Wulf's Webden

Today I got the opportunity to speak at Hathern Baptist on “The Good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37). In understanding the passage, it is important to remember that the parable is a story Jesus made up. Apart from him, the only other real person in the passage is an unnamed “expert in the Law” who asks a good question (how can I inherit eternal life) and gives a good answer when Jesus responds by asking what the Law says (“love God with all your being and love your neighbour as yourself”). Incidentally, that this theologically orientated answer is what he comes up with provides a clear indication that this is more what we might think of as a theologian than a lawyer in modern parlance, although the Scriptures were more closely entwined with rules for daily living than is the case today.

At this point, the expert could have walked away and we probably wouldn’t have the conversation recorded for us. However, despite being clever he seems to push his luck unwisely and asks who he should count as his neighbour. That’s what leads to the famous parable, which is easy to misunderstand when the words “good” and “Samaritan” go together in your mind. The Samaritans were a branch on the Jewish family tree drawn from the northern kingdom of Israel (after the post-Solomon split into Israel and Judah). They had been taken into captivity by Assyria about a 100 years before Judah fell to Babylon. When Judah came back, they rebuilt the walls and temple of Jerusalem and re-established traditional worship but many from Israel came back in dribs and drabs, intermarried with foreigners and with significant changes in theology. They only believed the first five books of what we call “The Old Testament” were scripture and they believed that true worship was offered from Mount Gerizim (in their territory) and not Jerusalem.

Almost certainly the expert would have had a low opinion of Samaritans. If nothing else, the fact that Jesus put the Samaritan character in punchline position indicates that the expert wasn’t going to find the answer to “who, then, was his neighbour?” easy to give! An evangelical Christian would feel the same way about a story where a Jehovah’s Witness took that role (JW’s believe that Jesus was a created being and not divine, which is profoundly anti-Christian). The two examples I used today were that, if speaking to the Reform party conference, an asylum seeker would fit the bill and, for many who would love to see that cat among those pigeons, a Reform party candidate would be just the type of person who would get their goat.

Where I landed was not to go big but small. We don’t need to wait until next time we are out on our donkey and do something that will impress God. To respond to the story, we can be willing to listen to the prompting of the Spirit, even when that means stepping outside of our comfort zone or disrupting our plans. We aren’t going to impress God by grand gestures, nor do we need to, but we can delight him by obeying the Spirit and reflecting Jesus to those around us.