The Good Samaritan and Racism in San Francisco - Part 2

“And who is my neighbor?” In answer Jesus said, “A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of bandits; they stripped him, beat him and then made off, leaving him half dead. Now a priest happened to be traveling down the same road, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite who came to the place saw him, and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan traveler who came on him was moved with compassion when he saw him.

For Jesus’ first audience, both the victim and the Samaritan were despised persons. Nobody in the peasant audience would have had the slightest sympathy for either. The victim would be despised because he was outside the realm of the one thing that guaranteed everyone’s safety: the religious purity structure. Every right thinking person in Jesus’ audience would have known that you have to keep religiously pure and if somebody doesn’t, then they are a threat to the whole community. Lepers are the obvious example of this, but anyone or anything that was unclean – menstruating women, lame men, weeds growing with wheat – were just as bad as a leper. Unclean things screw up everything. 

So the victim in this story is unclean – just by being there he is able to screw up everything. His first problem is that he’s naked. The issue isn’t nudity. That’s pretty shameful, but that isn’t the worst part. Because he has no clothes, you can’t tell what sort of person he is. You can’t tell if he’s a foreigner or a friend. You can’t tell if he’s religious or filthy. There are no social clues to let you know how to relate to him. The second problem is that a naked man lying by the side of the road would presumably be dead, if not dead, then as good as dead. Dead bodies are super-filthy. Coming into contact with them will totally screw your purity. 

The Samaritan is also super-unclean. He’s a stock character for Galilean street preachers. Samaritans are not only religiously impure (they pray to God in the wrong way in the wrong place) his kind are also known to be the sort who go out of their way to mess with nice people’s religious purity. They are the kind of folks that would drop a corpse in the Jerusalem temple, just to make it unusable for sacrifice. In other words, Samaritans are spiritual terrorists. 

In addition to being a foreigner, he was probably a tradesman, a despised occupation. He was despised because he walked the roads selling his goods instead of staying at home and taking care of the women-folk. And he has goods with him – wine and oil – and a considerable amount of money (later in the story he leaves two days wages at the inn and promises to pay whatever it costs to house the victim). He’s a sketch character. 

If there’s anybody in the story that the audience would have liked it would have to be the bandits. They were frequently peasants who had lost their land to the elite lenders whom all peasants feared. Their sympathy would have gone to the bandits, and in fact some of them hearing Jesus’ story might have taken up that profession.  The surprising twist in the story is the compassionate action of the one stereotyped as a spiritual terrorist. The religious characters, the ones who pass the naked man, are only doing what any sensible person would do: avoiding impurity, staying out of harms way, looking out for themselves. So how do we hear this story?

More to come…