The First of the Misnamed Parables...the good samaritan

'I suppose I had best lay my cards face up right here. To me, the central figure in the parable is not the Samaritan. He is simply one of the three characters in the story who have the opportunity to display neighbourliness as Jesus defines it. The defining character- the one to whom the other three respond by being non-neighbour or neighbor- is the man who fell among thieves. The actual Christ-figure in the story, therefore is yet another loser, yet another down-and outer who, by just lying there in his lostness and proximity to death...is in fact the closest thing to Jesus in the parable.

That runs counter, of course, to the better part of two thousand years' worth of interpretation, but I shall insist on it. This parable, like so many of Jesus' most telling ones, has been egregiously misnamed. It is not primarily about the Samaritan but about the man on the ground (just as the Prodigal Son is not about a boy's sins but about his father's forgiveness, and just as the Laborers in the Vineyard is not about the workers but about the beneficent vineyard-owner)...

What I am most concerned to skewer at this point is precisely the theological mischief caused by the misnaming of this parable. Calling it the Good Samaritan inevitably sets up its hearers to take it as a story whose hero offers them a good example for imitation. I am, of course, aware of the fact that Jesus ends the parable precisely on the note of imitation: "You, too, go and do likewise." But the common, good-works interpretation of the imitation to which Jesus invites us all too easily gives the Gospel a fast shuffle. True enough, we are called to imitation. But imitation of what, exactly? Is it not the imitatio Christi, the following of Jesus? And is not that following of him far more than just a matter of doing kind acts? Is it not the following of him into the only mystery that can save the world, namely, his passion, death, and Resurrection? Is it not, tout court, the taking up of his cross?

Therefore, if you want to say that the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us to imitate the Samaritan in his sharing of the passion and near-death of the man who fell among thieves- if you want to read his selfless actions as so many ways in which he took the outcastness and lostness of the Christ-figure on the ground into his own outcast and losing life- then I will let you have imitation as one of the main themes of the parable. But please note that such an interpretations is not at all what people generally have in mind when the subjects of imitating the Good Samaritan is broached to them. What their minds instantly go to is something quite different, something that is utterly destructive of the notion of grace that works only by death and resurrection. Because what they imagine themselves called upon to imitate is not a mystery of lostness and death graspable only by left-handed faith; rather it is a mere plausibility- a sensible if slightly heroic career of successful care-giving based on the performances of right-handed good works.

What is wrong with that? Quite simply, it blows the Good News right out of the water. For if the world could have been saved by providing good examples to which we could respond with appropiately good works, it would have been saved an hour and twenty minutes after Moses came down from Mt. Sinai...

Jesus' whole parable, especially with its piling up of detail after detail of extreme, even irrational, behaviour on the part of the Samaritan, points not to the meritorious exercises of good will but to the sharing of the passion as the main thrust of the story. What is to be imitated in the Samaritan's action is not his moral uprightness in doing good deeds but his spiritual insight into the truly bizarre working of the mystery of redemption. The lawyer is told by Jesus, in effect, to stop trying to live and to be willing to die...'