I was at the Tampa Bay Rays game on Friday, when they lost a typical game of Raysball. There are a couple of friends of mine who invite me regularly to go to the games. I enjoy baseball, but not Raysball. As a consequence, I have to pretend to know what my friends are talking about when they mention player stats, past game performances, etc. I need more than a roster to keep up; it would be helpful to have a brief, recent history of the team.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a similar situation. We have a list of the players in the story, but some history is also needed in order to understand the parts that the characters play.
The first person mentioned is the robbers' victim. The Gospel tells us that he was stripped and left half-dead. (Luke 10:30) In the ancient world, one's language, accent and clothing were one's identification. In contemporary terms, the robbers stole this man's identity when they took his clothes and left him unconscious. This man's unknown identity plays an important part in the story.
The second character to show up is a Priest. The Priests were descendants of the family line of Moses and Aaron; they were an hereditary priesthood which performed Temple worship in Jerusalem. Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth and the father of John the Baptist, was a Priest; he was performing his Temple duty when an angel announced to him that he would have a son.
The third character is a Levite. Levites were members of the Tribe of Levi, as were the Priests. Levites, while not Priests, were often responsible for governance duties in Israel.
The fourth central character was a Samaritan. While the Jews called these people Samaritans, they called themselves Israelites. They claimed to be the descendents of two of the northern Tribes which were not deported during the Babylonian Exile, about six hundred years before Jesus' ministry.
The Samaritans also claimed to practice a purer, and more ancient, form of Hebrew religion. The Jews and the Samaritans hated one another because each group thought that the other had compromised the integrity of the religion.
This background material is important to the story because all four main characters would have agreed about the answer the Lawyer gave to Jesus. Jesus asked, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" (Luke 10:26) Both Jews and Samaritans used the Books of Moses, the Law. Both groups would have agreed that to love God with one's whole heart, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, was an accurate summation of the Law. In the story, however, the Priest and the Levite disagree with the Samaritan about who constituted a neighbor.
Keep in mind that the robbers' victim was unidentifiable. He had no clothing, and could not speak for himself. The Priest and the Levite saw an unidentifiable person and, fearing that he might be an enemy (a non-Jew), decided not to risk helping him. To help an enemy would be to incur ritual impurity, and perhaps, the wrath of one's family. The Samaritan saw the same unidentifiable person, and the same risk. The Samaritan decided to take the risk of treating him like a neighbor.
The risk here was immense. If the robbers' victim was a Jew, he might have been very offended at being treated by a Samaritan – with unclean Samaritan wine and oil. The Samaritan might be exposing himself to severe retribution by the robbers' victim or the victim's family.
The Priest and the Levite understood holiness as avoiding anything that might risk personal loss or ritual impurity. The Samaritan, using the same Scriptures, understood holiness as risking oneself to help a potential neighbor in need.
Rather than a minimalist, extrinsicist, mechanistic approach to holiness, Jesus takes an internal, subjective and active approach to holiness. It is insufficient merely to avoid doing evil; holiness is constituted by doing good where it is needed.
For Catholics, the issue might be phrased in question form: 'Are you trying merely to stay out of hell, or are you trying to gain admitance to the Kingdom of Heaven?' The former is insufficient; the latter is Jesus' invitation and command.
Jesus says that it is insufficient to avoid evil; holiness comes from the active pursuit of good - not good as gain for self, but good as gift to those in need. In reaching out to those in need we encounter our neighbor, and we participate in God's merciful love of the world.
