by James Gregory of Crediton Congregational Church

ONE of the best known stories from the Bible is the parable of the Good Samaritan.

It is such a good story that even though widely known it is still worth retelling.

A man is mugged, beaten, and left to die at the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

Two religious types come along that road but neither feel inclined to help him. That’s the thing with us religious types, we might talk the talk but we don’t always walk the walk.

Maybe we convince ourselves that our inhumanity is okay if it’s dressed up in a self-righteous religious identity?

A third man comes riding his donkey along that road. This man is from Samaria.

He sees the injured man and unlike those religious types he gets off his ass and does something to help (pun intended…).

He soothes and bandages the injured man’s wounds and takes him to a safe place where he makes provision for his ongoing care.

At this point in the story our inner dialogue is insisting that we are indeed the sort of people who would help in the way that the good Samaritan did: we are not like those callous religious types!

But the real gem of the story is deeper still: The injured man and the two who refused to help him shared a religion and a country, but the man who helped the victim practiced a different religion and was from another country – and, as is sadly often the case, these two communities shared a deep mutual distrust, even hatred.

HAZY

The historical founding of the Samaritan nation is hazy. By 740 BC the northern kingdom of Israel had been taken into captivity.

It seems these exiles assimilated into the culture of their captors and most never returned home.

The people who filled their previous homeland became known as the Samaritans. They adopted many of the customs and practices of the Jews who had lived there previously but it seems these beliefs and rituals evolved and changed over time and no longer fell within the boundaries of "correct" religion.

The Samaritans were hated because they believed and did some similar things to the Jews but in ways that were not orthodox.

NEW RELIGION

Consider another new religion: In the 7th Century AD a 40-year old Arab started having visions of God and came to believe that there were not many gods, as his countrymen thought, but just one.

Moreover, he became convinced that this God had spoken through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus and that their lives and teachings were to be trusted.

He felt compelled to pass on what he had learned to his friends and neighbours. But could he ask them to follow and worship this God? He did not become a Christian because the Roman Christians were oppressing his people - to join their religion would be an act of treason which would undermine his message to his compatriots.

Instead he articulated a new vision of monotheistic faith which many of his people came to find compelling. Sadly, the relations between this new religion and the other monotheistic religions that preceded it quickly soured. This man was named Mohammed and his new faith, Islam.

SIMILARITIES

Can you see the many similarities between the Samaria/Israel relationship and the relationship of Islam to Christianity?

Two pairs of religions that share some beliefs and common history but who experience their differences as profoundly unsettling and threatening.

Jesus wanted his followers to know that mercy may come from the most unexpected places. So, He told them about a follower of a religion they feared, from a nation they distrusted, saving the life of one of their own.

In this way, He re-humanises the other, making the one we considered an everlasting enemy into a potential friend. Jesus’s parable drives right into the heart of our destructive us-and-them thinking, opening us up to the gifts that our neighbour-who-is-not-like-us brings.

My conclusion is perhaps obvious: How would we retell this story today? Who would be the main characters? Who would Jesus like us to imagine as a modern-day Good Samaritan? Perhaps it would be a woman in a burka?

What practical lesson do we learn from these observations? Of all the people who should be opposing the way Muslims are sometimes being dehumanised today, shouldn’t followers of Jesus be the first in line?