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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
Luke’s gospel is the only gospel that adds to the love-based interpretation of Torah the story of the good Samaritan, a story that shows how this lens was to be lived.
Luke’s Jesus applies the ethic of love by applying it even outside of his own community. This story uses the then long-held tensions between people in Judea and people in Samaria, once the capital city of the Northern Israelite tribes. This story turns the commandment to love one’s neighbor on its head with a Samaritan neighbor modeling the ethic of compassion for others.
Jesus’ story is both subversive and transgressive. Jesus subverts his society’s stereotypes about Samaritans and transgresses the strongly held boundary between “us” and “them.” The Samaritan shows compassion through his actions toward someone who had been beaten, robbed and left for dead. In the story, this happens after the political and religious representatives from that person’s own region had passed him by. The Samaritan in the story transgresses social and political boundaries to practice this ethic of love, demonstrating a larger application of “neighbor” that include Judeans as well as Samaritans. And so the Samaritan becomes an example of enlarging neighborly love to include “them” as well as “us,” and Jesus calls those in Judean society to practice the same love as the Samaritan does.
I love this story because the Samaritan practices a universal love ethic. In this story, this is deeply transgressive of framing the Samaritan as morally inferior.
There is so much that we can glean from this story today.
What Christian stereotypes about others are we being called to subvert in our societal context?
What are those stereotypes rooted in? Are they rooted in bias and bigotry toward a different gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, education, economic status, or some other category?
What stereotypes about those different from you have you found to be staggeringly untrue?
How does the ethic of love of neighbor call us to transgress our community’s boundary of “us” and “them?”
Whether we think of political, religious, or social communities, what does it look like for us to lean into boundary-transgressing practices of defining our “neighbor?”
What does genuine authentic love look like once our definition of “neighbor” has been enlarged?
Lastly, what else are you reading in this week’s story? Who else does this story invoke for you?
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