– James Tissot, Le bon samaritain
This most famous parable, even though it is probably the one most familiar to everyone, remains a deep and beautiful mystery.
It is mystery – not in being unknown or secret, but that overwhelming and quiet sense that we’re touching upon a vast, fathomless Reality. In Orthodoxy, the Great Mysteries are like cosmic icebergs – what we know about is the tip that rises above the water, but below, submerged in the blue bottomless depths is that real enormous mass of the berg: hundreds, thousands of times greater than what can be seen and measured.
We can better appreciate the Mysterious dimension of the Parable of the Good Samaritan – and how it is related so intimately with Christmas – by thinking about a few questions:
Who is the Good Samaritan?
Who is my neighbor?
Who is the priest or the Levite?
Who are the robbers?
Who is the man who got beat up, robbed, stripped naked, and left for dead in a gutter?
As far as the last two questions are concerned, most of the Orthodox fathers, writing on this parable, say that the victim represents the human soul. The robbers are the passions that darken the soul and deform human nature, weakening and corrupting it.
This is a true interpretation, and is not to be disregarded. But it is not the only one.
There is another complementary interpretation as well.
Indeed, the victim in this parable could be you or me or anyone else. And that’s just it. It is not just the “soul” or the self – it is the other.
That is, it is your neighbor.
And the robbers?
We need to pay attention to not only what the Parable says, but also to what it does not say. Nowhere does the Lord mention that the victim did anything to deserve being robbed. He was simply and innocently on his way to Jericho, minding his own business.
There is no hint of fault or moral irresponsibility here, which would seem to be necessary for the onset of sinful passion -- i.e., the "psychopathological" interpretation.
So the robbers who rob and beat and abandon, abandoning the victim for dead, may be just and only a hard symbol of the cruelties of life.
In the fallen world, life can get harsh and especially unmerciful. All around us, caught along the wayside, the highways and byways, tangled in the hedges, are those who’ve been “beaten up by life.”
This is the repeated and very clear theme of the Psalms. King David, the Shepherd Poet, wrote frequently – and I mean a lot – about being beset by the “enemy,” being beaten up, lacerated and bruised, and abandoned. He lamented that no one came to help, that those he had counted on for friendship either failed to show up or even ended up playing him falsely.
“Have regard, O God, for Your covenant,” David prayed, “for the dark places of the earth are full of the houses of cruelty” (Psalm 73.20 LXX).
Recall that Jesus Himself was steeped in the Psalms. From boyhood, the Psalms was His Prayerbook, His Hymnal, His theological text. Indeed, the Psalms came ultimately from Him in eternity and through the Holy Spirit to David and the Prophets.
But as a human and Jewish Boy, Jesus sang it and memorized it and the Psalms passed into the deep layers of His human mind.
And thus you can find the Psalms everywhere in His words – in the Beatitudes, in the Lord’s Prayer, and in every single one of His Parables.
It is impossible to interpret the Gospels without the Psalms running constantly in one’s mind.
The victim left by the wayside is simply anyone that we might come upon. Someone that you know about. Someone that you recognized as being beat up by the cruelties of life. Someone beset by the Enemy. It is really not our immediate business to determine just who or what that Enemy is: whether it is demonic, foolishness, cultural or natural catastrophe, or completely irrational and unknown.
This sort of premature "theological pathologizing" may be essentially what the Lord is condemning when He denounced judgementalism so often.
It’s not for us to determine how they got beat up, or whether it’s their fault or whether they deserved it. It’s not even up to us to “lift up the hood” and to try to figure out what passions have left them in such a state. It's not for us to ask "Who sinned that this man was born blind?"
The robbers in this Parable are “whatever in life” left our neighbor in such a tragic condition. Our neighbor is either someone like us or unlike us, even “the other.”
In any case, though, our neighbor is obviously, according to the Parable’s own terms, someone other than you or me. Our neighbor is our fellow human, our fellow bearer of the Image of God.
Which means that “all of humanity” comprises the Neighborhood, and every human being is our Neighbor. “Inasmuch as ye have done unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it also unto Me” (Matthew 25.40).
This is a Parable less about interiority or introspection: it is a Parable about love, about kenosis (i.e., pouring out ourselves in self-sacrifice), about servanthood. According to the Lord's own terms in this Parable, the victim is not ourselves, but other than self. The victim is our neighbor -- whether or not we recognize him or her as such, whether or not we recognize the world and all of humanity, even creation, as the "neighborhood."
As we should.
The Good Samaritan Parable is about the giving of mercy. It is rather less about psychopathology.
Here’s the pivot, the “eu-catastrophe” of this Great Story. Here is the Mystery that has been thundering in the deep:
If humanity, beaten up by the fallen world, is the victim, the “man fallen by the wayside,” then who is the Good Samaritan?
Well, obviously, the Son of God. Jesus Himself. He bathed our wounds – deserved or undeserved – with the sweet oil of His mercy. He set us upon His beast of burden – all the prophets and the apostles and saints who established His covenant and His Gospel – and took us to the Inn, which is obviously the Church.
What happened at Bethlehem was the great Good Samaritan Who came – and Alone, He recognized our pain, our poverty, our lostness in the darkness.
From Bethlehem to Nazareth, to the desert temptation, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, to Hell, to the Empty Tomb, to the Right Hand of the Father.
And at every place He saw you and me, and He didn’t pass by. He stayed, and remains in co-naturality with us. He is truly the Christmas Samaritan.
Let’s do the same.
As the chiefest of Good Samaritans, as the Gift of Christmas, He said, at the end of this Parable: "Go and do likewise."
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