8th Sunday after Pentecost

8th Sunday after Pentecost

1. The parable of the good Samaritans is one of the crucial teaching moments of
Jesus. In it, Jesus deals with very controversial issues:

What are they key components of religion?

Could there be a conflict between love of God and love of neighbor? How would it be resolved?
Are the laws in the Bible divine or are they human?
Who is the neighbor we are supposed to love? Just family and friends? What about people we dont
like and dont like us? What about the enemy?
Lets start with a little bit of historical background about the Samaritans.
After king Solomon, roughly 9 centuries BC, the 12 tribes split up and formed 2 kingdoms: the 10
northern tribes became the kingdom of Israel with Samaria as the capital, while the 2 southern tribe
became the kingdom of Judah with Jerusalem as its capital.
About 7 and centuries BC, the super-power in the Middle East was Assyria: they conquered most of the
nations in the area and established an empire that extended from modern Iraq to Egypt. When the
Assyrians defeated a nation, they would take the leadership of the country (nobility, business people,
merchants, teachers, etc.) and exile them to another part of their empire. They they would repopulate
the area with people exile from another nation. Without their natural leaders, the conquered people
were unlikely to rebel against the Assyrian rule.
Assyrian archaeological documents state that the Assyrian king Sargon conquered Samaria the capital
city of the kingdom of Israel and took into exile 27,270 Jews (the leadership of the 10 Northern tribes,
counting only adult males, not their women and children). Then the Assyrians moved other exiled
populations into Israel. Those who had been exiled never come back, and, over time, the foreign people
who had taken their place, intermarried with the remaining Jews, and adopted some Jewish believes and
religious practices. They became the Samaritans.
136 years after the fall of Samaria, the Southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians,
and their leadership also taken into exile. However, after nearly 50 years, the Southern Jews were
allowed to return and rebuild Jerusalem. At first, the Samaritans welcomed the returning Jews like long
lost brothers, but those who had returned from Babylon rejected the Samaritans as half breeds.
Eventually Jews and Samaritans ended up attacking each other and become bitter enemies.

8th Sunday after Pentecost

So, the parable of the good Samaritan is not about a kind stranger who helped a wounded Jew, but
about an enemy helping a Jew, while fellow Jews failed to come to his help.

2. There is another important component of the parable and it is the fact that a priest and a

Levite saw the wounded man, and did not come to his help.
Was this because they were indifferent to the mans plight, or is there something else going on? Here
we need to remember the concepts of holiness and purity in the Hebrew Bible.
Leviticus stresses very emphatically that God is Holy, and that anyone who needs to come in contact
with places and things that are devoted to God, must keep himself pure.
The Jews believed that contact with certain substances made a person impure. Blood was one of these
substances. If a Jew came in contact with blood (his own or somebody elses), he became impure. As
such he could not approach the Holy. If someone impure entered the temple, the temple itself would
become contaminated, could no longer be used to worship God, and would have to be re-consecrated.
So, if the priest or Levite had touched the bleeding person, they would have become ritually impure and
could not even enter the temple and do their job.
Thus keeping pure was their duty. Even if he felt pity for the wounded man, they were required by law to
avoid touching anyone bleeding, and they did. The Jews believed that the 613 laws in the Bible had all
came directly from God.
The priest and of the Levite were caught in a conflict between the duty to love and obey God, and the
duty to love and care for a person in need.
The parable is far more complex that it would appear at first sight. Jesus and the lawyer who had
questioned him agreed that religion was based on love of God and love of neighbor. But what are we to
do if there is a conflict in our conscience between loving God and loving our neighbors?

3. This parable is very deep and deals with

1. Who is my neighbor? Jesuss answer is the neighbor is not just the Jews, but everyone, even the
enemies of the Jews.
2. Are all the laws in the Bible divine laws, or are they human laws attributed to God to give them more
authority? Jesus answer is that If a law is in conflict with the principle of love, it is human, not divine.
If a law or a passage in the Bible leads us to hate, reject, exclude someone, it is the opposite of what
Jesus stood for. It does not come from God.

8th Sunday after Pentecost

3. When in doubt, our conscience should be guided by the duty to love, not by obedience to the rules.
4. We love God by loving our neighbor. The 1st Letter of John states unequivocally, If someone says "I love
God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot
love God whom he has not seen

3. So, what can we take home from the parable of the Good Samaritan?
a. We need to remember that there are passages in the Bible about hating, killing, punishing, rejecting
people (usually enemies of the Jews). Those are in conflict with the commandment to love our
neighbors, thus they are not orders coming from God, but they are a part of the historical and cultural
baggage of the human beings who composed the Bible. So, when reading the Bible, always remember
Jesus summary of the Old Testament: love God and love your neighbors. Anything in conflict with this is
not the word of God.
b. Traditionally, the term neighbor is applied to those closest to us: spouse, children, family, friends, people
who live close to us. But, in this parable Jesus went out of the way to pick the enemy as the
compassionate neighbor.
Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus states, if you just love those who love you, you are no different than
pagans: they also love their families and friends. Jesus challenges us to forgive our enemies, to turn
the other cheek, to walk the extra mile
Its not easy to do that. It takes super-human strength. Nobody said that Christianity would be easy.
It is not a piece of cake. It is radical. It take heroism to be truly Christian
c. Finally, note that Jesus audience was influenced by Pharisees totally focused on following the rules
scrupulously. Some of us were brought up the same way: keep all the rules.
But here Jesus is telling us forget the rules, focus on the 2 principles: love of God and love of
neighbor, then use your conscience and your intelligence to put these principles into practice in
whatever circumstance you find yourself in: the Good Samaritan found himself in a strange situation
of having to help and enemy, and he made the right decision.
We live in a time of tension. People are demonized because of their race, religion, national origin,
sexual preference. Some appeal to some Old testament law to support their views.
Remember the parable of the good Samaritan. He was the enemy next door. He chose compassion
over political hatred. Jesus held him up as our example.