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The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the best known in the Bible. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to other people. We read that the Good Samaritan goes to great lengths to make sure his help is useful: he gives the inn keeper money to look after the injured man, and promises to come back, and he doesn't expect any return for himself. When we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, we rightly take this to be an example of how we ought to behave. And because Jesus taught this, and the church has repeated it down the centuries, this is such a familiar idea that we take it for granted.
The problem, however, with such a familiar story is that it's easy to read it without paying it the attention it deserves. Permit me, then, to examine one aspect of our Gospel passage today that we perhaps don't think about so much when we read the familiar story. Not - I hasten to add - to suggest because the familiar story is wrong; only that looking at it from a different angle may help us see more in this familiar story than we thought was there.
The interesting thing about the Good Samaritan is that he was a Samaritan. We think Samaritans are nice people. There is an extremely valuable voluntary agency called the Samaritans that saves many people from suicide. To be a Samaritan is to be someone who helps his neighbour. But the reason we have this idea about Samaritans is because all we know about Samaritans is from this very parable. The people who heard the parable first, however, had very different ideas. What we have to grasp is that the Jews hated the Samaritans. The Samaritans, as you are aware, were descended from the ten tribes of Israel who split off from the Kingdom after the death of king Solomon. The Jews felt they had become corrupt, and, as it says in John "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans". In this day and age, when we know we're supposed not to hate anyone, we may not therefore get the full force of this parable. Those members of the congregation who remember the war may get an idea of it by thinking how we felt about Germans and Japanese then. Imagine hearing the parable in 1943 and instead of saying "Samaritan" saying "Jerry" or "Jap". Today, as I say, we don't hate races or nations so much. But think of this story: a man fell among thieves; first of all there came a solicitor, but he passed by on the other side; then came a police officer, but he too passed by on the other side; then a convicted paedophile came by and he took pity on the man and helped him.
Does that strike you as a stranger and more difficult story? Now the hero of the story is someone we distrust, loathe and detest. And that is more how a story about a Samaritan would have struck the people to whom Jesus was speaking. The parable of the Good Samaritan, then, is not just about being kind to others. Jesus made the hero of the story someone his listeners hated.
What would that have made them think? The people in the story they would have identified with were the priest and the Levite. The priest and the Levite should have been the heroes: but they passed by on the other side. So the parable might have made them ashamed. Then again, think how the man who fell among thieves would have felt. He was in trouble and glad to be rescued, sure. But yet it was a Samaritan - someone he hated and distrusted - who rescued him. The Gospel tells us that the robbers left him "half dead". The implication is, if the Samaritan had not saved him, he would have died. How would he have felt knowing that he owed his life to a member of a race he had always hated?
Lastly, imagine how those who heard this story would have felt, remembering the parable after Jesus had died and risen again. You notice that it is a lawyer who prompts Jesus to tell the parable. This man would probably have been on the side of those who voted to crucify Jesus. And remember that in Deuteronomy - the book of the Law - it says that a man hanged on a tree is "cursed by God". In dying on the Cross Jesus became as much an outcast, as much despised by all right-thinking people, as the Samaritan was. As Isaiah says, "he was despised and rejected by men". Yet it was through the outcast and despised son of God that we all, though left for dead, have been saved.