The Good Samaritan and All My Relations
The parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke seems like a good place to start an exploration of March’s Worship theme, Healing and Helping. In his book The Power of Parable, theologian John Dominic Crossan characterizes this as a challenge parable, a story meant to illustrate what the right, moral and ethical thing to do in a situation, while at the same time challenging the cultural assumptions of the listener/reader (Crossan 59). Crossan goes on to argue that if this parable was merely meant to be instructional, Jesus would not have specified who the three travelers were who encountered the man who had been robbed and beaten by the side of the road as he did. Their identities are quite specific for the time: first a Priest, then a Levite, then a Samaritan encounter the man in need. By inverting his listeners’ expectations by making the Samaritan the hero of the story who stops and helps the man instead of the good and righteous figures of the Priest and Levite, Jesus creates a “cultural paradox, a social contradiction in terms” (Crossan 60): a GOOD Samaritan.
A lot of this nuance has been lost on the modern reader. Being a “Good Samaritan” has become a cliché, shorthand for doing good acts for our fellow human beings. But even with this moral truism, closely tied as it is the universal “Golden Rule” (“Do unto others…”) most of us limit the scope of who we extend this help to, based on those to whom we feel a connection. Our society with its emphases on wealth, status and class creates so many markers to separate us, it is hard to remember just how connected and interdependent we all are. In one of the most insightful and challenging books I’ve read in a long time, Nora Samaran’s Turn this World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, the author observes: “In a healthy community, most human interaction takes place in this relational area between closeness and complete stranger. The idea that we have relational responsibility only to those humans we love, and no responsibility toward anyone else, is destroying the very fabric of human connection in Western societies.” (Samaran 127)
And really this is just the barest minimum of our true relational responsibility. The deep belief in the concept of “All Our Relations” in many of our First Nations Peoples, is so comprehensive, that it may be the only way forward to a sustainable and peaceful future. Lee Maracle in her book My Conversations with Canadians put it this way: “Indigenous people have always believed that we are “good for nothing” when it comes to the earth. We are critical to no other life form.“ She goes on: “The earth…can do without us and thrive…anthropocentric narcissism costs us lives on this planet.” (Maracle 129)
There’s a lot of healing and helping we need to do on this planet, but we need to start expanding our visions of what that is going to look like and who we will help.
Yours in Service, Tim