“Good Samaritan” falls from the tongue so easily that we forget that, in Jesus’s time, Samaritans were considered heretics. They didn’t worship at the temple in Jerusalem. The high priests said they were unclean. When the Samaritans wouldn’t welcome him along the Jerusalem road, Jesus had to rebuke his disciples for threatening to call down the fire of heaven and destroy them.To understand Jesus’s parable, we might think about reminding a room full of elite, nominal Christians about the time one of them was stricken, and the rest were too busy to help because they had meetings with their tax accountants. The person who stopped to save the victim’s life was someone they’d ridiculed and scorned. The trans woman they called a predator for wanting to use the bathroom or locker room. The drag queen they kept from reading stories to children at the library. The undocumented worker they joked about feeding to alligators.
It’s like saying to a stricken member of Netanyahu’s cabinet that when no one else would help, appearing at the door with food and bandages was the mother of a child killed in an IDF attack on an apartment building in Gaza.
We need to imagine a meeting of white supremacists and say that, in the story as told by Jesus Christ, the only person who got down on their knees to wipe the blood and sweat from the victim’s brow was a person of African descent. Everyone else left them for dead.
This is how people in Jesus‘s time heard this parable. Those we covered with neglect or hate were the ones who covered us with healing. Just imagine that, Jesus says.
We are a little community of Christ followers who say to this broken world that the person we resent or fear might be a source of redemption and new life. If ego and privilege will only relent, when people act according to the divine law of love God has written on their hearts, they’ll begin to heal themselves and those around them. This is how our God.in Christ will save the world.
(Image: “The Good Samaritan,” Dinah Roe Kendall)