The Good Samaritan

Luke: 10: 25-37

Colossians 1: 1-14

Today's gospel reading, the story of the good Samaritans, is one that most of us are probably familiar with. 

One of the things I like about preaching is that it gives me a chance to really look at a text and try to find something new. 

This story is so familiar, so much a part of out culture that the phrase a good Samaritan is used routinely outside of church contexts. 

As I was reading and thinking I realised that the lawyer that Jesus is in conversation with wasn't someone I had thought much about. A lawyer in the biblical text wasn't quite the same as we think of a lawyer today. They were experts in religious teaching and religious law. They didn't really have anything to do with civil law.  

So, when this expert in religious law asks Jesus what should we do to inherit eternal life? 

Jesus seems to respond with an attitude of your the lawyer, your the expert here, you tell me the answer.

In response the lawyer says love the lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself. 

The lawyer is quoting from the book of Deuteronomy. It’s a passage that forms part of the Shema prayer in Judaism. The shema is a central prayer in Judaism. For observant Jews it is a requirement to recite it twice a day and it is an integral part of morning and evening prayer, a bit like the Lords Prayer for us. So, it is something that would have be well known to both Jesus and the lawyer. 

So, if the lawyer knew the answer, why did he ask the question in the first place? Well, he asks a follow up question, who is my neighbour? and maybe this is what he really wanted to know but needed a way in to asking. 

In response Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. When he finishes the story, he asks the lawyer who was the neighbour in the story. 

The lawyer doesn’t respond by saying the Samaritan. It’s almost as he can’t admit that it might be a Samaritan who is his neighbour.

The hostility between Jews and Samaritans dated back a long time, to the death of King Solomon in about 930 BC. 

After Solomon's death the Kingdom split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judea, due to differences in how rulers should be selected. Jerusalem was in Judea and remained the capital there, but Israel needed a new capital, which ended up as the city of Samaria. 

After about 200 years Israel was conquered by the Assyrians, who took a large part of the native population away, and replaced it with colonisers from elsewhere. 

Some Jews had remained and over time they intermarried with the colonisers and began to follow some of their traditions. 

Judea, of course, faced it’s own exile sometime later under the Babylonians. It was during this time that the later parts of the Old Testament were written, and brought back after the Babylonian exile. 

So when the exiles returned Judea had a different set of religious texts to the Jews living in what had been Israel. 

Also Samaria and Jerusalem are quite close to each other so while the Jews that had lived in Jerusalem had been in exile, some of the Samaritans had moved onto their land.

So you had two peoples who although they had shared roots, they now had different religious texts, different ways of worshipping and living, and conflict over land. 

Some of the returning Jews thought the Samaritan people were weird and strange and definitely not like them and not to be counted as proper Jews. 

By the time of Jesus the differences and hatred had deepened. The Judeans had taken a stance of trying to resist outside influence at all cost. Meanwhile the Samaritans had developed a better relationship with those around them in the Roman empire and become more like them. To a Judean Jew, the worst insult you could give would be to call them a Samaritan. 

So, to return to our lawyer, Jesus has basically just told him that he has to love a Samaritan, one of these terrible, scum of the earth, not the right type of Jew people, as his neighbour! I mean it’s like telling Putin and Zelensky they need to be best friends! 

We don’t know how the lawyer reacted to this, but I suspect he found it difficult to deal with what Jesus told him.

But, what about us? How often do we think or act like the lawyer?  How often do we think, oh that charismatic, evangelical church, they don’t do worship the right way, they understand the bible differently to me, don’t want anything to do with them! Or, that person voted for a political party I totally disagree with, I’m not having anything more to do with them! 

Well, I have some bad news for you, according to Jesus, they are your neighbour, and you need to love them, or at least try and treat them with respect. 

We can see across the world the terrible consequences of what happens when people fail to do this. The other starts to be seen as less, it’s OK to insult them, then to hurt them, then to kill them.  

We have seen recently how disagreement with the actions of the Israeli army quickly turned to chants calling for all members of the Israeli army to be killed including those that are there by conscription, not choice.  

There needs to be another way to deal with conflicts, otherwise we will be in a never ending cycle.

The church of England often talks about the need to disagree well, But how do we do that?  Whilst we may all hold to our views with passion and possibly for deep seated emotional reasons, we have to accept that it is the same for the other person. Their experiences and thinking may have brought them to a different view but they may hold that view as passionately and emotionally as we hold ours. Treat them like you would want to be treated. 

Be open to the fact that you may be wrong. If you enter a conversation determined to prove that you are right, you won’t really listen to the other person and may seem to just dismiss their experience and thinking, leading them to then resent you.

We need to listen well, and respond well. In the first letter of Peter, Peter writes about how the Christians should answer people who challenge them, he says be prepared to give an answer “But do this with gentleness and respect.”  We also need to think about the words we are using in one of the letters to Timothy this advice is given “Warn them before God against quarrelling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen” 

Wise words indeed. Too often we can twist or misinterpret what someone else has said, leading to more misunderstanding and conflict.

Later on today we are having lunch and a bible study. I hope that we can keep in mind the need to disagree well. 

It’s not an easy thing to do, but if we can start by managing to disagree well among ourselves, then maybe we can show the wider world what we have learnt. Show them that there is another way, the Christian way, and that it’s a way that’s worth following and can help move the world onto a more peaceful path.