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 ...