Hans Kung: On Being A Christian: Man's Cause, Action
It is one of the most important stories in the Christian Scriptures and I would bet that even those, perhaps, minority of professed Christians who could accurately recount it would not understand the background and so implications that Jesus would certainly have known would be fully known in the context of him telling it. I heard the story for years, read it, too, without really understanding that in any depth. And I should have, it was right there on the page in front of me. Maybe that's the downside of telling a truth through a striking story, you tend to dwell on the action and forget the context.i Especially if you grow up in a milieu in which that context seems to not be familiar.
From the Good News translation, Luke 10 25:37
A teacher of the Law came up and tried to trap Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to receive eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?”
The man answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’; and ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’”
“You are right,” Jesus replied; “do this and you will live.”
But the teacher of the Law wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answered, “There was once a man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers attacked him, stripped him, and beat him up, leaving him half dead. It so happened that a priest was going down that road; but when he saw the man, he walked on by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also came there, went over and looked at the man, and then walked on by on the other side. But a Samaritan who was traveling that way came upon the man, and when he saw him, his heart was filled with pity. He went over to him, poured oil and wine on his wounds and bandaged them; then he put the man on his own animal and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Take care of him,’ he told the innkeeper, ‘and when I come back this way, I will pay you whatever else you spend on him.’”
And Jesus concluded, “In your opinion, which one of these three acted like a neighbor toward the man attacked by the robbers?”
The teacher of the Law answered, “The one who was kind to him.”
Jesus replied, “You go, then, and do the same.”
I suppose I should meditate on that in the Lectio Divinia way by imagining my mortal enemy as the Good Samaritan, the one who fell among thieves me or my loved one. And maybe I'll do that this week. It would be better than answering hate mail. Jesus was answering a question about the Mosaic Law with an extremely radical interpretation of it.
Speaking of mortal enemies. One of the best commentaries on this story I've read in recent years wasn't commenting directly on Luke, it was Marilynne Robinson commenting on The God Delusion:
Dawkins says, “I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.
There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33—34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on 19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful Samaritan—a non-Jew— embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest scrutiny.
I'll point out that not only does Robinson correct the enemy of Christianity and all religion but she throws in a mention of our own self-appointed Super Christians (as any informed person would understand) who wants to put Bible passages - third rate abbreviations of it, really - into court houses for political purposes, not because they have any intention of following them. At that time it Roy Moore's history of child molestation and rape wasn't yet known to the public. It's not just the university based atheists who are ignorant of the Bible, it's lots of fundamentalists, readers of it as well as just those who use it as a political prop.
