The Good Samaritan

Recently I found an interesting article on religion on the front page of CNN news online.  Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament and Jewish Studies professor, who teaches at Vanderbilt, offered a fresh look at four of the best-known New Testament parables.  For example, she looks at the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Her point is the way we tend to interpret these parables today does not match how the original Jewish audience would have heard and interpreted them.           

In this inspirational piece I want to look at how she deals with another very familiar parable, the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Many of us know this parable as a story about who will stop and help a person lying wounded---robbed and beaten---by the side of the road.  In the biblical story, that person who offers helps is the Good Samaritan.  Before that person appeared, two others had passed by the wounded person, namely, a priest and a Levite.  Both of these persons were Jews.           

And that is where Levine jumps in to begin her work.  She says about our common understanding of this parable, “First, readers presume that a priest and Levite bypass the wounded man because they are attempting to avoid becoming ‘unclean.’  Nonsense.”  At least, she is clear!  She adds a further detail in her interpretation.  “All this interpretation does is make Jewish Law look bad.”  My point here is not to say she has it right or to take her point into contention.  She offers an interesting insight and I use her to provoke my own understanding.           

I like the way she thinks.  She carries me along with her developing argument.  She says, “Jesus mentions priest and Levite because they set up a third category: Israelite. To mention the first two is to invoke the third.”  This is a subtle move that might leave you and me not at all clear. It is easy to assume the priest and the Levite are Jewish.  And we always hear the Samaritan is not Jewish.  But when she says, “Israelite,” we are not quite sure how to understand this.           

She offers a clever analogy.  “If I say, “Larry, Moe …” you will say “Curly.” However, to go from priest to Levite to Samaritan is like going from Larry to Moe to Osama bin Laden.”  There is no mistaking this analogy.  Clearly Osama bin Laden is not one of the Three Stooges!  The analogy is clear and telling.  It makes me think I got it!  And then Levine cautions me by saying this analogy leads to another contemporary misunderstanding. Quoting her, we read, “The parable is often seen as a story of how the oppressed minority – immigrants, gay people, people on parole – are “nice” and therefore we should check our prejudices.”           

Levine has set us up to follow her as she leads us back to what the contemporary audience of Jesus would have thought when they encountered the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  She claims, “Samaritans, then, were not the oppressed minority: They were the enemy. We know this not only from the historian Josephus, but also from Luke the evangelist.”  That is an important distinction: oppressed minority or enemy.  I know this parable only appears in Luke’s gospel.           

Levine rightly puts the parable in its context.  “Just one chapter before our parable, Jesus seeks lodging in a Samaritan village, but they refuse him hospitality.”  And then she adds another note many contemporary folks would not know.  “Moreover, Samaria had another name: Shechem.  At Shechem, Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped or seduced by the local prince.  At Shechem, the murderous judge Abimelech is based.”  This is Old Testament history, but history the original Jewish audience would know.          

Then Amy-Jill Levine comes to her punch line.  “We are the person in the ditch, and we see the Samaritan.  Our first thought: “He’s going to rape me.  He’s going to murder me.”  I find that powerful.  I never thought of myself as the person in the ditch!  Of course, that says much about the fact that I have never been an oppressed minority.  And I have never really conceived of myself as the enemy!  These realizations are sobering for me.           

Her last point drives home a powerful truth.  She notes, “Then we realize: Our enemy may be the very person who will save us.”  Oh wow!  If she is correct that the Samaritan is the enemy, then when the Samaritan stops to help the wounded person, that Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan.  As such, the Good Samaritan becomes the savior.            

Through the process of thinking about his, I have come to new realizations.  I have seen new possibilities for myself.  I can be both the wounded person and I can be the Good Samaritan.  I also should not forget that too often, I have been the priest and the Levite.  The Good Samaritan is a story of the triumph of love and the work of grace.  I can be an instrument of both.