by Joannie Watson | July 11, 2025 1:00 am
This Sunday[1], we hear a very familiar parable. A parable so familiar, perhaps, that it ceases to surprise us as it did its first audience. The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the most familiar of all Jesus’ teachings and the phrase has entered our lexicon to such an extent, we fail to remember that it once would have sounded like an oxymoron to a good, observant Jew.
To say the Samaritans and the Jewish people did not get along is a bit of an understatement. After a complex history that dated back to the split of the northern and southern kingdoms and then the Assyrian captivity in 722, the two groups viewed each other with suspicion and even hatred. The author of Sirach mentions that his heart “loathes” the “foolish” people who live in Shechem (a main city of Samaria), and says they are not even a nation (Sirach 50:25-26). The Mishnah, a collection of oral tradition of the rabbis, says, “He who eats the bread of Samaritans is like he who eats the flesh of swine.” As we can see from the Gospels, Jews and Samaritans did not speak and usually avoided travel through each other’s regions (see John 4:9; Luke 9:51-55).
Relations between the Samaritans and the Jews were at an all-time low in the first-century. A Jewish ruler destroyed a Samaritan house of worship, and there were numerous violent confrontations between the two groups. The historian Josephus describes a massacre of Jews from Galilee who were passing through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem, and subsequent attacks on Samaritan towns.
Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine notes that it might be helpful for us to put these two groups into a modern context to really grasp the shocking nature of the “Good” Samaritan. “To hear the parable today, we only need to update the identity of the figures. I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I’m attacked … the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas” (Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, 115).
The scholar of the Law has asked what the greatest commandment is, and then asks a follow-up question. If I’m supposed to love my neighbor, well, who is my neighbor? If you’ll look at Luke’s Gospel, you’ll notice that the question that prompted the parable was not: “Are the Samaritans my neighbors?” That answer would be easy. Samaritans weren’t neighbors, according to the usual interpretation of Leviticus.
With this parable, Jesus flips the scholar’s question. It’s not about a figuring out what check boxes to mark or how big the group of people you need to love is. The scholar’s predicament is much bigger. Rather than worry about who is his neighbor, this man needs to learn how to be a neighbor.
Pope Benedict writes that the Samaritan “makes himself the neighbor and shows me that I have to learn to be a neighbor deep within … I have to become like someone in love, someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another’s need. Then I find my neighbor, or – better- then I am found by him. … The issue is no longer which other person is neighbor to me or not. The question is about me. I have to become the neighbor, and when I do, the other person counts for me ‘as myself’” (Jesus of Nazareth, 197).
How can I be a neighbor to others?
For the last two thousand years, we have been been trying to find a way to not love our enemy. We have been working out theological, philosophical, or sociological loopholes to try to make Jesus’ teaching more palatable. In our distance from the reality of the first-century relationship between Samaritans and Jews, we have managed to avoid the harsh reality of the parable. I’m called to love–and serve–the person that is the hardest to love and serve. The person who hurts me. The people I have every reason to hate. The person who spends their life working against the things we believe in. The person who believes differently than me. The person who does not deserve my love.
This parable should make me uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, I don’t understand it.
How must I be a neighbor?
Image credit: “The Good Samaritan” (detail) | Balthasar van Cortbemde[2], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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