Rev Gav

Who is my neighbour?

Luke 10.25–37

We cannot detach Jesus and his teaching from the Old Testament. Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, was rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and from the way he referred to them, it is clear that he lived them and breathed them. Before we turn to today’s story that we have titled the ‘Good Samaritan’ let us dig a little deeper and understand the biblical and social context. Ready for a quick history lesson?

Israel was a person, Jacob, who had twelve sons, and Judah was the fourth son. The twelve tribes of Israel are named after the twelve sons, and the the term ‘Jew’ comes from the word ‘Judah’. It kinda makes sense when you say it, “Jew-dah”.

In about 720 BCE, the ten tribes of the northern Kingdom of Israel were taken into captivity by the Assyrian Empire. Israel stopped becoming an independent entity, and this left the remaining two southern tribes to continue the heritage of Israel. These were the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. As the tribe of Judah was more dominant, when they merged, they became a single tribe and took the name — hence they became the Jews.

Now, those who were members of the ten northern tribes did what they were forbidden to do, intermarried with the local tribes, and they became known as the Samaritans. They still worshipped the same God, but were considered not to be of pure lineage. And so, a kind of tension arose between the Samaritans and the Jews. By the time we get to the first century, the time of Jesus, the Jews and Samaritans didn’t ‘hate’ each other so much as they lived by a different code of conduct — they were simply of a different heritage. You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family!

The Jews had Jerusalem as their focus and the locus of their worship was around Mount Moriah, the ‘holy mountain’, otherwise known as ‘Temple Mount’. The Samaritans had their own holy mountain in the north, Mount Gerizim, which is in the modern day West Bank, near the Palestinian city of Nablus. So you have Samaria in the north and Judah in the south. The Samaritans lived in Samaria and the Jews in Judah. The Samaritans had Mount Gerizim and the Jews had Mount Moriah.

Jesus was a Jew and from the tribe of Judah and was steeped in all this history. And so, when he told this story — the one we call the ‘Good Samaritan’ he called to mind a much older story, one found in the second book of Chronicles (28.9-15). One of the northern tribes of Israel was named after Ephraim, Jacob’s grandson — one of Joseph’s sons and its people were called Ephraimites. They were in Samaria and had captured some prisoners and they had compassion on them. They, “clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho.”

So, a tribe of Israel that later intermarried and later became the Samaritans, had compassion on those who were injured, and took them to Jericho on animals. Ring any bells? It should!

When Jesus told a story to answer the question from an expert in the law — no doubt also an expert in all the Jewish scriptures — he told a story inspired by those very scriptures. The story of the ‘good’ Samaritan was not just a story to help us have compassion on all people, but contained a much deeper and clever meaning. Jesus was saying, “Don’t forget where you came from, and don’t forget where the Samaritans came from. Your people included the Ephraimites, and look what they did, even for their own prisoners.”

We don’t know to which tribe the expert in the law belonged, however the story Jesus told involved two members of the tribe of Levi (priests and temple helpers). The Levites had no special ‘territory’ and continued to serve in the temple. Note how in the story a man was travelling from Jerusalem (the locus of the tribe of Judah) to Jericho (the place in the story where the Ephraimites took their wounded prisoners) when he was beaten and left for dead. The two Levites — those with no territorial affiliation — ignored the injured man, but a Samaritan did not, and interestingly, the innkeeper, a man living in southern Judah (where all this took place), trusted the word of the Samaritan and looked after the injured man. The ones who showed mercy were both the Samaritan and the Judean.

So what is our faith lesson? Of course, it is to have compassion, but on a deeper level, it is to recognise the sanctity of others who are different to ourselves — that under God we all have the same lineage, no matter to what race or creed we belong.

We live in a world where extreme nationalism is on the rise. I have friends who tell me they are proud to be English, Bermudian, or American, and this is fine, but with the same breath, others who make the same claim point the finger at others and say they are not English, Bermudian, or American, and use their nationalism to separate themselves socially and politically, and marginalise or exclude those who are foreigners or aliens. How short our memories are! For example, there is not an English person who is of indigenous descent with their heritage being primarily of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. And what of Americans with their complex mix of diverse cultural and historical influences including contributions from Indigenous peoples, European colonisers, and subsequent waves of immigrants from all over the world? And Bermudians, well, there weren’t even indigenous people in Bermuda!

There is no place for exclusivity in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we who belong to God’s sovereign family, referred to in the Bible as the Kingdom of God, are called to reflect on our own heritage, and extend our compassion to all. When the expert in the law correctly identified the one who was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers as, “The one who showed him mercy,” Jesus had only one reply. “Go and do likewise.”

Amen.

(Photo by Ev on Unsplash and thanks to Simon Cross for the valuable insight into Chronicles 28).