![\"isis\"](\"https:\/\/theamericanjesus.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/isis-1024x595.jpg\")
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(H\/T NBC News<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n Last night was the season premiere of 60 Minutes<\/em>.<\/p>\n The show focused on the rise of ISIS and the West\u2019s work-in-progress response.<\/p>\n It was a heartbreaking and disturbing thing to watch. Between the blurred out video clips of ISIS militants mowing down scores of unarmed men in a ditch and the story of a woman whose friends were abducted, raped, and sold into slavery, I was ready to pull the airstrike trigger myself.<\/p>\n I have to be honest, thoughts of \u201clove thy neighbor\u201d and \u201cturn the other cheek\u201d were not floating around in\u00a0my mind while I watched the horror unfold on television. The thoughts floating around in my mind were more like, \u201cWe need to wipe these monsters off the face of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, it wasn\u2019t my best Christian thought moment, but frankly it\u2019s hard for me to hear\u00a0stories about children watching their parents murdered in front of them before they too are slaughtered and not think that the only solution to all of this violence is greater\u00a0violence.<\/p>\n But in the midst\u00a0my\u00a0holy wrath\u00a0I found myself unable to push out of my mind something I had read earlier in the day from noted Vanderbilt professor\u00a0Amy-Jill Levine.<\/p>\n Yesterday, she wrote an op-ed piece for the CNN Belief Blog<\/em> entitled 4 Teachings From Jesus That Everybody Gets Wrong<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s a fascinating reexamination of some of Jesus\u2019\u00a0best known parables that challenges many of our commonly held assumptions about what he\u00a0was actually trying to say. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thin<\/a>g.<\/p>\n While I\u2019m not sure I agree with what seemed to me to be the implied notion of her article \u2013 that the parables have one particular meaning, rather than multiple plausible interpretations \u2013 her take on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally made me stop and say, \u201cWhoa.\u201d<\/p>\n We all know the story about the man in need who gets overlooked by religious leaders, only to eventually receive aid from someone those\u00a0religious leaders had marginalized \u2013 a Samaritan.<\/p>\n But according to Levine, that is a misreading of the parable.<\/p>\n The parable is often seen as a story of how the oppressed minority \u2013 immigrants, gay people, people on parole \u2013 are \u201cnice\u201d and therefore we should check our prejudices. Obviously, the Israeli\/Palestinian crisis is the most direct comparison for a parable told by an ancient Jewish teacher, but while I was watching 60 Minutes<\/em> and fantasizing about wiping ISIS off the map, I couldn\u2019t get Amy-Jill Levine\u2019s Good Samaritan reassessment out of my mind.<\/p>\n That is to say, I couldn\u2019t stop imagining myself laying stranded in a ditch and looking up to see an ISIS militant dressed all in black standing above me. But then instead of pulling out a gun to shoot me or a butcher\u2019s knife to cut off my head, he extends his hand to help me out of the ditch.<\/p>\n But as Levin astutely calls our attention to, it\u2019s that sort of disturbingly bizarre imagine that is the very sort of thing Jesus is trying to get his audience to imagine.<\/p>\n But to be honest, it\u2019s a image that really ticks me off.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because it forces me to humanize ISIS militants. It forces me to remember that despite the atrocities I witness on TV, there are actually real human beings\u00a0behind those black masks.<\/p>\n People who act like monsters to be sure, but people who were created in the image of God just like me. They\u2019ve absolutely distorted that image in profoundly perverse ways, but if there\u2019s any truth to what Jesus said about the Good Samaritan, then we have to force ourselves to consider the possibility that they\u2019re not actually altogether evil.<\/p>\n That they have the potential to do good.<\/p>\n That the Good Samaritan could be the Good ISIS militant reaching out to help us even as we rain fire and destruction down on them from the heavens.<\/em><\/p>\n Look, I love Jesus and proudly call him Lord and Savior, but I have to confess that simply writing that sentence about an ISIS Good Samaritan, let alone allowing for its possibility in the real world makes my soul cringe.<\/p>\n Frankly, it infuriates me to think that a member of ISIS could be anything other than absolute evil.<\/p>\n And I think that\u2019s exactly the reaction Jesus was trying to provoke.<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to think of the Good Samaritan as a virtuous, unjustly marginalized person, but to think of our arch enemy as the Good Samaritan, to say nothing of simply a human being made in the image of God, is nearly incomprehensible.<\/p>\n Which is what made we say, \u201cWhoa.\u201d<\/p>\n It made me say \u201cwhoa\u201d because suddenly the situation in the Middle East \u2013 to say nothing of my own battles with people in my life here at home \u2013\u00a0just\u00a0got way more complicated.<\/p>\n You see, it was easy for me to want to pull the trigger on the airstrike when I thought of ISIS militants as nothing more than the devil incarnate. But if Jesus is right and I have to consider the possibility that at least some of them could be Good Samaritans, then I\u2019m left having to imagine a new way to respond to my enemies.<\/p>\n And can I be honest once more?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not very good at that.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a wanna be pacifist. I can talk about peace and non-violence till the cows come home, but when it comes to situations like ISIS the only response I can conceive of that will \u201cactually work\u201d is a violent one \u2013 even though in the back of my mind I know that violence only perpetuates more violence.<\/p>\n One thing I hear from my sold-out pacifist friends is that the reason people incorrectly view pacifism as \u201cdoing nothing\u201d is that those people aren\u2019t doing the work of trying to imagine possible alternative responses to violence other than more violence.<\/p>\n I am one of those people.<\/em><\/p>\n I lack a holy\u00a0imagination.<\/p>\n I lack\u00a0the imagination to conceive\u00a0of any sort of response to ISIS other than a violent one.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m sorely lacking the sort of imagination it takes to see an ISIS militant as a potential Good Samaritan.<\/p>\n So I pray.<\/em><\/p>\n I pray for peace.<\/p>\n I pray for protection.<\/p>\n And I pray for a better, holier imagination that can see the imago dei<\/em> in my enemies and envision a way of responding to their actions that doesn\u2019t simply bring more violence and brokenness into an already violent and broken world.<\/p>\n Because if I can\u2019t do that, if I can\u2019t even imagine the possibility that my enemy could be the Good Samaritan helping me out of a ditch, then I\u2019m not sure I can keep calling myself a follower of Jesus.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (H\/T NBC News) Last night was the season premiere of 60 Minutes. The show focused on the rise of ISIS and the West\u2019s work-in-progress response. It was a heartbreaking and disturbing thing to watch. Between the blurred out video clips of ISIS militants mowing down scores of unarmed men in a ditch and the story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3437,"featured_media":12876,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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\nSamaritans, then, were not the oppressed minority: They were the enemy. We know this not only from the historian Josephus, but also from Luke the evangelist.
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\nJust one chapter before our parable, Jesus seeks lodging in a Samaritan village, but they refuse him hospitality.
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\nMoreover, Samaria had another name: Shechem. At Shechem, Jacob\u2019s daughter Dinah is raped or seduced by the local prince. At Shechem, the murderous judge Abimelech is based.
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\nWe are the person in the ditch, and we see the Samaritan. Our first thought: \u201cHe\u2019s going to rape me. He\u2019s going to murder me.\u201d
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\nThen we realize: Our enemy may be the very person who will save us. Indeed, if we simply ask \u201cwhere is Samaria today?\u201d we can see the import of this parable for the Israeli\/Palestinian crisis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n