Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In theory, the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria had equal rights as citizens of Israel. But in practice, the Samaritans were despised. Jesus himself was of course a member of the tribe of Judah. The hostility that existed between the two tribes was deeply rooted in their history. When the Jewish people were carried into exile in 587 BC, the great Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians. It had taken seven years to build. It has stood as the proud centre of the Jewish world for over 300 years, the centre of its scholarship and the touchstone of its identity. On the orders of the Babylonian king, Jerusalem is raised to the ground and the Temple destroyed in three short days. The entire population is assembled outside the walls of the city, corralled for a few weeks and then herded off into exile.
But as the Jewish people are moving out, another population group is being moved in. Just as the British did here in various parts of Ireland at various times, the Babylonians planted these settlers in the vacated lands of Judah. Samaritan peasants moved in and intermarried with these settlers, taking over the lands of the Jewish people. To make matters worse, many of them forsook the Jewish religion for the pagan Babylonian gods of their partners.
So when the Jewish people returned after 70 years of exile, they found a racially and religiously transformed people occupying their former lands. Even those foreigners who had been planted there now called themselves Samaritans as well. When the Jewish people returned, their first project was to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. They refused to allow the Samaritans to have anything to do with the project. In response, the Samaritans established a rival priesthood and a rival temple in Samaria. The breach was soon complete. Each group's loyalty to its own tradition served to nourish its hostility towards the other group. So, by the time Jesus came on earth, the Jews and the Samaritans had enjoyed 500 years of poisoned hostility. In fact there are very striking parallels between the loyalist/nationalist divide in the North and the Jewish/Samaritan divide in ancient Israel. I always found it rather ironic that this gospel is read every third year, on the Sunday nearest the 12th of July celebrations.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is told against this historical backdrop. Apart from the Prodigal Son, this is the best-known parable of the entire scriptures. You are all familiar with the details of the story. A man on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho falls among thieves. He is left for dead. A Priest and a Levite ignore his plight successively. It falls to a Samaritan to pick up the pieces. But we should not be too hard on the Priest and the Levite. The original audience would have known that the Priest and the Levite had particular functions to fulfill in Jewish worship. One of the laws was that if they touched a dead body they were forbidden to act in their religious role. Hence their religious functions effectively constrained them from going to the aid of a body in the ditch. Jesus is not attacking the individuals. He is stressing that the first demand being made by the religion he is preaching is love of neighbour. No religious ritual is superior to that.
When Jesus came on earth he found that the bitterness which began 500 years previously had lost none of its energy. The Samaritans were still ostracised. A Jew was forbidden by law to walk on the same side of the road as a Samaritan. Throughout the gospels Jesus misses no opportunity to undermine this hatred. You will remember the incident of the woman at the well when Jesus asks her for a drink of water. She is shocked. She says to him, "And you, a Jew, ask me a Samaritan for a drink?" This was unheard of in Jewish society in his day. Today's gospel recounts another attempt by him to expose and condemn this hatred. The lawyer's question in "Who is my neighbour?" provides him another opportunity to confront the ancient hostilities. For the traditional Jew, to love one's neighbour was understood as loving someone who belonged to the Jewish community.
In today's gospel, Jesus challenges the lawyer to question that received tradition. If your religious tradition invites you to despise your fellow human beings, then it is not in accordance with the mind of God. If loving your neighbour means being disloyal to your tradition, then disloyalty itself becomes a virtue. The ultimate loyalty is love.
During the 'marching season', we witness the weight of inherited hatred and hostility between two traditions in our own country. Jesus tells us that, as his disciples, we must be disloyal to those who would play upon our inherited prejudices. If religion needs hatred to nurture it, it certainly is at odds with the religion Jesus founded. The gospel of Christ challenges hatred and promotes love. And that challenge is always to extend the boundaries of love to include our traditional enemies. If the gospel does not liberate, then Christ died in vain. He died so that all, be they Jew or gentile, could have life in his name.