The Good Samaritan

Most of you already know that I grew up in the Christian faith. Some of you already know I'm no longer a Christian, but if you didn't know, there you go. For purposes of this post though, I'm going to treat Christian belief neutrally. My hope is that any believers reading this can hear my point, and not feel unnecessarily attacked.

As a kid in church, there's kinda this "order" of how you are taught what's important to Christians. Sometimes, it's formalized into Catachism. Other times, it's just the lesson plans for the Sunday School teacher. But there's an order. Sunday school teachers don't start with Ecclesiastes or Deuteronomy, and for good reason.

In most of my experiences across a variety of groups, some of the first things that get taught, after the crucifixion/salvation message will be the Parables of Jesus in the Gospels.

The parables are super important to Christians, because on top of giving insight into what Christians think of as important, they are also a kind of meta-narrative about how Christians see the world.

The Gospel's Parables are stories that Jesus tells, that didn't actually happen, but that show some sort of deeper truth through an everyday interaction. They are analogies, but with more of a folksy/truthy twist.

The meta part of that is that Christians also see themselves engaged in life's everyday tasks, but there are constantly deeper truths going on all around us, and they are the only ones who are picking up that spiritual wavelength in these seemingly mundane things.

The reason why all of this is important is because it sets the stage for why the church, and by proxy, Christians, have so deeply lost their way, and their relevance in America.

One of the Parables of Jesus is so famous, and so ubiquitous, that it is actually just an English idiom now: the good Samaritan. The thing is, when you dig into the parable at all beyond the idiom, one of the first things you notice is that it's a parable that explicitly uses racism/ethnocentrism to flip the script.

In the time that this parable would've been passed around, it would have been an unquestionable fact that Samaria was a place where sub-humans lived.

They were disdained. They were the other. Nothing good comes from them.

In the parable, the twist comes *precisely* because of that fact.

Hebrew high society saw someone in need, and they denied that need through their behavior. They "walked on by."

Then, the hated, despised, dregs-of-society Samaritan comes by, and not only helps, but completely ensures that the person in need is taken care of.

Had you been sitting in Jesus’ audience, listening, you would’ve felt either deep sorrow (if you were more empathetic), or deep outrage (if you weren’t).

In fact, the parable would’ve hit something like this:

A former marine that served honorably in Afghanistan was ruthlessly attacked one evening in the street and left for dead. He was bleeding profusely, and was unconscious.

While the marine laid there, a white woman that was a well respected small business owner, and often a community volunteer, was walking with her daughter and her dog.

When she saw the Marine lying in the street, she feared for her safety, and quickly grabbed her daughter and dog, ran, and left without calling 911.

Next, a prominent white Pastor of the local community Megachurch walked up on the marine, and quickly looked around for danger. The Pastor didn’t have his gun on him, and feared for his safety, and left the man in the street. 

Finally, a gay, black man with a previous arrest record, in a hoodie and with a cigarette, sees the Marine, runs over to him and begins trying to stop the bleeding. The black man takes out his cell phone, knowing how this is going to look when police drive up, and calls 911. When the police arrive, the black man is pushed to the ground, cuffed, questioned, suspected, and they quickly find his former record. They hold him at the police station, thinking he is the one who attacked the Marine.

After being held without cause for 48 hours, he is finally released unceremoniously and still with suspicion, but he immediately goes to the hospital to check on the Marine. The black man helps call the Marine’s family to let them know that he’s alive, and he checks on him daily, until he’s fully healed. The Marine’s medical bills are astronomical, but the Black man decides to start a GoFundMe to help pay the bills, and he includes a whole month’s paycheck from his job in the donation to help the Marine.

That’s how it would’ve felt. That’s the emotional response Jesus’ audience would’ve had upon hearing the parable.

So now, in another moment of severe national pain, inflicted on the black community, after a SERIES of historically identical pains, the Christians that are the most politically active…whose foundational identity is built on this idea that because of their faith, they are paying attention to deeper spiritual truths, while everyone else misses it…continue to actively align themselves with the people (and, by proxy, political leaders) in the parable that “walked on by.” They continue to hate the proverbial Samaritans of our society through who they choose to crown as their “king".

The Christians are the characters in the Gospels who are angry at Jesus for telling the parable, and they are blissfully unaware of it.

For how much time the Gospels spend laboring over the dedicated, religious people who just don’t get it, it seems that message is completely lost on the people that spend an enormous amount of time reading those very books, and telling others that the solution is to read those books.