The Good Samaritan shows us the consequences of a failure of compassion

The parable of the Good Samaritan, unique to Luke’s gospel, is so well-known that it suffers, as do certain other parts of the gospel, from over-familiarity. More often than not, it has been pressed into service as a parable of social concern and the virtue of compassion. But this is to obscure its original meaning. The parable isn’t primarily about compassion, but about the barriers and boundaries that we all-too-unthinkingly interpose between ourselves and others. Failure in compassion is the result.

The boundaries in this particular parable are perhaps the most powerful and certainly on occasion the most toxic of all, namely, religious boundaries. In the context of the parable itself, the specific boundary was one that Israel had used to keep at arms length a people it despised, the schismatic Samaritans. The twist in the parable is that Jesus doesn’t simply re-locate those boundaries: he removes them altogether, by redefining not only who our neighbour is, but what it means to be a neighbour.

The conclusion of the parable is the reverse of what we normally understand: it isn’t that the man in need is the Samaritan’s neighbour, but that the Samaritan is his. And the challenge to all who hear the parable isn’t just to do as the Samaritan had done – though Jesus does explicitly say, “Go and do the same yourselves” - but to acknowledge that genuine virtue and authentic goodness are often found where we least expect them; and that those on the outside – those who are not, for whatever reason ‘one of us’ - sometimes have more to teach us than we find it comfortable to admit. (It’s a theme that Graham Greene returns to in his novels time and again). Here, Jesus drives the point home by suggesting that, unlike his own people, the Jews, the Samaritan acted in the spirit of the Law, precisely because he wasn’t encumbered by the letter of the law. (You can imagine how well that went down with the Scribes and Pharisees.)

The historical background to the parable is important. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans stretched back centuries, way beyond anybody’s living memory. Jews despised Samaritans not only because they had intermarried with their Assyrian conquerors in the 8th century BC and thus polluted the Davidic line, but they had also set up a rival Temple in entirely the wrong place. (Even then, location, location, location was key, especially in Temple real estate.) From a Jewish point of view, the Samaritans were, as Mrs Thatcher would have said, definitely not ‘one of us’. But, of course, most of what the Jews said about the Samaritans was false.

The Judeans had adopted this historically inaccurate account to justify retrospectively their intractable hostility towards the Samaritans. (How depressingly familiar is that?) And, by the time of Jesus, the schism between Samaritans and Jews had reached the point where Jews were strictly forbidden to have any contact with them, an apartheid as strict as any we’ve known in our own time. You can see why this is one of Jesus’ most daring and dangerous parables, and how, without any doubt, it was one of the blackest marks his enemies would hold against him. A particularly dark side of the parable is the fact that for the priest and the Levite, ‘men of the cloth’, who crossed on the other side, compassion for their neighbour took second place to their own ritual purity.

Again, they were doing what they considered to be the right thing in preserving themselves for the performance of their duties: they couldn’t afford to incur ritual impurity. This was, of course, a perfect illustration of one of Jesus’ recurring themes in the gospels, namely, the wrongheadedness of allowing the letter of the law to trump the spirit. They were acting, you might say, more like clergymen than priests, two callings that are difficult if not impossible to combine. Remember, for the purposes of the parable, the suggestion isn’t that their preservation of ritual purity was merely a ‘good’ reason, as opposed to their ‘real’ reason, for passing by on the other side.

On the contrary, it’s acknowledged that they were being genuinely observant. In other words, Jesus wasn’t attacking them for cynicism or hypocrisy; but he was most definitely attacking a system that could, according to its own flawed understanding of the Law, actually prevent people from doing good (and even from rescuing lives), for the sake of respecting its own legal and ritual integrity. So, when Jesus goes on the offensive and asks the lawyer who’s challenged him: “Which of these three proved a neighbour to the man in need?” he isn’t making a point about where and how far we should draw the limits of neighbourliness, much less about who does and who doesn’t deserve our compassion.

Rather, he’s making it clear that loving God entails our becoming the kind of people who treat everyone with care and genuine compassion, however alien, different or unlike ourselves they may seem to us to be. Jesus, in other words, isn’t clarifying a point of law, as the lawyer seems to request, he’s actually overturning the Law (or, at least, a particular understanding of it), by pointing to love and compassion at its heart, its only purpose and its final fulfilment. The parable describes in concrete terms what it’s like to be a neighbour: and the exemplar is a despised Samaritan. Of course, telling a Jew of the time to learn from a Samaritan was no way to win friends and influence people. But that, in effect, is exactly what he says: imitate the Samaritan.

The despised, apostate Samaritan in this remarkably vivid parable is the hero of the story: unlike the priest and the Levite, he fulfils the Law, even at risk to himself – remember he was in Jewish territory and therefore in danger – by acting as a true neighbour to a Jew, who, it’s implied, would have held him in contempt, had he known who it was who was helping him. Now Jesus told this parable on his way to Jerusalem, and it was precisely such talk as this that would guarantee he was also on his way to the Cross. And that implies one more possible layer to this parable.

Could it be that this is a parable of Jesus’ own Passion? In effect, he’s identifying Himself with the Samaritan. He, too, is an outsider, the object of hostility on the part of the establishment, the unrecognised but best friend and neighbour of all, prepared, even at the cost of his own life, to save our lives. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is pointing to himself, in other words, as the neighbour whom we all need, lying, as we all are, in one way and another, injured and wounded on the roadside of life.