Losing the plot: Martyn Kelly says we’ve been reading the Parable of the Good Samaritan all wrong

‘Jesus turned the question around.’

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but a man was walking down a street when he started to feel feverish. He slumped onto a bench, doubled over, and coughed several times. An infectious disease consultant from the local hospital also happened to be walking down the same street. Seeing the man on the bench, and hearing him cough, she made sure that she gave him a wide berth. If she’d had her protective equipment with her, or if she didn’t need to ensure her colleagues and patients were not indirectly exposed, then she may have acted differently. A few minutes later a staff nurse from the same hospital also walked by. She saw the man and she also saw the consultant pass by. But the nurse also lacked protective equipment and, as her partner was in a clinically-vulnerable category, she did not want to risk infection either.

OK. So you know where this is going. It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37), rewritten for our times. We know that the third person to come down the street is going to surprise us all by offering the help that our sick man, coughing away on the bench, did not receive from the two earlier passers-by. In the original, the first two people to pass were a priest and a Levite. Each of these represented the hierarchy of a complex, ritualistic religion, which none of us now understand, so the term ‘Good Samaritan’ is almost always accompanied by an implication that he was preceded by two bad people. But that is not the way that the original audiences would have received it, and that is why rewriting it with two NHS workers replacing the priest and Levite helps us to see the parable in a new light.

Jesus’ original audience would have seen the priest and Levite as frontline workers in Israel’s Spiritual Health Service, performing the essential services in the temple that ensured good relations between individuals and God (see Luke 2: 21-24 for sympathetic portrayals of these acts). They would have recognised that contact with a dead body (in the original version they did not know that the man was alive) would have required a period of cleansing, and necessitated changing their clothes. Jesus’ audience, unlike us, would have seen these first two encounters in terms of situation ethics, defined in multiple shades of grey. They would have empathised with the dilemma that both priest and Levite encountered and, as the Levite passed on down the road, wondered who would appear next.

Think of this in terms of the ‘Class System’ sketch from the 1960s’ show The Frost Report. The upper-class patrician, played by John Cleese, would pass for the priest. The middle-class man, played by Ronnie Barker, could stand in for the Levite. This would lead the audience to expect that the next person to appear would be a temple minion (the working-class man played by Ronnie Corbett), who would have, let’s say, administered first aid and let everyone leave contemplating the possibility that even working-class oiks might be their neighbours. Instead, the person who walks down the street is a Samaritan. Not a Samaritan in the sense that we have come to use the word now – an altruistic and charitable person – but a Samaritan in the sense of a member of a despised and detested clan who occupied part of the land we now recognise as Israel. In the version of the Good Samaritan that we receive from traditional interpretations of the Bible, this is the individual with whom we try to identify. But to get close to the original reading we need to ‘other’ him. Who might the equivalent be more for modern liberal Quakers? The play on race doesn’t quite work because, although this year we have learned that society has a long way to go to address racism, most of us know what the right responses are on that subject even when we retain private or unconscious biases. No, there can be no more appropriate ‘other’ for the key character in this story than a member of the far-right English Defence League.

Our reworked parable, then, needs to become the ‘Parable of two NHS workers and a racist’ if we are really to get to the heart of the message that Jesus was trying to convey. It never was a parable about two bad people and a good person, but over the years we have turned it on its head and lost the capacity to read it in terms of the real-time situation ethics faced by the first two protagonists. We then compound this by aligning ourselves with the one good person, falling into the trap that Jesus sets out in another chapter of Luke where a pharisee in the temple says: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people’ (18:11).

That brings us back to the original reason why Jesus told the parable in the first place. He was responding to the question: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The point of the parable is that two people who the audience should have expected to act as neighbours were unable to fulfil their obligations, whereas the person who did respond was the person who the audience would have least expected. In other words, Jesus turned the question around and asked: ‘To whom must I become a neighbour?’ We are not told that the priest and Levite are not excellent neighbours under most circumstances, and the original audience would have recognised the important public service that they rendered through their roles at the temple. In utilitarian terms, active engagement by the priest or Levite might have seen the benefits they bring to the traveller being offset by their inability to bring benefits to many others. Neighbourly action by a hated Samaritan, by contrast, increases the total utility, with priest, Levite and Samaritan all contributing to the greater good. Jesus was making the point that the boundaries of ‘neighbour’ needed to be re-thought. Rather than limit his cast to Jews, he has gone for the sucker punch of placing a Samaritan as a foil to the other characters. The sheer audacity of this step at the time has been lost over the millennia to the extent that the whole point of the parable is, itself, often lost.

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Comments

I’m so glad I read this - thanks Martyn. Opens a lot of reflection

By tkirwan@doctors.org.uk on 4th April 2021 - 9:57

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