually edifying to see Jesus as the one who cares for us, bandages us up, places us in his immediate care, and transports us to safety (perhaps to the care of the church). This interpretive viewpoint has a long, rich history in the Christian tradition.
The Good Samaritan in Caring Community
The contemporary individualistic focus that shifts the story to include “us,” however, fails to grapple with or account for what might be the most critical element of Jesus’s story: his choice to imagine a hero his audience would strongly reject. That element seems as crucial to the story as the act of kindness depicted within the story. Indeed, the lawyer responds to Jesus’s final inquiry with a reply that closes out the account: “the one who showed mercy” (Luke 10:37). The lawyer clearly recognizes what is, in his mind, the irony: the one who is least likely to stop and provide help is the one who did and thereby becomes the one classified as the true neighbor.
The parable of the good Samaritan has a history that is similar to a [Toni] Morrison novel: there are many different angles on the story and thus many interpreters who express distinct views on Jesus’s parable that generally reveal much about the interpreters’ own cultural spaces and times. Notice, for example, how many Good Samaritan Laws exist in the United States, a land in which a law is necessary to enable individuals to act in a helpful way toward a stranger in the middle of a crisis. It is not that most people would refuse to assist a stranger in need – though some might within our individualistic society – but a law is necessary to protect the “good Samaritan” from a lawsuit in case the act of kindness goes awry. It is the litigious society in which we find ourselves that is responsible for this kind of law, not the parable itself. To hear this story afresh – which is difficult to do with well-worn, often-told biblical parables – interpreters must recognize that this account is about more than mercy. By listening to others who utilize the parable in different contexts and as we engage a variety of perspectives in chapter 2, we will hopefully come to appreciate how much our own contexts shape the way we engage this story.
In that same spirit, Jesus’s parable is not simply a story about one human being, a stranger, helping another human being. It is a story about the kind of community Jesus envisions for the world. The characters in his parable represent other groups – those people not part of the dominant group. In the Palestinian collectivistic society of Jesus’s day, the culture rarely focused on the individual. That is clearly the case in this story as well. The cultural ethos of Jesus’s day, especially in the Jewish communities in which he participated, is much more like the Amish community of our day than the generally individualistic settings in which most North Americans find themselves. So in light of this first-century cultural context, this parable may be a story about people groups and the myths that shape their perceptions of other people groups for later times and places….
In the Samaritan’s last words to the innkeeper, the story provides no certain closure. How long will it take to nurse the abused back to health? How much will it cost in time and money? If the man returns to full health, will he be able to return, eventually, to his prior commitments? Was he on a journey, and if so, to where? For what purpose? The lack of closure in Jesus’s parables is usually understated because the point the parable needs to make has been made: in this case, who the neighbor is. What remains is the undisclosed openness to human commitment to one another. It is a commitment that commentators and Christians alike would rather not discuss because their own respective journeys – similar to the Samaritan’s – need to resume. Moreover, that resumption requires full attention. So the burden falls to the innkeeper. To put it briefly here, the Samaritan’s act of kindness becomes a burden that others within the community must share….Communal commitment requires expectations of others when individuals make crucial, even life-altering, choices. When one person or group cares for another, when one person or group forgives another, when one person or group expresses explicit acts of mercy, then there is much more at stake for the larger community than the initial act itself.
The Good Samaritan in Ethnic Community
It is surprising that some interpretations downplay the ethnic background of Jesus’s hero in this story: the Samaritan. Part of the reason is a desire to locate ourselves within the story so that one of us can potentially become the one who commits the good act. The Samaritan becomes anyone. It may simply be the tendency of contemporary North Americans to ignore the ethnic category, even though it’s a potentially crucial element of the story. Many white biblical interpreters would rather claim some “objective” perspective than recognize their own biases in their interpretive decisions. Morrison’s thoughts on the absence of written reflection on the “black body” in white American literature may prove to be a useful analogy. As Morrison observes, contemporary liberals promote a “habit of ignoring race” as “understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.” [Playing in the Dark, p. 9-10] By noticing this absence, however, Morrison attempts to fill the void in her creative fictional work and pass along a more complicated “American” engaging story. In an analogous way, recognizing the ethnic identity of the Samaritan may provide insight into a more complicated biblical, ethnic-filled story that will, hopefully, speak more pertinently and radically to the present moment.
The Bible contains many stories about ethnic group interactions and ethnic conflict: from the Tower of Babel to Abram’s departure from the land of Ur to travel to Canaan, from Israel’s difficult departure from Egypt to their challenging entrance into Canaan, and from the Wisdom tradition’s dependence on non-Israelite wisdom to the preservation of a book named after a Moabite heroine (Ruth). Jesus’s parable about this non-Jewish figure has many points of indirect contact within the biblical tradition. We should not avoid Jesus’s intentional choice of characters.
The characters of Jesus’s story already have a shared mythic history. Jesus assumes that his audience shares a common sensibility about the ethnic conflicts that they, their families, and their villages have turned into living myths. These assumptions make Jesus’s story work, allowing the structure of this story to gain traction and to provoke his audience.
From The Good Samaritan, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2022, used by permission.
Emerson Powery, professor of biblical studies, Messiah University
