I’ve been having quite a time with The Good Samaritan. By “quite a time,” I mean I’ve been working for years on understanding how it works – linguistically, cognitively, and as a narrative. I want to understand it in its original context, and I want to think carefully about its implications for early Christian ethics and for contemporary social ethics. But a colleague recently opined that if she were to choose one New Testament parable which utterly fails to communicate its point to modern readers, it would be this one.
How could she say that? Well, I’ll tell you. And then I want to tell you why I both agree and disagree with that assessment. But first, please pause and read the passage in Luke.
Now that you’ve refreshed your memory, I wonder what you think. If this is a familiar or even favorite text and parable of yours, what do you like about it? Or do you find it flat, even boring? Are there things you’re not sure you understand? What would you say is the point of the parable and of Jesus’ interaction with the lawyer?
Here’s what our problem is: That was then, and this is now. There are cultural barriers to our understanding what’s going on. But our biggest problem is our over-familiarity with the title given this passage in our English Bibles, “The Good Samaritan.” My colleague’s point was simply that, on one level, we just don’t get it because “Samaritan” means nothing to most of us other than “good guy” or “helper.” We associate “Samaritan” and “good. ” But “helpful, heroic Samaritan” is a meaning that Luke’s first hearers or readers could not have conjured on the first reading or hearing. That would not have computed. The NT scholar John Dominic Crossan observed that 1st century Jews could not have heard “Samaritan” and “good” in the same sentence without recoiling in shock and outrage. Why? A long history of ethnic conflict and religious disagreement had resulted in entrenched mutual prejudice between Jews and Samaritans. But that’s their history and culture, not ours, and we just don’t get outraged when the nice Samaritan merchant stops and helps the assault victim, even after we’ve been given the historical information. It is not our fight.
That Samaritan-Jewish conflict is just one of the things we don’t get unless a preacher or teacher or commentary helps us with the information about the 1st-century cultural framing. It can also help to know that priests and Levites had inherited status; they weren’t chosen for their personal piety or sense of calling. It can help to know something about Jewish purity laws. And it can help to know some geography. Jerusalem was the civil capitol of the country, but also the religious center for Jews but not Samaritans. The lawyer who asks the opening question is a Torah scholar, and he adds the Leviticus passage about love of neighbor to his recitation of the Shema, the summary of the Law. But you can look all of that up. Once you have information about how much a denarius was worth, and what the traveling customs were, the picture you build has more detail. So I agree that there’s a lot we don’t get, unless we have help with the cultural background.
But I think this parable can still succeed. Jesus (and Luke) gave plenty of verbal prompts in the words of the parable that can activate our human embodied perceptive apparatus and engender exactly the kind of response Jesus was looking for. Ok, that was a mouthful. Here’s what I mean: It’s about blood and guts. It is about the natural, normal human empathic response to another’s injury, and even to a stranger in need. When you read about the assault your mind immediately simulates that scene and can evoke your own bodily memory of either seeing such a scene in real life or of being traumatized yourself. So then when the priest and the Levite “see” but avoid the victim, we feel that. We feel the wrongness of that, even if we don’t have the 1st-century cultural framing info about the specific duties and expectations for priests and Levites. And we feel relief when the Samaritan stops and helps. We might even see the oil being poured over the wounds – or feel that from the victim’s perspective. We know what it is to be hurt so badly that we cannot get up. We need to be lifted, and our bodies remember what it is like to be carried. This we DO get. And it is no small thing.
Here’s what the cognitive linguist and literary scholar Barbara Dancygier says about how readers make sense of stories and track with characters:
Any narrative form assumes the readers’ or listeners’ ability to feel for the characters and interpret the events from the characters’ point of view – to feel sympathy, envy, disgust, anger, et cetera. While some of these emotional responses may be complex, or even conflicted, they are better explained through our ability to feel empathy, and also to attribute emotional meaning to linguistic expressions – even simple experiential concepts such as up (alert, conscious, confident, in a good mood) or down (tired, inactive, sick, unconscious, dejected).
I said it was about blood and guts, and I meant it. The pivotal point in the parable is about guts, gut-level response. When Luke 10:33 says the Samaritan “took pity on him” (NIV) or “was moved with pity” (NRSV), the Koiné Greek word is esplanchnisthē, which means “he felt moved in his guts.” The intestines, not the heart, were the seat of the emotions, and the Samaritan’s compassionate response begins here, in his bodily reaction to what he sees. Then he does all these actions that the Torah scholar realizes are “merciful.” This is how the Samaritan shows him and us (even us, now, in our cultural setting) what it looks like to be a compassionate neighbor. Blood and guts are essential to the story, and that’s why I don’t think this is a sweet children’s Sunday School story. I wouldn’t recommend this for my little grandson just yet.
The best preachers and Bible teachers help us update the social-cultural features of the story. In his 1969 Cotton Patch Version, Clarence Jordan casts the lawyer (Torah scholar) who confronts Jesus in Luke as a teacher of an adult Bible class, a Sunday School teacher. Jordan maps the Jericho Road onto the highway between Atlanta and Albany, Georgia (now I-85). The robbers become gangsters who, “When they had robbed him of his wallet and brand new suit, they beat him up and drove off in his car, leaving him unconscious on the shoulder of the highway.” The priest and Levite become a white preacher and a Gospel song leader who when they saw the victim, “stepped on the gas and went shooting by.” The Samaritan becomes a black man who stops and helps the white victim, lifts him into the back seat of his car and takes him to a hospital in Albany.
What Jordan does is pick out the key elements of the 1st century cultural frames – Samaritans, priests, Levites, wayside inns – and map them onto his contemporary cultural setting. But Jordan’s version doesn’t fit our own frames, exactly. So I ask you: How would you transpose the parable characters and scenario to fit your own situation? The “Samaritan” role needs to go to someone whose religion and ethnicity is different and offensive. For some of us, that’d be a Muslim or a Taliban fighter. For others, it’d be a conservative evangelical, even a Trump-vangelical. Who would you not expect to be compassionate? That’s your Samaritan. And your “priest and Levite” should map onto characters in your own world who exemplify religious authority and function. There are details we would need to get into, if we were to do this exercise thoroughly, but you get the idea.
So I do agree that on the cultural level, this parable is hard for contemporary readers to track with. But I actually do not agree that the parable utterly fails. What saves it – and us – is shared embodied experience. It is the blood and guts of the story that can grab us and activate our own compassionate responses. Here’s my point about reading and interpreting Scripture: modern readers share considerable common conceptual ground with ancient characters. We know from experience what it is to travel down a road or path alone, to be wounded, to encounter a needy stranger. We know what it is like to see a needy person but decide for various reasons that we cannot stop this time. We know that gut-level feeling when someone’s injury moves us. This is what makes the story come alive, makes it embodied cognition. This is what makes it possible for us to hear Jesus say, “Go and do likewise!”
Bonnie Howe, Ph.D., is New College Berkeley Adjunct Professor in Ethics and Biblical Studies. Her books include Because You Bear This Name: Conceptual Metaphor and the Moral Meaning of 1Peter and (edited with Joel B. Green) Cognitive Linguistic Explorations in Biblical Studies.
1Barbara Dancygier, The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge University Press. 2012) 29.
Illustration: The Good Samaritan, 1890, by Vincent Van Gogh. Courtesy of www.VincentVanGogh.org https://vincentvangogh.org/the-good-samaritan.jsp