With the Victim

Paul Walton
13 July 2004

The parable of the Good Samaritan begins with a teacher of the law who wants to justify himself. He wants to stand out from the crowd, to be in the right, to take the high moral ground. I reckon he’s a lot like me, and perhaps like each one of us.

He tests this new teacher Jesus with a question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus throws it back at him, and he gives a global kind of answer — love the Lord your God with all your being, love your neighbour as yourself. The answer is good, but it’s not what Jesus is looking for. Jesus takes it out of the realm of ideas, and into actions: “Do this, and you will live.” The teacher’s response is, “Who is my neighbour?” Surely, there are limits! I can’t be loving to everyone! Perhaps the teacher just wants something more specific, so that he can assess his performance. No, less kindly but more accurately, it’s so that he might justify himself.

Typically, Jesus addresses this man’s desire to justify himself in an indirect way. He tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan. He invites his questioner into a world which calls the teacher’s background assumptions into question. The teacher is invited to re-examine his take on life, in fact the whole way he lives. The parable challenges the teacher to give up the fruitless search for self-justification.

It’s not just that this parable holds up a hated Samaritan as the ’neighbour’, and confronts the teacher’s prejudices — though that’s a necessary part of it. We need to be reminded of this, and contemporary takes like the ’Good Gay’ or the ’Good Asylum Seeker’ have a real place. But much more than this, the parable challenges the teacher to stop trying to stand out from the crowd, to be in the right, and instead to identify with another. Not to identify with just anybody, mind you — the point is to identify with the victim, to see things from the victim’s point of view.

I don’t want to imply that the teacher didn’t identify with anyone at all. He wanted to be above the crowd, the mob, the mass, the hoi polloi. But Jesus’ shrewd parable has two characters he would identify with: the priest and the Levite. People of piety, of good standing in the community. The teacher would be drawn naturally to them. But these pillars of society had failed to be neighbours to a person in need. There was a fundamental moral flaw in the heart of their being; ’priests’ and ’Levites’ of the third millennium may present it in terms of ’priorities’, or ’time management’, or they may fear ’compassion fatigue’ or ’burnout’, but for Jesus it is a simple lack of love.

Jesus leads the teacher to connect with the Samaritan. It’s here that his tidy world begins to be undermined. He certainly didn’t identify with the Samaritan, just as anyone could find someone that they would refuse to connect with, whether it’s the ’good gay’, the ’good Moslem’ or the ’good fundamentalist’.

Jesus invites the teacher to shift ground, to see the hated Samaritan as a real person, one capable of compassion. He invites him to extend his personal boundaries, boundaries that mark who is ’in’ and who is ’out’. He invites him to take a journey, to step from these are our people, and our people are good people; to this person is a good person, and therefore one of our people.

Once the teacher accepts the Samaritan as a good person, a person capable of love, it is a short step to seeing himself as someone who may one day be in need of the Samaritan’s help. What if the teacher were lying by the roadside one day? Would he refuse the Samaritan’s help? What does the world look like from the victim’s position? The teacher is beginning to find out.

“Go, and do likewise.” The teacher had identified with the priest and Levite; he had imitated them. Hopefully, he can begin to imitate the Samaritan, who knew the world from the underside. His calling is also ours.

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