The story of the Good Samaritan must be one of the very best known stories in the New Testament. It illustrates for many, whether adherents of the Christian faith or not, the need for kind and compassionate behaviour towards strangers as well as friends. Indeed, the word, Samaritan, has been adopted into our language and culture as a kind of shorthand for a compassionate person: the Samaritans offer a listening ear to those in despair, whilst the charity the Samaritan’s Purse distributes Christmas presents to needy children.
However, this linguistic shift has in fact detracted significantly from the full impact of the story. As many of us will know, the Samaritans in the Bible were very far from being seen as compassionate people, but were rather the butt of prejudice and discrimination, historically considered to be dirty and irreligious foreigners. Samaria was originally the northern part of the Kingdom of Israel, and was conquered by the Assyrians in the sixth century BC. In order to suppress uprisings within their conquered territories, the Assyrians adopted a policy of moving people about wholesale, and placing foreign settlers in different parts of their Empire. As a result, the people in Samaria, hundreds of years later, were still regarded as foreign settlers, who worshipped other gods. Even those who sought to practise a form of the Jewish religion were generally treated with dislike and derision by the “true” Jews who had returned to Judea in the south.
So the real point of Jesus’ story lies in the fact that the despised, irreligious Samaritan is nonetheless revealed to be the passer by who shows the most love and compassion.
I think it is hard even for those of us who are aware of this background, really to relate to the deep-seated prejudice which the word Samaritan would have provoked. Theological college students are often told to tell this story by “contextualization” – placing the story in a more familiar and hard-hitting context. I remember being moved to tears by the story of a minister in the segregated Southern states of America, who had the courage to tell his white congregation a version of the story using a black man as the Samaritan, in order to hammer home to them the strong criticism of blind prejudice which Jesus is trying to convey.
A couple of years ago I wrote a contextualized version of the story for a school assembly, in which a popular, footballing boy was mugged by some older boys at the bus stop. He was rescued, not by his cool mates, but by the child with the annoying laugh who liked poetry and was a teacher’s pet. I tried this version out first on my then eight year old, who said, “Oh Mum, that’s much sadder than the Bible version.” When I pointed out that in the Bible, the man was attacked and left for dead, he responded, “Yeah, but Mum, in this story, they took his Ipod!”
We often feel things more strongly when they are placed in our own context, and Jesus always placed his parables in familiar and everyday settings. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho would have been well-known to all his listeners, but is almost certainly less so for the majority of us here today.
So I would like to share with you a true story which took place here in Hampstead High Street earlier this year, and which has certainly offered me an opportunity to reflect afresh on the story of the Good Samaritan.
In February, my whole family caught a horrible, debilitating 24 hour bug. The children had had it, but for some reason, I thought that I might have been spared, so went out shopping in Hampstead.
Coming out of Gap Kids, I was suddenly overcome with appalling dizziness, and found that I had to sink down onto the pavement. To my astonishment, not one single person stopped to see if they could help. People passed in and out of Gap Kids, and in and out of the Café Rouge, apparently without noticing at all that a woman had collapsed on the pavement in front of them. After what seemed a very long time, someone did stop. It was a homeless person, a tramp, who asked me, “Are you all right, love?” There was little he could do, but he showed me the compassion that had seemed to be lacking from those who might have been in a position to help. The story ended well, when finally someone who was quite literally my neighbour, from West Hampstead, went past and offered me a lift home in her car.
But this experience has given me much pause for thought, about the story of the Good Samaritan, and the respectable people who passed by the wounded man. I suspect that some of the people who passed me by were afraid to stop in case I was drunk, drugged, or might embarrass them by responding angrily or violently to an offer of help. Perhaps others were conscious that if they stopped they might have to, metaphorically at least, put me on their donkey and take me somewhere, and they just didn’t have the time. But I think it is possible that to many of them, I was, quite simply invisible – out of the sphere of their normal vision. For the homeless person, on the other hand, I was far from invisible, because I was lying on the pavement … where he lived!
It brought home to me, with shame, how many homeless people on the pavement I might not even have noticed, as I went about my busy life. Perhaps the Samaritan in the story was so used to being treated as though he were invisible by prejudiced people in Jerusalem, that it made him particularly aware of the plight of the ignored man on the ground.
While I was training, a Jamaican woman came to talk to us about Race and Religion. It was a very moving presentation, with some terrible stories of racial abuse, which woke one up to the experiences of many people within our society. But I think the story that most stayed with me was when she told us that sometimes in airport queues, people would just walk in front of her. When she said, “Excuse me, I’m in the queue”, they would often apologise by saying, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there.” This woman was six foot tall, and immensely elegant, and one might have thought it impossible that she had escaped their notice, but it would seem that her race had blinded some people to her existence. I was very struck that our prejudices, whatever they may be, can make us totally blind to others around us.
The story horrified me because it made me wonder if there were people who, for some subconscious reason, were invisible to me, and I wasn’t aware of it, precisely because I didn’t see them.
Jesus said, “I have come to open the eyes that are blind.” My Hampstead High Street experience led me to wonder if perhaps this statement can be linked with the teaching in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The story seeks to bring home to us, in the strongest possible terms, that those whom we disregard and even despise, may prove to be the neighbours who show us love and compassion. When we ask ourselves why the Good Samaritan acted as he did, we may decide that he was a particularly kind and generous person. But we could also conclude that he had lived a life as an invisible object of prejudice, who felt a shared bond with the wounded man.
Are there those in our society, in our community, even in our churches, whom we don’t see? And what kind of experience might shock us, not just into seeing them, but engaging with them?
The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us that they may, one day, turn out to be our neighbour. Perhaps Jesus is suggesting that in laying blindness and limitations aside, we should seek out the people who are invisible to us now, and act as neighbours to them.