The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan isn’t just to be nice. Or that we’re all the same. Jesus pushes us to see how we see each other.
Here’s a story poorly understood.
There’s a man mugged and beaten by the side of the road. People keep going past him. But one stops and helps him, maybe saving his life.
What parable is this?
Let me try again.
There’s a priest on the way to the synagogue for services when he sees a man, covered in blood. He thinks about stopping, but he’s alone and can’t touch the man himself. Because he needs to remain ritually pure on behalf of the community, he keeps his distance. Hopefully, someone else will come by soon to help him. And someone does.
Is this the same parable?
Again.
A member of a wealthy, connected family is heading to an important board meeting. He sees a man by the side of the road, bloodied and near death. He was taught to never go near someone who was bleeding. That’s not his job. It could jeopardize his purity. Let someone else do it. Thank God they do.
Again.
A German soldier sees a Jewish person lying by the side of the road in the middle of the Holocaust. He was beaten by criminals and ignored by his own people. But the German soldier tends to his wounds, carries him into town, stays with him the whole night, and pays his hotel and medical bills.
Again.
A refugee stops to save a man in a MAGA hat—
A black woman stops to save a racist—
A queer person stops to save a megachurch pastor—
Again.
Again.
Keep going.
And again.
The Turn
We all know the parable of the Good Samaritan. Or at least we know how we talk about it.
And what keeps coming to our attention over and over is the reversal, the trick of the story. The turn. When Jesus reveals to us who the neighbor is. That it isn’t always someone from our tribe. It is often someone clearly outside it.
While this may be the most obvious turn of the story, it isn’t the only point.
The Good Deed
We often refer to strangers doing good things as “Good Samaritans”. With good (though simplistic) reason. This too is an obvious reading of the story.
The point of this parable really does seem to be saying something about doing good. But more than that. Like it’s trying to show an example of “the Other” doing something good.
But that isn’t all.
The Justified Enemy
The Other in the story isn’t only other or outsider, but a perceived enemy. And, importantly, a justified enemy. One the hearer feels justified in “othering”.
At the time of Jesus, the Hebrew and Samaritan peoples were rivals. But really, for only about 150 years. Their ancestors came from different tribes; tribes which do go back to a time, many centuries before, when they were of the same people. But the term “Samaritan” for these people dates to early in the first Century BCE.
These peoples were rivals, turned enemies. Like the Hatfields and McCoys.
So the Hebrew people felt justified in thinking lowly of the Samaritans. They earned that reputation. Just as the Hebrews earned theirs with the Samaritans.
Justified enemies. It looks like they’re both at fault for the arrangement.
The Mix-Up
Here’s where we get ourselves into trouble with this parable.
Because it isn’t just the turn.
And it isn’t just the nice deed.
Nor is it that the Other or that an enemy helps a person in their time of need.
We get distracted by the turn, the good action, and the identities all that we miss what the story doesn’t communicate.
We don’t realize what we fill in. What isn’t in the story, but we make it the secret lesson.
This story messes with our expectations. But it doesn’t say to completely rewrite them.
It doesn’t…
condemn the rabbi or the Levite.
celebrate the Samaritan people.
say we’re all only the same, deep down.
Who is my neighbor?
Jesus is asked by a lawyer about inheriting eternal life and Jesus says love God and love your neighbor as yourself. The lawyer, being a bit cheeky, asks Jesus “who is my neighbor?” So Jesus tells him a parable.
One that reminds us that neighbors come in many forms.
This story is about who counts as a neighbor. And it reveals an unlikely neighborly act; one that isn’t just lending a cup of sugar. The Samaritan tends to his wounds and carries him. He takes him to help, stays with him, and then pays for it. And he promises to cover everything.
But there’s something twisted in the way most Christians comprehend the point of the story.
Most of us read it backward. We hear this as correcting the Jewish leaders or inviting them to give people the benefit of the doubt. We think it shows what not to do (don’t be like the rabbi and Levite) and what we should do (be like the stranger).
But we usually fail to put ourselves in the Samaritan’s shoes here. Not in church. Not in line at Starbucks. Because we want our purity and our neighborly good deed.
We want to maintain control and judge and figure out what the right thing really is! This story becomes all about us!
So we keep the wall between the Hebrews and the Samaritans up, even after reading the parable for the 5,000th time. Every time, the “good guys” screw up and the “bad guy” does the right thing. And we tell ourselves that this is telling us how to be a good person.
And we pin that onto every interaction.
Who then is my neighbor? A wall.
It was always the Samaritan
Given the three people traveling that road, the one most likely to help actually was the Samaritan. Why? Because he didn’t have the same legal requirement to maintain ritual purity the first two did.
The one most likely to help was always the Samaritan.
Purity laws (something Jesus routinely critiques) prevented the Hebrews from seeing the person by the side of the road as a real person.
While the only thing preventing the Samaritan from helping was being able to see common humanity.
He didn’t have centuries of tradition telling him to ignore the plight of others or to care only for people in the tribe or thinking it was someone else’s responsibility.
Jesus is making a political statement.
This story doesn’t only mess with expectations, it depends on them. It relies on conflicting ideas being held in tension.
And because of that tension (that the third person, the one who helps, was a Samaritan) serves to remind the hearers that Samaritans are actually human beings at all! It’s a conviction of tribalism’s tendency to blind us to our relationship with others.
And it blinds us to our convictions and beliefs. Not just in a team-sport mentality, but to the purpose these traditions serve. We miss the point in trying to protect ourselves, our traditions, our precious egos.
We treat our own ritual purity as more important than a human life or that the boundaries of our tribes would predetermine our outcomes.
Often we take this parable as a turn on expectations or a simple lesson in being nice rather than the more significant teaching: that we dehumanize other people. We fail to see our neighbors as people.
And that they remain different.
Our cultures are different, our values are different, and our expectations are different. None of that goes away.
But we shouldn’t treat that difference as bad. We don’t need to erase it to enforce equality. Just like we know that being “colorblind” doesn’t stop racism. It enshrines it and protects it by imposing a false sense of equality. It makes a new purity code, a new thing to protect from some mythical hostile aliens.
The power of this story isn’t just in the turn and the deed, but how it reveals our blindness to true freedom. For ourselves and others. One we continue to struggle to identify and see in ourselves. This is the Good Samaritan confusion.
Jesus is trying to help us see how we see!
How we see difference, freedom, community, and even what it means to be human.
It’s our difference which helps us see and be.
A difference which lets us all be free.