FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
7/8/13
Among the best known passages of religious literature are the verses of Luke that constitute what is known as "the parable of the Good Samaritan." It is of the best known because it is a compelling story to the plot of which people of all sorts and conditions can relate and do relate. Like the classic parable, it means one thing at one time and one thing at another. It means one thing now, but it will mean something different next time around. One thing it doesn't mean is that the priest and his acolyte, the Levite, were bad people. They were just trying to get to where they had to go to do what it was they were obligated to do, and if it was what we think, i.e. some kind of ritual task, they could not have done it had they dealt with bloody casualty or death without first undergoing a somewhat complicated likewise ritual cleansing.
The parable hangs there in spatial and temporal suspension, just as a dissonant chord awaits resolution that does not come. The hearer is invited to resolve it if and as he can -- or not.
Talk about midrash. Talk about the living word. With this passage of eight concise verses, we come to Luke at the gospel's finest moment as it shows how near the "rule of God" can be when and where it is least expected. The so-called Parable of the Good Samaritan (a title given to the passage by 18th Century English bible editors and publishers) is Luke's imaginative extension of a colloquy between Jesus and a lawyer reported in some form by all three synoptic gospels.
In the Matthean version, it is a Pharisee and in Mark a scribe. At issue in the exchange is in Matthew which of the 613 commandments of Torah is the greatest, in Mark which commandment is the first and in Luke what must be accomplished to inherit eternal life -- that term meaning not life without end but life in its fullest possibilities here and now, a matter of breadth and depth rather than mere length. The answer in each case is the commandment to love God first and foremost and the admonition to love neighbor as self (Leviticus 19:18) At Luke 10:27 Deuteronomy 6:5 is cited.
Luke handles the inquiry differently than Mark and Matthew in having Jesus turn the question back upon the lawyer: v. 26, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" It may remind one of a Supreme Court justice questioning a lawyer before the bar. But the lawyer is not about to allow his questioner (in this case Luke's Jesus) to make a point at his expense and so poses another question wanting to justify his initial inquiry, which was not a stupid question, given the sometimes bitter divisions between and among different strains of folk in the Levant. In the end, the lawyer was not dumb. He knew the answer to Jesus' post-parable counter question: "Which of these three, do you think, was the neighbor to him who fell among thieves?"
The lawyer, presumably associated in some way with the scribes and Pharisees, could probably not bring himself to speak the word "Samaritan." And that is one unmistakable point of the parable. "Samaritan = neighbor? Impossible."
Under "the rule of God," that is to say a world in which the Hillel Doctrine of not doing to another what one hates, neighbors are not made by distinctions or discrimination among class, clan, kith and kin. Neighbors are made at the intersection of need and resource. The late George Arthur Buttrick wrote of this parable, "People may live divided only by a narrow wall, and yet not be neighbors. People may live with no intervening wall, and yet not be neighbors."*
What results when need is served by available resource unstintingly provided is what the gospels call "the rule of God," as if the commandments mellowed into the humanist ethic credited by the same gospels to Jesus of Nazareth. When the lawyer asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life (as if it were already his by will and testament), he was asking what was necessary to realize "the rule of God." The answer was breaking down such barriers as exist between, say, Samaritans and Judeans.
What was true of that barrier during the first century CE was that Judeans thought of themselves as pure Jews as opposed to the Samaritans to the north whose ancestors had intermarried with Assyrians in earlier centuries. To the Judean, therefore, the Samaritan was tref -- unclean. But the Samaritan of the parable was unconcerned with such barriers and fell to the task at hand with the man who was left half dead.
As has been observed above, the story is not a polemic against priests and their assistants over matters of ritual propriety. To avoid rendering himself unfit for priestly activity, a priest could only bury members of his immediate family. The Levite, a member of a kind of "associate priest" class, would have been under similar restrictions. Is Luke saying that such restrictions are invalidated by emergent need? Or is it a more general headshaking, inviting the inference that no job is so vital that a person on the way to doing it should not stop to lend a hand?
The parable does not reveal anything about the Samaritan's identity than that he was of and from Samaria with all the perceived faults attendant upon his origin.
Either way, the Samaritan might have had nothing to lose in any formal, cultic sense by coming to the unfortunate robbery victim's aid. Though thinking of that road from Jerusalem down to Jericho with its drop of almost 1800 feet over a mere dozen miles through crag and rocky paths, why wouldn't the robbers of Luke's imagination be lurking for another victim upon whom to pounce? So risk of self wellbeing was an issue.
What in Luke's imagination would have been the motivation for the Samaritan to turn aside to administer First Aid? And then to convey the victim to a hostel and then to leave the equivalent of two days' wages to support him with a promise to return with more if needed?
By indirection, Luke answered his own question thus: Those with little to lose or who wear what they have lightly enough that to risk losing some or even all of it are the kind of people who can turn a crime scene into a neighborhood. "Go and do likewise," is what Jesus is made to say to the lawyer, who surely must have been sorry he ever asked his question in the first place.
If it is accurate to say that this parable hangs, as suggested above, in spatial and temporal suspension like a dissonant chord awaiting resolution, how shall it be resolved? Or can it be?
In 2013 the possibilities for resolution are as numerous and they are nearly impossible to imagine.
How does the abyss separating the aspirations of the Israeli from those of the Palestinian get bridged? How can the conflicting views of life held on the one hand by the Arab or Pakistani jihadi obtain concurrent with those of the typical middle-class American Christian? How can the political analysis of the socialist-leaning Democrat be reconciled with those of staunch political and economic conservatives?
The barrier between Samaritan and Judean (if that is the division Luke was thinking of) was crossed and removed in a simple act of kindness and mercy by what have been risky in more ways than one. For a Judean to be so tenderly cared for by a Samaritan would have involved touching. For the Samaritan thus to stop and occupy himself as he is depicted as having done was to expose himself to the same lot as the one he was trying to save. To part with two days' worth of wages was then and would be today no small investment in the life of a stranger who would under ordinary circumstances consider the agent of his deliverance a dirty dog.
I go out on the proverbial limb here to say how I choose to resolve the dissonance at least as I re-work this text in the early summer of 2013. At this writing I will say that in Luke's imagination, the Good Samaritan must have been the avatar of all the human potential for good and loveliness Luke believed was realizable. And if it could be manifest on a lonely and perilous mountain pass infested with robbers who cared not whence their loot, it could be manifest anywhere -- meaning that emergent need trumps ideology and racial, cultural, social and economic identity.
It sounds good, but I cannot resolve the chord. It remains suspended in judgment by the unable and unwilling.
* The Parables of Jesus, Harpers, 1928, p. 152
