Everything depends upon where you start. Better yet, it all depends on where you are. No, I want it to be more accurate: not where you start or where you are but who you are in the location where you are and therefore your starting place.
When you and I read the parable of the “good” Samaritan in Luke 10 much depends on who we are when we read or listen or encounter that parable. Preachers are often driven by some golden nugget that will drop into the mix and give a leading idea to preach a text everyone seems to know already. Scholars read that parable to see if they can somehow say something new, or connect it to something they know about that most don’t, or shape it anew in light of a current method for reading the parable. Most Christians, dare I say, read it to learn all over again that they can be like the good Samaritan and take care of the wounded on the path they may walk today.
Emerson B. Powery reads the parable in Luke 10 from who he is and where he is and he starts right there. He does so aloud. Many think they are simply reading the parable was it was. No one can do that. One always starts from where they are and who they are. Always. Powery’s reading is one you simply must hear, and it can be found in his new, accessible, important book: The Good Samaritan: Luke 10 for the Life of the Church.
In reading his book I realized my recent sermon because somewhere else. His reading reminds me of my location and who I am. My reading now reminds me of who he is and where he is.
So where does he begin?
With Frederick Douglass’ amazing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the utter hypocrisy of slaveowners singing praises to God while silencing the voices of slaves; with the massive contradiction of this parable with the way of Jesus, with true Christianity.
With Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, with its difficult-for-some-to-read approach of various voices all speaking into the same world, and the inevitable gaps such diverse stories bring into our world, leaving us unable to know fullness.
With the Nickel Mines story about the murder of schoolchildren, and with the Amish community that showed compassion and grace to the children’s families, to the community, and to the murder’s own family. Forgiveness is such a good story it can eclipse another story that deserved more attention: the reason for such violence and the necessity of repentance and confession and truth-telling in the process of forgiveness and reconciliation. Why the violence is part of that story, too,
With the tragedy at Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church where a crazed man murdered people while praying. Again, the story that carried the day in our society was the forgiveness story while it neglected the why of violence and the necessity of truth-telling. “Violence does not simply happen. It happens because something deep down is wrong.”
With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the ascension of Nelson Mandela to leadership in South Africa, a commission led by Desmond Tutu – and his later book No Future without Forgiveness. And the truth that “there is no future without forgiveness” but there is “no forgiveness without honest confessions about the wrongs that have been done to one another.”
These tragedies, and here Powery evoked for me the work of Love Sechrest in her new book Race & Rhyme, “complicate” the parable and the parable “complicates” our story. They feed into one another as we read them from who we are, where we are, and where we start.
This well-known parable is “a story about people groups and the myths that shape their perceptions of other people groups for later times and places.”
In other words, the parable unmasks systemic issues.
Wow.
I cannot accurately express how this reaches to the depths of my soul. Thank you. I have shared it.
This is challenging. At my church we’ve been reading through Ezra. In our mid week Bible studies, several of us have been troubled by the determination of the Judahites to disallow the neighbouring tribes (many of them Samaritans, who counted themselves as Jews but appeared to also worship other gods)- from helping build the Temple. We’ve looked at why they may want to cut these people out- attributed all sorts self serving motives to them, to justify the Judahites’ decisions. It would take more study of the history at the time, but showed us how long this Jew-Samaritan feud had been going on.
This article brought up the systemic suspicions we see in Ezra. That pits people who may have a lot in common and ‘could’ be good neighbours - against each other. You’re right- the parable brings up so much more than at surface level.