Lives That Matter
Emerson Powery’s distinctive new book, The Good Samaritan: Luke 10 for the Life of the Church, notes there are four lives in the parable that matter but they are lives more or less ignored.
Please don’t preach or teach on this parable without reading this book.
The unnamed victim, the unnamed Samaritan, the unnamed innkeeper, and the unnamed lawyer. The latter is a real person and the others are figures in a story. Jesus, of course, matters, too, but that’s not questioned.
As Amy-Jill Levine observes, and Powery repeats, Jews would have identified with the victim as a common experience. They would not have identified with the Samaritan.
The victim has become an inkblot test: for some he is the lost soul, the victim of systemic racism, the poor suffering in the capitalist system, and the enslaved.
Who is the victim?
OK, the lawyer. His question is not very Jewish because Jews believed the kingdom belonged to the covenant people, and Christians can be scandalized by anyone wondering what someone can do to obtain eternal life. The problem for Christians is that Jesus seems to think the question was fine and answers it with doing as the Samaritan did. Loving God, loving others, that’s Jesus’ answer and the parable puts into motion what love of others means. Compassionate actions are central to kingdom living for Jesus. One doesn’t inherit the kingdom without the kingdom living.
What matters, too, is the body. This parable is about bodies – walking, beaten, half-dead, passing by, picking up, transporting, caring for, healing. Discipleship is an act of the body. One acts for the other with one’s body. “Confessions of love for the other are crucial; actions of love for the other are definitive.” Confessions of the faith that do not lead to actions in the body are not worth the paper on which they are inscribed. During our pandemic bodies became more prominent – in their health, in their vulnerability to the virus, in their absence in the church and in neighborhood, and in their revitalized presence in familiar spaces.
Jesus used a parable, which is “a creative tool Jesus utilized to relay his thoughts about God’s activity in the world, human interactions, and the values he put forward for those who desired to follow his teaching.” In this parable, an Other is the hero. That is rare. The parable surprises as so many of Jesus’ parables surprise hearers. This parable can shed light on how stories do what propositions cannot and do not. The messiness of the characters form the realities of our stories, too.
This is a parable about human dignity.
To be the change we can be, we may need first to imagine the change.
It can be a story of individuals doing good and it can be a story of communities doing good as communities. It can be a story about systemic stereotypes. Notice the types: lawyer, Samarian, victim, innkeeper, priest and Levite. These are systemic embodiments. The story disrupts systemic stereotypes of the Other (Samaritan). It disrupts complicity in violence and ignoring violence. ML King Jr saw the need to fix the Jericho Road and purge it of violence. John Lewis sees “good trouble” at work in our society’s vision. Powery sees good trouble in the Black Lives Matter movement. Can traditional white theology be seen as the Jericho Road?