Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Faith is being grasped by the power of love"--William Sloane Coffin

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the Bible’s most popular stories. The phrase to describe a person willing to help the stranger, a “Good Samaritan”, is widely recognized. Given its popularity, it is easy to miss the power of choosing a Samaritan as the protagonist in Jesus’ parable.

The parable is situated as the development of the question posed to Jesus by a “lawyer” about what was necessary to obtain eternal life. Jesus responded with the traditional joining of passages about the love of God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus then poses the question as to “Who is my neighbor?”; in essence: Whom should I love? Jesus then relates the story of The Good Samaritan.

For Jews of Jesus’ time, the Samaritans were despised. The Samaritans descended from the tribe of Joseph (one of the 12 tribes corresponding to Jacob’s(Israel’s) 12 children) and lived to the north of Judah, which worshiped at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans had their temple on Mount Gerizim too; however, they did not worship on Gerizim as in Jerusalem. Also, they were despised by the Jews because they came to accept intermarriage, only believed the Books of Moses (Torah) to be authentic holy scripture, mixed pagan, and Jewish practices, and opposed the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. There are other reasons as well. For us, this is all very academic, but for the Jews of Jesus’ time, it was visceral.

For us, the parable comes down to Jesus asking us to decide whom we despise on a visceral level, and to love them as our neighbor. Let’s give it a try by renaming the parable:

The Good Isis Terrorist

The Good Mass Shooter

You get the idea. Jesus isn’t suggesting that the Samaritan is good because he is a Samaritan, any more than anyone would accept that someone is good because they are a mass shooter. Rather, we are being asked to consider the possibility that someone so despised could also be good. Can we envision our enemies doing good? Can we envision ourselves doing evil?

The first step towards our ability to harm our enemies is to objectify them; in other words, make them less human than ourselves. It is quite easy to see a suicide bomber as the incarnation of evil, and by doing so deny them their humanity. One could easily reply that such behavior is outside the definition of human. I would suggest that humanity is capable of great evil and that we, given the right circumstances, could perpetrate evil deeds as well. What makes us human is our great capacity for love, as well as our great capacity for evil. Jesus is asking us to love the person capable of both.

Jesus asks us not to call our enemy simply our neighbor, but to love our enemies as we love those we regard as close to us, our “neighbors.” Jesus poses the challenge: If you want to inherit eternal life, love those you despise in how you act towards them. Love is not a noun, as the saying goes, it is a verb; it is a commitment to act in a loving way towards our enemies. Anything less is less than Christian.