In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus isn’t giving us a natural reversal of roles. He’s exposing how our bias actually works.
learning to love in a culture of hate
Proper 10C | Luke 10:25-37
Good stories like this one have many layers. We can peel back one to see what’s underneath. Then peel again.
A man is mugged, robbed, beaten and left for dead. Two people walk by and ignore him. Then a stranger comes along and takes care of him. He takes the man with him to an inn and pays for his care.
In this first layer, we see the generosity of a total stranger and feel compelled to be a generous stranger ourselves.
This first layer is useful and popular. Who cannot see the wisdom of this invitation to be a Good Samaritan? We even name laws about helping strangers Good Samaritan laws.
The Second Layer
Peel back a second layer and we can focus on the two characters who ignore the victimized man. They are a priest and a Levite. So we might see them as representing the religious establishment.
Priests were required to maintain their ritual purity, so they couldn’t go near those who are bleeding and dying. And Levites are the family of priests. So these two are doing precisely what tradition enforces.
So the turn, the revelation, is that it is an outsider, a stranger, who helps the man in ways insiders cannot.
At this second layer, we might also recall how Jesus broke Sabbath laws to guide our thinking to a greater truth.
The Third Layer
Peel it back a third time, and we can see that this outsider, this stranger, isn’t just anybody. He is an enemy. The justified enemy. He is from the tribe at perpetual war with their own. His uncles are surely butchers and his cousins monsters.
So Jesus invites us to imagine the vilest, cruelest, most inhumane creature we can imagine to fill that role. Nazis in their death camps, for instance.
This is who is saving the man. Not religious leaders. But a Nazi. Jesus is telling a parable about a “Good Nazi.”
The Fourth Layer
Now let’s peel one more layer, with these expectations in mind. How there’s a call here to be good and generous to a stranger. How the religious are taught by tradition to avoid certain situations which may hurt them. And how even a Nazi can look like a true human being.
Now we’re ready to hear the even harder news: that our religious tradition keeps recreating this scenario. So this parable isn’t a reversal of expectations at all. Often it is our tradition which justifies ignoring other people’s miseries. And ensures that people outside our tradition become the only ones who are likely to be good.
In this scenario, this Samaritan, the Nazi is the one most likely to stop and help the man! So Jesus is directly arguing against tradition.
Who are we then?
I don’t know about you, but I always try to figure out where I’m supposed to be in these stories.
Often I look at this in the first layer. So who is Jesus trying to help me become? Clearly the Good Samaritan, right? We go out and do the good thing of helping the stranger.
Then we come to that second layer and remember that we are the religious elites. We’re the dutiful followers with all the rules we must maintain. So, if we’re the priest and the Levite, then who in our world are we ignoring and leaving for dead? Where is our inaction leading to someone else’s death?
And if we go to that third layer, we sometimes cast ourselves as the one who is beaten. We feel ignored and all the people who are supposed to help us keep walking by. Sometimes we feel left for dead.
But then there’s one other character in the story. The one I usually forget about, but St. Augustine didn’t: the innkeeper. This one receives the man carried in by the Samaritan and is entrusted to tend to him as he recovers.
He is the one who is there, prepared to bring in the wounded, to care for the wounded, to receive the wounded and be there with them.
If there’s any picture here of what it means to be a Christian, that seems the closest.
Now let’s put it into Context
This parable doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. It has a specific context.
A lawyer who is trying to weasel out of the central command to love his neighbors asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?”
But even this question arises out of an even bigger context of love and relationship. He is trying to help his followers love when they are all too eager to justify their hate. So this discussion of neighbor isn’t merely our common sense of being neighborly. This isn’t just borrowing or lending a cup of sugar.
This is after the disciples struggle to heal a boy. Then they try to silence a healer. And then they ask Jesus if he wants them to ask God to annihilate a Samaritan city.
Jesus is trying to show them that all people are their neighbors while they insist on keeping up their tribal filters. You mean my white neighbors, right? or You mean my neighbors from this side of the river, right? Because we have a long history of choosing to keep out certain people from becoming neighbors.
Long before we started caging immigrants at the border, we’ve been doing this much closer to home. Redlining, redistricting, eviction, incarceration become tools to justify racism. Legal means by which illegal outcomes could be achieved. To ensure our neighbors look a certain way under the banner of protecting the tribe.
We have found countless ways to ensure one tribe keeps power through obscured legal racism.
Jesus has told them to make everybody a neighbor and James and John are essentially saying but you don’t mean those dogs, right? For these enemies to be neighbors, these two disciples would first have to admit they are fully human. And not 3/5 of a person.
It’s telling–the Three-Fifths Compromise ensured a person counted as a person for the accumulation of power in slave states. But also ensured that some people remained inhuman property.
Legal justifications have never honestly hidden their racist intent.
A different parable
Jesus is trying to help these disciples see that their most hated enemies are people like them. And he has a knack for doing this in the most disarming way possible: through a story.
So maybe we need to hear a different parable. One that hits us in our biases.
You may have heard of a morality test called the Trolley Problem.
Imagine a runaway trolley is barreling down the tracks. You can see, for some reason, five people stuck on the track. They are totally done for. Your only choice is to divert the trolley to another track. But that track has one guy stuck on it.
What do you do?
Some moral philosophers use this scenario to expose how we make decisions. And they find that many students won’t divert the trolley because if you put your hand onto the switch, you are choosing the one person’s death. Then people feel responsible for it.
When teachers invite students into economic or utilitarian thinking, they become much more prone to assume responsibility for inaction and see themselves as protecting the five by sacrificing the one.
And we can see how old this thinking is because it is the moral justification for the scapegoat.
How this parable works in its context
Imagine that you’ve been taught that your action or inaction is the central tenant of faith. Your entire moral character hinges on what you do in one, heated moment of your life. So every scenario like this one is about learning to make the “right” choice. Your eternal life is dependent on who you let die.
And a new teacher tells you a story built around this very idea. And you’re thinking about what you’re supposed to do. Because your soul and the souls of all your friends depends on getting this right. Then he continues.
A passenger, who knows nothing of trolleys, comes to the front, pulls the brake and it stops just in time. Then the passenger jumps down, unties the people, and puts them on the trolley.
When Jesus tells parables, he’s upending expectations so that we can see how self-limiting we are. And self-limiting in a really specific way. He’s showing us our bias.
The traps in our thinking
We create scenarios that require death and responsibility without alternatives or true agency. We make it so our religious leaders have to walk on by. Not innocently, either! We require it from each other! Because we want to be surprised when a Samaritan does a good thing.
We write “our people” (our tribe) as heroes and the central figures of the story. So we cast everyone else as extras or enemies.
Just like we write scenarios in our own lives which make racism inevitable and oppression required.
Jesus’s story is for people whose idea of neighborliness is tribal. A story that says there is no justification whatsoever for hate. A story that reveals that those whom we step over and avoid are the people we must serve like a king. That someone who comes to us, brutalized and suffering must be treated with full dignity.
So this is a story as much about challenging our understanding of love as it is about being a good neighbor. It exposes the patterns of thinking which justify the dehumanization of other people. And compels us to remove the preconditions we put on dignity. It’s a story that short-circuits all of those things and lays them bare so we can see how empty our tribal preferences are.
It is, in the end, a simple story.
The first layer embodies its whole truth. Jesus commands us to love strangers and be good. And all of the other layers help us to see what that really means.
Who is my neighbor?
My neighbor is the innkeeper, the Samaritan, the victim in the road, and these pious people of faith walking by, convinced they are not allowed to help. These are all my neighbors.
And just as importantly, Jesus tells these deeply religious followers of his, the characters they shouldn’t be in the story are the priest and the Levite. Because their’s is not the Way of Love.
We aren’t forced into these patterns of separation and dehumanization! We aren’t born thinking other people aren’t fully human! We’re taught that. So we don’t have to support systems which reinforce that immoral justification for oppression. We’re commanded to love outside our tribe.
Jesus teaches something still incredibly radical, even for the 21st Century. That everyone is our neighbor. Every human is human. And we are not bound by these false borders. We too can be free.