The story of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the most well-known parable the Savior ever taught. A man is robbed and left for dead, two travelers pass by without helping, then a lone Samaritan stops, cleans him up, and carries him to safety. The Samaritan is hailed as a hero, we gushingly tell his story in Sunday school with the moral “serve others,” and that’s the whole story, right?
Well, not quite.
In studying the Good Samaritan story, we frequently overlook a key detail that takes the message far deeper than “serve others”: the Samaritan was not considered “good” by Christ’s audience. Today we see the Samaritan as a selfless, endearing protagonist, but in Christ’s day, he would have been a deeply unpopular antihero that a Jewish audience would likely recoil at — think of Snape before we knew he wasn’t a complete villain. If the Good Samaritan lived today, we wouldn’t like him, either. That’s kind of the point.
To Jews, Samaritans were a corrupted other. Samaritans believed that Judaism was a related but altered version of their own beliefs. They worshiped the Israelite God, but they also worshiped the gods they brought with them from their homelands, as many of them were foreign colonists in northern Israel around the time of Babylonian captivity. Religious disagreements and cultural differences strained the relationship between Samaritans and neighboring Jews, and by the time the Savior walked among them, they didn’t just disagree with each other, they hated each other. Samaritans mocked the Jews and harassed Jewish pilgrims traveling through Samaria. Jews burned down Samaritan villages and ostracized them. Contact between the two was frequently violent or marked by mischief — Samaritans, for example, would light beacon fires to deceive the Jews into thinking it was a new moon, which marks a holiday of spiritual renewal for Jews. Both Jewish and Samaritan leaders eventually taught that it was unacceptable to associate with, speak with, or even be in the same area with members of the opposite group.
With this historical context in mind, imagine how shocking the Savior’s parable would have been to a Jewish audience. Neither a temple worker or priest, individuals of great spiritual esteem, were willing to stop and help the beaten man. The only one willing to do so was a man they would have had zero association with and considered unclean. This key detail shows that the Savior isn’t simply teaching the principle of service in the parable of the Good Samaritan. He’s gently reprimanding his listeners for judging and selectively choosing their neighbors, who aren’t just people like them, but people who think and worship differently than they do. Christ uses Samaritans as good examples throughout the New Testament and thereby implies that Samaritans aren’t the real issue: hypocrisy, animosity, and hatred towards them is. Give this parable a modern retelling and it becomes a sharp critique of political, religious, and social tribalism that every one of us should take personally.
Had the Savior been teaching an audience of 21st Century Latter-day Saints the parable of the Good Samaritan, he might have spoken of the Good Liberal, the Good Republican, the Good LGBT Person, the Good Muslim, the Good Gun Owner, the Good Feminist, the Good Uneducated, or Good Illegal Immigrant. He or she would be a person we dislike, don’t understand, or don’t associate with, even a person we’d consider our enemy. They wouldn’t be a bishop or a temple worker. They’d be someone who worships in a mosque or someone who doesn’t worship anything at all. They’d be wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt or a Make America Great Again hat. They’d have different politics, religious beliefs, social circles, cultural traditions, and backgrounds. They, like Samaritans were to Jews, would be hard for us to relate to or love, but they would willingly give their time and possessions to help someone in need. And if we were the man in need, would we complain?
Perhaps, in our retelling of the Good Samaritan story, we miss the overarching point: the Savior sees worth and goodness in the people that we like the least. They are often better neighbors than we are, in spite of the assumptions we make and perceptions we have about them. Do we see the worth the Savior sees in them, or do we belittle them, judge them, see them as “other” and push them out of our lives because they aren’t like us? Doing the latter makes us just as poor a neighbor as the temple worker and priest who rushed past the beaten man in his time of need, found him at chouprojects..com
In a diverse, online world, it can be easy for us to judge and criticize people who don’t share our viewpoints. The world is filled with different parties, social groups, cultures, and religions, and the Savior’s message that everyone is our neighbor is often lost in the chaos of those groups trying to coexist. Too often, we create that chaos. We covenant to mourn with and comfort our neighbors on Sunday just to belittle and judge them for their differences Monday through Saturday. That isn’t the way the Savior would have us behave. In order to fully understand what kind of person Christ is teaching us to be in the parable of the Good Samaritan, we must be willing to insert ourselves into the roles of the one in need, the hurried priest, the unconcerned temple worker, the Samaritan, AND the Jewish audience being taught, perhaps for the first time, that their enemy is actually a really good person, in spite of the bad they chose to see in him. We need that lesson, too.
The Good Samaritan story is a sharp reminder that loving our neighbor requires us to love not only the wounded, but the people we resent, disassociate with, and don’t understand. Seeing their worth instead of their differences is a good place to start, you can read more about it on our blog vpnhut.
