Are we so familiar with the "good" Samaritan parable that we're too comfortable with it?

What number is the best dancer?

Writers love the number three. It’s got rhythm.  In describing someone, three adjectives usually do the trick:  “Mom is pretty, witty, and wise,” and though teachers train kids to write five-paragraph essays, it’s so they can have three main points in the body of their argument.  There are three little pigs, three bears, and three billy goats gruff.  In all these stories, the third one builds the brick house, gets things just right, and stumps the troll.  For my over-21 crowd, two people walk into a bar, and the third ducks. All the best storytellers use the rule of three, including Jesus.  

One by one, a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan see the wounded man on the side of the road, and true to the rule, the third one knows what’s up.  To Jesus’ original hearers, there’s a big ol’ record scratch moment we need to know about.  Amy-Jill Levine says, “Mention a priest and a Levite, and anyone who knows anything about Judaism will know that the third person is an Israelite” (103).  She says replacing Israelite with Samaritan is like saying, “Larry, Moe, and Osama bin Laden,” or to modernize a bit, “Angelica, Eliza, and Putin”  (103). See?  Parables are tweaky.

So, who are these guys?

Priests are descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. Levites are descendants of Levi, the third son of Jacob.  All other ancestral Jews are Israelites, descendants of Jacob’s other sons (Levine, 98).  The point is the priest, the Levite, and the Israelite are all Jewish and make a fitting trio.  Samaritans are also descendants of Jacob, but tradition says members of the Samaritan tribes married outside of the Israelite people and adopted the gods of those cultures and the God of Israel. From a Jewish perspective then, Klyne Snodgrass says Samaritans had a “doubtful descent and inadequate theology” (345).

The Samaritans are decidedly not Jewish, but Levine points out that disdain between the two groups was probably mutual (Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, 136).   She stresses that “the parable is not about the type of prejudice that creates people on the margins; it is about hatred between groups who have similar resources” (112).  To her point, the Samaritan in the parable has freedom of travel in Jewish territory, access to the inn, and money to pay for the man’s care. At the same time, in Luke 9:52-56 we learn Jesus has to hold James and John back from burning down the Samaritan village that refuses to host them.  At least in Luke’s Gospel, things are pretty spicy between the Jews and the Samaritans.  

Before we dive into the parable, one more detail to know is that as priest and Levite, our bypassers are required to serve in the Jerusalem temple for a week or two per year (Green et al. 634). They may have been on the road on the way to serve.  Some scholars have argued that their upcoming service in the temple would have required their ritual purity and that contact with blood or a corpse would have defiled them.  They say that the duty to stay ritually pure would conflict with the responsibility to care for the wounded man (Craddock 151).  Levine disagrees, claiming Jewish law would require their care for the man, alive or dead, regardless of purity laws.  The scholars do seem to agree, however,  that we should not look at the priest and Levite as the elite religious authorities our studies in Mark and John have portrayed.  They’re not the Chief Priests you may have heard about, the ones in collusion with the Romans, but regular guys just doing their inherited duty. 

There you have it!  You’ve got the important context for understanding the parable.   Jesus would stop here and let you engage in the story your way, especially if it makes you wrestle a bit.  My job requires me to be more like Luke, happy to offer a few interpretations for you to consider.

Three readings

People often read this narrative as an example story. We should follow the example of the Samaritan who helps the injured man. Is anyone else brave enough to admit this feels boring?  And unnecessary?  Like, duh. God wants us to help other people. Many of us have been lulled to sleep by this reading.

On April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his last speech.  He spoke extemporaneously to an audience gathered to support the Memphis sanitation strike and the 1,300 African-American men who demanded fair pay and safety measures against the dangers that killed two men months earlier. Dr. King called on his audience to march and “force everybody to see that there are 1,300 of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out.”  He knew marchers risked losing their jobs.  He knew their defense against the police dogs and fire hoses would be nothing more violent or less potent than their prayers and hymns.   “Dangerous unselfishness” is what he called them to, and then he told this parable. King preached, “the first question the priest and Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’” King wondered if they worried the robbers were still lurking, of if the guy was faking as a trap. He continued, “But then the Good Samaritan came by and reversed the question:  ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” 

This example story is starting to tweak like an actual parable.  The kingdom of God happens when we make ourselves truly vulnerable for another, when dangerous unselfishness makes our decisions.  We still have much to learn about the systems that continue to oppress our neighbors of color fifty years later.  Are we asking what will happen to us if we open ourselves to the discomfort that might involve?  Or are we asking what will happen to our neighbors if we don’t?

Are you tweaked yet?

Scholars validate this vital example story way of hearing the parable. Still, their primary reason for reading it more figuratively is that none of Jesus’ Jewish audience would have related to the Samaritan (Funk, 31).  It’s hard to create an example of someone no one likes.  The story starts in verse 30.  “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.”   The victim is the man the audience would relate to.  He’s also Jewish, traveling on a familiar road notorious for its bandits and treacherous grade.  “I was on that road last month,” they would say to each other.  “That could’ve been me.”  A clever filmmaker would shoot the movie from the wounded, naked man’s ground-level perspective, desperately watching the priest and Levite hurrying by. The pacing of their avoidance is quick. Then the Samaritan appears, and everything slows. Verse 33 begins, “But a Samaritan while traveling came near him…”  Anxiety builds. The enemy approaches.  You're clutching your blankie if you’re watching this movie in a dark room.  But the verse ends, “and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.”  Whaaaaat?!?!  Now the audience isn’t nervous.  They’re flabbergasted, especially as the story continues in detail.  The Samaritan anoints his wounds with oil and wine, puts the man on his own animal, cares for him overnight in an inn, and the following day gives the innkeeper enough money to feed and care for him for two months.  Then he promises to return and pay whatever else he owes.  

Robert Funk points out, “In the traditional, example story reading of the parable, the significance of the Samaritan has been completely effaced; the Samaritan is not a mortal enemy, but a good fellow, the model of virtuous deportment” (33).  Is “mortal enemy” too strong here? The disciples may have been refused lodging in the Samaritan village in chapter 9, but they weren’t afraid to ask!  There is historical cause for their hostility. Stories that support the “mortal enemy” label include Genesis 34, where Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped in Shechem, an earlier name for Samaria, and Judges 8-9, where Shechem descendant Abimelech murders 70 of his rivals.  Some Jews who knew these stories saw Samaritans as rapists and murderers (Levine, 104). Who wants to accept help from them?  

In addition to these stories, Levine argues that the ancient story most relevant to our parable is in 2 Chronicles 28:8-15 (111).  Here, the Samaritans, confusingly called “The people of Israel,” “took captive two hundred thousand of their kin” (that means, the other tribes of Israel, from whom the Jews descend) and brought them to Samaria. There, a prophet lets them know God is not pleased with this behavior, so check out what their officials do:  “They clothed all that were naked among them,... provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho” (2 Chronicles 28:15).  Do you hear the echo?  What the Samaritan does in Jesus’ parable sounds similar to what his ancestors did. The Israelite captives must have been very surprised by the Samaritans’ sudden turn-around.  And yet, despite their “inadequate theology,” the Samaritans heard God and returned the captives to safety.  This story's light on the parable causes Levine to ask, “Can we finally agree that it’s better to acknowledge the humanity and potential to do good in the enemy rather than choose death?” (116).  Who do you despise enough to reject their help?  It’s easier to think of a few examples than I’d like to admit. In what ways could my hatred be impeding their goodness?  God’s kingdom happens when we love even our enemies and refuse to dehumanize them.

How about now?

Funk takes the enmity between the Samaritans and Jews slightly differently.  He asserts that the only reason the injured Jewish man permits himself to be saved by his enemy is that he has no other choice.  Funk says, “All who are truly victims, truly disinherited, have no choice but to give themselves up to mercy” (33).  That word, mercy, is significant.  It’s the word the lawyer uses when he can’t force himself to say “Samaritan.”  “The one who showed him mercy,” he says in verse 37, answering Jesus’ question, “Who was a neighbor?”   Levine tells us, “For the lawyer, and for Luke’s readers, the Samaritan does what God does”(113).  Here’s why: The word “mercy” appears five other times in Luke’s gospel, all concentrated in chapter one where we hear the hymns of Mary, soon to be the mother of Jesus, and Zechariah, the father of a newborn John the Baptist (see notes). They proclaim the tender mercies of a God who has announced that the promised savior will come in a tiny, vulnerable package.  I’m struck by Luke’s connection here.  In providing mercy, the Samaritan makes himself vulnerable for the Jew just as God becomes vulnerable for us.  Mercy involves a status shift, a willingness to be shorted on behalf of another, to give what the other cannot gain.  Mercy cannot be earned or lost.  It can only be received.  Perhaps that’s the hardest, most beautiful thing about God’s kingdom, accepting that all the love God lavishes on us is completely outside of our control. 

There you have it!  Three readings of “The Good Samaritan,” though don’t let that number trick you into thinking any of them is “just right.”  If none of these have made you think, I recommend you keep searching for your parable.   Next time, we zoom out on the rest of the chapter.  How does this story-within-a-story reflect on the greater narrative?  How does it relate to Martha?

Notes

Mercy in Luke: 1:50, 1:54, 1:58, 1:72, 1:78, and 10:37

Works Cited

Craddock, Fred B. Luke: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990

Funk, Robert W. Parables and Presence, Forms of the New Testament Tradition. Philadelphia; Fortress Press, 1982.

Green, Joel B., et al., editors. Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels.  Intervarsity Press, 1992.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (speech, Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, 3 April 1968), http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm.

Levine, Amy-Jill.  The Misunderstood Jew, The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus.  Harper San Francisco, 2006

Levine, Amy-Jill. Short Stories by Jesus, The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Harper One, 2014

Snodgrass, Klyne R., Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2008