“A shocking turn of events”
Meditation – Thursday, June 5, 2025
Luke 10:25-37 (Forward, p. 38) CEV p. 1073
We are so very accustomed to today’s passage, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that we are blind to how very shocking it would have been to Jesus’ original audience. Years ago, a British playwright wrote a series of short pieces based on the parables of Jesus, one of which was an adaptation of this parable. In it, a traveller on the train is beaten up by a bunch of hopped-up football hooligans returning from disputed match. And who should pass him by initially but the local bishop and the diocesan solicitor. But the man who does stop is the last person you’d ever think of: a heavily tattooed punk rocker adorned with piercings galore and wildly coloured hair. It was this unlikely person that stopped to help the badly injured man.
According to one of my seminary profs, Jesus was actually ‘recycling’ this parable, using one that had been told before but telling it in a new and unexpected way. His audience, perhaps not always appreciating the officialdom, might well have written off the priest and the Levite as being of any help, expecting instead, that it would be a good and righteous Jewish lay person that stepped in to help.
But, to substitute a Samaritan: that was outrageous. Samaritans were despised and ostracized. They were the outsider, the enemy, the infidel. No one would have anything to do with them, much less accord them any merit or praise. And so, to cast one as the ‘hero’ of His parable was unheard of.
To place this in a contemporary context: just think of someone that you and I would think of as unlikely, a someone ‘dressed in drag’ perhaps, or perhaps someone dressed in body armour waving a Confederate flag and bearing an AK45, or perhaps a black masked Islamic State terrorist. This
gives you a sense of how surprising, and outrageous, Jesus’ choice for the hero would have been for His audience back then.
But Jesus’ point was this: this unexpected and despised man was the neighbour, the one who acted in a neighbourly way to the man who was left half-dead. And, returning to the legal expert’s original question, this same man was the neighbour that he should be loving as himself. And, as this man showed mercy, so too was the legal expert implored to do the same.
Forward notes: “You have given the right answer; do this and you will live” (verse 28).
“Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama flipped this passage on end for me. In his book In the Shelter, Ó Tuama asks us to consider the perspective of the injured man who receives help from the Samaritan, whom he was taught to despise.
“Did the injured feel shame accepting help from a sworn enemy? Did he consider himself unclean after the encounter? Did others treat him differently?
“In biblical times—and today—accepting love and grace is much harder than it should be. We question the motives of the giver. We prefer to be self-sufficient. We don’t want to put anybody out, especially the person we feel has wronged us in some real or perceived way. And yet, Jesus tells us that we will be saved in loving our neighbor. This directive also means allowing our neighbor to love us—accepting the gift offered, even when we have been taught to despise the giver.”
Moving Forward: “Do you find it easier to give than to receive? How can you practice being a gracious recipient of God’s love, even from those you might not like?”
Some concluding thoughts: As wise, and as searching, as our Irish theologian’s comments are, and as appropriate, I think he has missed the point, in three ways:
I think that Jesus left the ethnicity of the injured man up in the air, for good reason. We can’t assume automatically that he was Jewish. He could well have been a Samaritan or a Roman or an Arab. The fact that he was
stripped and left half naked, took away any clue that his garments might have accorded him. So, the whole idea is that we offer help, that we act in a neighbourly way, to whomever has need of it.
Secondly, from my experience, severely injured or ill persons don’t begrudge the help they are given. It does not matter whether the EMR or the emergency room surgeon is of a different ethnic group or whatever, they are just glad to receive the help. And no one else questions it either. In fact, maybe even the opposite.
And, as for the author’s suggestion that Jesus tells us that we are ‘saved’, that we have eternal life, by loving others: yes, Jesus does seem to intimate this, at least at first glance. However, there is a catch. If we truly love God with our entire beings and love our neighbours as much and in the same way as we love ourselves, we will have eternal life. The catch is, however, that we simply cannot do this. None of us can succeed in doing either, at least in our own strength and ability. We need to place our trust and faith in God in Christ Jesus to hope even to get close.