One of the most well known parables attributed to Jesus is that of the ‘Good Samaritan.’ It is found only in the Gospel of Luke. When tested by a lawyer trained in the Law of Moses on what a person needed to do to obtain eternal life, Jesus answered, “love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” The lawyer then challenged Jesus with another question, “And who is my neighbour?”
Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. A Jewish man is travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho when he is set upon by bandits and left for dead. First a priest, and then a Levite (a member of the Hebrew tribe of Levi, especially of that part of it which provided assistants to the priests in the worship in the Jewish temple), come upon the injured man on the side of the road, but both cross to the other side of the road without stopping to offer assistance to the man. Finally a Samaritan comes upon the man and administers first aid to him. Then he places the injured man on his own donkey and takes him to a nearby inn where he gives money to the innkeeper to look after the injured man until he returns.
Having finished telling the parable, Jesus asks the lawyer who he believes was a neighbour to the man. The lawyer responds correctly that it was the “one who showed mercy,” meaning the Samaritan. Jesus tells the lawyer to go and do likewise.
There are two important messages from the parable of the Good Samaritan. The first, compassion for a fellow human being is more important than observing any prescribed religious practice. The reason both the priest and Levite crossed the road without offering assistance to the man is because for all they knew he might already have been dead. Under Jewish law, it was not permitted to come into contact with a corpse. Anyone doing so became ritually unclean and had to follow the purification rituals to become clean again. Both the priest and the Levite are more concerned with upholding Jewish religious law than with showing compassion for a fellow human being.
The second message from the parable is that all human beings are the same in God’s eyes, and that is more important than any form of tribalism. Jews and Samaritans were bitter enemies. The Samaritans had once been part of the tribes of Northern Israel, but after the Assyrians conquered the northern tribes in the 8th century BC, the Samaritans had been dispersed among the Assyrian Empire. The Samaritans still believed in the same God of Israel that the Jews did, but they held several different beliefs on how God was to be worshipped, and this created enmity and division among Jews and Samaritans in much the same way that we find differences among Christian denominations today.
The author of the Gospel of Luke attributes another story to Jesus that also involves a Samaritan. In the story of Jesus healing ten lepers, only one of the ten, who happens to be a Samaritan, gives thanks to God for his healing. The other nine lepers were going to the Jerusalem temple to see the priests, as instructed by Jesus and in keeping with Jewish law, but only the Samaritan recognised Jesus as the one who deserved his worship and thanksgiving.
These two examples from the Gospel of Luke – the parable of the Good Samaritan and the healing of the ten lepers – demonstrate that perceiving oneself to be a good person simply because one is a member of what they themselves consider to be the ‘true’ religious faith is not necessarily the case.
The Jewish people in the time of Jesus no doubt still considered themselves to be God’s chosen people, but in these two accounts from the Gospel of Luke they are shown up by their bitter enemies (the Samaritans) as lacking in the basic aspects of what it means to be God’s children – compassion for other people, and treating all people the same, without any partiality.
The gospel passage for Sunday 17th November 2024 (the Twenty–Sixth Sunday after Pentecost), chapter 13 verses 1 to 11 of Mark’s Gospel, is largely responsible for the development of the Christian tradition of the Second Coming of Jesus, which is the belief that Jesus will return again at the end of time to pass judgement on all people, with those deemed worthy being chosen to spend eternity in heaven, and those who are not worthy being sentenced to spend eternity in Hell.
Of course this opens a theological “can of worms” regarding whose God is the true God, and whose faith is the correct faith, and what happens to good people who are of no faith, or are from the “wrong” faith. There is not enough time or space in this blog to explore these questions, so instead let me repeat what I have mentioned on several occasions in recent blogs.
People who came into contact with Jesus during his lifetime, or at least during the time of his ministry proclaiming God and the kingdom of God, obviously had an experience of God through that interaction. It was through such interactions that God was revealed in and through Jesus. I believe the way in which Jesus revealed God was in the way he broke down the barriers that separated people from one another.
Whether a person was Jew or Samaritan, Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free, adult or child, a leper, possessed by demons (which today we would describe as suffering from mental health disorders), a prostitute, a tax collector etc, made no difference to Jesus. All people were equal in his eyes. In his eyes, all people were children of God.
