One of the best illustrations of what Jesus meant when he said to love our enemies is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In this familiar story, a man is mugged on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Both a priest and a Levite pass by him without helping. Finally, a Samaritan stops and helps the man, giving him medical attention, taking him somewhere safe, and paying for his recovery.
Jesus tells this story in the context of the question, "Who is my neighbor?" The lawyer type is apparently thinking in the same vein as Matthew 5:43: love your neighbor and hate your enemy. So he is willing to love his friends but perhaps wanting to exclude his enemies from those toward which he must show love. He sounds like he wants to be clever. "Ah, but who is my neighbor?"
Jesus' answer is topsy-turvy. First, he does not tell a story about someone helping a Samaritan, although in effect Jesus' answer is that Samaritans are his neighbors. But the story honors the Samaritan as the one who actually fulfills what God expects. Meanwhile, those like the lawyer--the priest and Levite--do not.
Samaritans were of course hated by many Jews at the time. They lived in the region between Galilee, where Jesus lived, and Judea, where Jerusalem was. While Galilee in the north had largely turned to follow the religious approach of the south in Jerusalem, Samaria remained both politically and religiously distinct. Samaria had a long history of resisting the advancement of Judea, and they had their own version of the Jewish Law that did not see the temple in Jerusalem as the legitimate temple. They had their own temple much of the time. They also tended not to worship Yahweh exclusively but to mix worship of him with other gods in the world like Zeus.
So for Jesus to make the Samaritan the good guy would have been grating, to say the least. Any lawyer of this sort would surely have found it insulting. What's even more subversive is the situation that Jesus creates. A priest or Levite would surely have wanted to avoid the mugged man for purity reasons. He would have been bloody, and contact with blood of this sort would make a person unclean, and purity was a major concern for a priest, whether they had just finished their priestly duties or not.
Some try to soften the startling nature of what Jesus is saying here by pointing out that the priest and Levite were headed away from Jerusalem. If they were working in the temple, they were done for the day. It is hard to know how significant the direction of travel is in the story. It does not change the fact that Jesus did not put a Pharisee in the story as the one who avoids the mugged man. Jesus chose two people for whom purity was a concern because of the Old Testament laws.
In other words, this is another story like the one where Jesus gets into conflict with Pharisees over his disciples picking heads of grain on the Sabbath. It is another story where he implies that people trump rules for their own sake, in this case a priestly concern for purity. Loving our neighbor or enemy takes priority over lesser laws and concerns.
Once again, we find that Jesus leaves no excuse for hating our enemy. When we have a concrete opportunity to help others in need, we'd better have a very good reason not to do it. Jesus does not show himself to be an "absolutist" in these stories. Quite the contrary! He regularly makes exceptions to the rules, even breaks the rules, when loving others is at stake.
Showing posts with label Parable of the Good Samaritan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parable of the Good Samaritan. Show all posts
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Parable of the Good Samaritan
The Bible assignment this week for the Missional Church course involved some interpretive and applicational work on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I am not a Luke scholar but I enjoyed the onsite class today and am enjoying the ongoing online discussion as well. I feel like I've gained some new insights.
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Part 1
1. When the expert in the Law asks Jesus who his neighbor is, what is he really asking Jesus?
Several people noted that the expert in the Law wanted to "justify" himself (10:29). The sense seems to be that he wants Jesus to reach the conclusion that he is in fact keeping the commandment to love his neighbor. The lawyer is thus asking Jesus who he must love or, as one student put it perhaps more accurately, who he did not need to love.
Several pointed out that the opening tone of the expert in the Law was adversarial. He is "testing" Jesus (10:25). Interestingly, the parallel passages in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 have Jesus giving the answer. But we must bracket our knowledge of those other passages to hear Luke in its own literary context.
Interestingly, the earlier part of the chapter is about the sending of the 72, a number quite possibly symbolic of the nations. So the literary context is perhaps already suggesting that Gentiles are neighbors to this expert. It is indeed possible that the very placement of this story causes the mention of an expert in the Law to have a tone of conflict even as the story opens.
2. When Jesus suggests through the Parable of the Good Samaritan that it was the Samaritan who acted as a neighbor to the half dead man, how does this answer the earlier question of the expert in the Law?
Luke seems to pull a switcheroo here. The question the expert in the Law asks is, "Who is my neighbor?" We might thus expect the story to have the Samaritan as someone the Law expert should help, that the expert in the Law should behave neighborly toward. We might expect the Samaritan to be the one mugged.
The effect of the switch is much more powerful and effective than if the Samaritan had been the one mugged. The effect is to say, this Samaritan, someone you would not say has eternal life because he does not follow the Law correctly, does not worship at the right worship site, whose people from time to time has sided with Israel's enemies, this Samaritan does a better job at loving his neighbor than you do. In a sense, this Samaritan is closer to eternal life than you are! This Samaritan knew how to love his neighbor, even if you don't. There is shame involved here in an honor-shame world.
And of course the person mugged is someone who is to be loved as a neighbor as well, a double whammy. We can understand why a priest and Levite might avoid this bloody person. They no doubt wish to remain clean and pure according to the Law. Yes, they at least seem to be leaving Jerusalem rather than going up. But they are still staying clean, going above and beyond the call of duty in following the Scriptures. The expert in the Law would presumably know this. Jesus is thus not an absolutist on such issues. It is essential to make exceptions to the rules when greater values come into play and trump lesser ones.
So a bloodied man who might make me unclean is the expert's neighbor and the Samaritan acted as a neighbor and is presumably the expert's neighbor.
Part 2:
3. What is the implication of Jesus’ answer for who we are to love and what love means in concrete terms?
Now we move from interpretation to application. We have been asking what the text meant. Now we are asking its significance for us today. I suppose if we are to be careful with the implications, this parable is not exactly a "love your enemies" story. The Samaritan is not the mugger in the story. He is a "good" Samaritan who loves his neighbor. We better get the full blown love your enemy message from Matthew 5.
But the Samaritan was someone who crossed a social boundary line. He was someone who, because of where he was located in the world by geography and genealogy, was not someone a carefully Law-observant Jew might want to love as neighbor. And of course Samaritans were in fact the geographical neighbors of Judea and Galilee.
The parable seems to give us a double whammy answer to the question of who we are to love. We are, of course, to love the unfortunate victim. Fitting in well with Luke's general theme of good news to the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden is the inference that we should be a neighbor to those who are in trouble and need. The Samaritan, by the same token, implies that we are not to let identifiers like race, gender, or any kind of external identifier stand as a barrier to loving. Some application today would be that we would not let a different skin color or the fact that someone was an immigrant or a Muslim stand as an obstacle to us loving them as neighbor.
Love here seems very concrete. The compassion the Samaritan feels is toward a person in distress, not a hands holding "we are the world" sing along. You can act lovingly toward another person even when you don't particularly like them.
4. Are there any people or people groups in the immediate context of your church that some in your congregation do not think of as “neighbors” in the manner of the parable?
There are a lot of "mugged" people within blocks of my house. They don't know they've been mugged. They make lots of wrong choices. They do drugs or make a mockery of child raising. They do petty theft when it's an easy target. These mugged people pass the mugging along.
But they are themselves slaves, in bondage to forces they have little clue about. They may not even know how miserable their lives are. Being a Samaritan to them, aside from little acts of openness, looks to some prophets with a great vision and special gifts to implement it.
_______
Part 1
1. When the expert in the Law asks Jesus who his neighbor is, what is he really asking Jesus?
Several people noted that the expert in the Law wanted to "justify" himself (10:29). The sense seems to be that he wants Jesus to reach the conclusion that he is in fact keeping the commandment to love his neighbor. The lawyer is thus asking Jesus who he must love or, as one student put it perhaps more accurately, who he did not need to love.
Several pointed out that the opening tone of the expert in the Law was adversarial. He is "testing" Jesus (10:25). Interestingly, the parallel passages in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 have Jesus giving the answer. But we must bracket our knowledge of those other passages to hear Luke in its own literary context.
Interestingly, the earlier part of the chapter is about the sending of the 72, a number quite possibly symbolic of the nations. So the literary context is perhaps already suggesting that Gentiles are neighbors to this expert. It is indeed possible that the very placement of this story causes the mention of an expert in the Law to have a tone of conflict even as the story opens.
2. When Jesus suggests through the Parable of the Good Samaritan that it was the Samaritan who acted as a neighbor to the half dead man, how does this answer the earlier question of the expert in the Law?
Luke seems to pull a switcheroo here. The question the expert in the Law asks is, "Who is my neighbor?" We might thus expect the story to have the Samaritan as someone the Law expert should help, that the expert in the Law should behave neighborly toward. We might expect the Samaritan to be the one mugged.
The effect of the switch is much more powerful and effective than if the Samaritan had been the one mugged. The effect is to say, this Samaritan, someone you would not say has eternal life because he does not follow the Law correctly, does not worship at the right worship site, whose people from time to time has sided with Israel's enemies, this Samaritan does a better job at loving his neighbor than you do. In a sense, this Samaritan is closer to eternal life than you are! This Samaritan knew how to love his neighbor, even if you don't. There is shame involved here in an honor-shame world.
And of course the person mugged is someone who is to be loved as a neighbor as well, a double whammy. We can understand why a priest and Levite might avoid this bloody person. They no doubt wish to remain clean and pure according to the Law. Yes, they at least seem to be leaving Jerusalem rather than going up. But they are still staying clean, going above and beyond the call of duty in following the Scriptures. The expert in the Law would presumably know this. Jesus is thus not an absolutist on such issues. It is essential to make exceptions to the rules when greater values come into play and trump lesser ones.
So a bloodied man who might make me unclean is the expert's neighbor and the Samaritan acted as a neighbor and is presumably the expert's neighbor.
Part 2:
3. What is the implication of Jesus’ answer for who we are to love and what love means in concrete terms?
Now we move from interpretation to application. We have been asking what the text meant. Now we are asking its significance for us today. I suppose if we are to be careful with the implications, this parable is not exactly a "love your enemies" story. The Samaritan is not the mugger in the story. He is a "good" Samaritan who loves his neighbor. We better get the full blown love your enemy message from Matthew 5.
But the Samaritan was someone who crossed a social boundary line. He was someone who, because of where he was located in the world by geography and genealogy, was not someone a carefully Law-observant Jew might want to love as neighbor. And of course Samaritans were in fact the geographical neighbors of Judea and Galilee.
The parable seems to give us a double whammy answer to the question of who we are to love. We are, of course, to love the unfortunate victim. Fitting in well with Luke's general theme of good news to the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden is the inference that we should be a neighbor to those who are in trouble and need. The Samaritan, by the same token, implies that we are not to let identifiers like race, gender, or any kind of external identifier stand as a barrier to loving. Some application today would be that we would not let a different skin color or the fact that someone was an immigrant or a Muslim stand as an obstacle to us loving them as neighbor.
Love here seems very concrete. The compassion the Samaritan feels is toward a person in distress, not a hands holding "we are the world" sing along. You can act lovingly toward another person even when you don't particularly like them.
4. Are there any people or people groups in the immediate context of your church that some in your congregation do not think of as “neighbors” in the manner of the parable?
There are a lot of "mugged" people within blocks of my house. They don't know they've been mugged. They make lots of wrong choices. They do drugs or make a mockery of child raising. They do petty theft when it's an easy target. These mugged people pass the mugging along.
But they are themselves slaves, in bondage to forces they have little clue about. They may not even know how miserable their lives are. Being a Samaritan to them, aside from little acts of openness, looks to some prophets with a great vision and special gifts to implement it.
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