26 - Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI THE GOOD SAMARITAN

Luk 10:25-37, THE question has been raised: Are the riches and poverty of Dives and Lazarus literal or metaphorical? Was Dives just a rich man, or does he represent the middle and upper class Jews “ rich in possession of Moses and the prophets if not in material goods “? Is Lazarus just a poor man, or does he typify the taxgatherers, “just on the threshold of the Jewish Church, yet always outside “? 2

Certainly the Prodigal Son is not intended to teach that the self-centred life always leads to literal starvation; very often it has the opposite result. Nor does anyone imagine that the teaching of the Unjust Steward or the Talents is primarily concerned with money, though both stories centre round the use of money. Yet the Rich Fool is obviously a warning against a wrong attitude to material wealth; and our Lord spoke so much on this subject that there is no reason for regarding the wealth of Dives

1 This parable is treated at much greater length in the last chapter of the author’s “ Jesus and Life “ (Jas. Clarke and Co.).

2 “ Abingdon Bible Commentary,” p. 1030. and the poverty of Lazarus as symbolic. The Good Samaritan enlarges the range of the teaching about the duty of a citizen of the Kingdom to a neighbour. When our neighbour needs our help, not only our pecuniary assistance but our help in any way, it is our business to render that help, asking no questions.

We do not know, it is part of the meaning of the story that we should not inquire as the Samaritan did not inquire, whether the wounded traveller was rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Jew, Gentile or Samaritan; we do not even know whether he was a bad man or a good man. All that the Samaritan saw was that he was a man in need of help. Paul taught that we should do good to all men, especially to those who belong to the home circle of the Faith. Perhaps we have given too much prominence to this limiting ’ especially.” The Prodigal was still a son and a brother even when he was in the far country, with no filial or brotherly thoughts. The priest was going down the road ’ by chance.” Apparently, then, we have to revise our conception of ’ chance.” Chance is our ignorance of God’s arrangement of our lives. The traveller did not know that the priest would come, and the priest did not know that he would see the half-dead traveller. But God knew; God was giving the traveller a chance of help, was giving the priest an opportunity of doing a noble act. Of all the people who came into contact with the traveller that day, the robbers alone sought contact with him. The priest, the Levite and the Samaritan met him in the ordinary course of their work; he was brought to the innkeeper; but the robbers were on the look-out for him or such as he. The Samaritan lived the guided life, accepting such opportunities as God put in his way; but the robbers guided their own lives. They knew what they wanted, and knew how to get it; for the robbers represent the commercial spirit, the spirit which sees in a neighbour only an opportunity for making money. So far as we know, these robbers would have preferred to make money honestly, if they could have made it as easily; in any case assault and murder were only among the accidents of their profession, not its aim. The interest that the commercial spirit takes in us may be limited in its range, but it is astonishingly active. With what obsequiousness are we received, how important are we made to feel, how wise are our most foolish remarks found to be, how readily are our lightest wishes obeyed, when people are trying to persuade us to buy something from them. In our more cynical moods we think of the art of salesmanship as the art of persuading people to buy things they do not want and do not need and cannot afford.

One often thinks of the men engaged in producing the lowest type of newspapers, and especially of those who prepare their news-bills, how the grief, the anxiety, the shame of fellow-citizens mean nothing to them but the possibility of an extra circulation. At its best the commercial spirit, as our wiser merchants have found, may be hardly distinguishable from a genuine desire for service. At its worst, it is pure greed, which, as in the case of the drink-sellers, pursues its aim indefatigably, remorselessly, undeterred by any thought of the consequences in ruined homes and wasted lives, unhampered by any pity or any moral scruple, allowing no consideration to turn them for a moment from man’s chief end, the making of money out of one’s neighbours. When the robbers had got the traveller’s money, and incidentally had nearly killed him, though that was only a by-product of their activities, ’ off they went,” just as, when the farmer’s enemy had sown darnel among the wheat crop, “ off he went.” They had got what they wanted; in the true commercial spirit, they recognized no further relation to their victim.

They had created a problem; anyone who cared might take a hand at solving it; they were no longer interested. As it happened, the first men who got the opportunity to undo some of their work did not take it. Characteristically our Lord makes no excuse for the priest and the Levite. They were entitled to feel a just resentment at the traveller for being alone with moneybags on such a dangerous road. He must have been a suspicious fellow who would not trust a companion, or a secretive person who did not wa,nt anyone to know he had money, or a reckless person who took foolish risks. Why should they have to risk their lives because he had chosen to be a fool? Doubtless also there was fear of defilement in case he was dead or dying. If we are to help only those who are in no way to blame for their misfortunes, then the work of Christian charity will be immensely simplified.

There was much to be said for the priest and the Levite, but Jesus does not say it. Was there justification for singling out the Churchmen of the time for this unenviable distinction? When the stress is put on the ritual and ceremonial side of religion, the moral side is apt to be obscured. One supreme example of this is popular Hinduism, in which the priesthood is a synonym for infinite cruelty and greed. The priests played a large part, perhaps the largest part, in bringing our Lord to his death. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews found in Jewish ceremonial, especially the ritual of the Day of Atonement, symbols of eternal realities in the unseen world. But the Levitical priesthood had no counterpart in his scheme. Jesus was a priest, not after the order of Aaron, but after the order of Melchizedec, the priest of an eternal order, who was a priest in his own right, whose appointment depended on nothing in his lineage, nothing extrinsic. In accordance with the best traditions of the Jewish prophets, Jesus throws all the stress on the moral. For him the Temple was a place of prayer, and that not for the Jew only but for all nations; the synagogue was a place not only for worship but for a healing ministry; the whole distinction of clean and unclean, whether as applied to people or to things, he swept away; sacrifice he hardly mentioned, and never practised; for him the Sabbath was not a burden imposed by lawyers but a gift of God; fasting, if practised at all, was a secret self-discipline; and tithing found its truest expression in the Templeoffering of the widow whose penny that she gave was her last penny. The robbers saw in the traveller a source of gain; for them he had no other interest. The priest and the Levite recognized no relation at all to the traveller; he was outside their orbit; they passed on. The Samaritan saw in the traveller a man who needed his help. As Jesus taught that our forgiveness of those who wrong us must know no limits, the Samaritan’s creed was that the help to be given to a neighbour in need must know no limits. If we ask what he did for the traveller, the answer is that he did everything that the occasion called for. He gave his time; and we can see that he was a busy man with urgent work on hand; he gave his skill and material resources, the ’ first aid ’ of the time; he risked his life, for he also must have been a tempting bait for the robbers; he took trouble, mounting the traveller on his own horse or ass; he gave his money, but not recklessly, all that was needed and no more; he saw the job through, never resting till the traveller was in safe and competent hands; he exercised both thought and fore-thought, and even when the traveller was safe in the inn, he continued to accept responsibility, promising to look in on his return journey. With most of us our goodness is “ goodness limited; ’ here is goodness unlimited, goodness that knows no rest till there is nothing more to be done. The Lord loveth a cheerful giver; the Samaritan was of the noble company of those to be helped by whom is not a humiliation but a joy.

We are often struck by the way in which in our day benevolence has been taken out of the hands of the private individual and entrusted to public bodies, especially to the State. In the complicated life of modern times, the process is inevitable; but is it not destructive of an important Christian grace? The answer we find in this parable. The officials of the time, the priest and the Levite, noticed the wounded traveller; they saw him with their eyes, they did not see him with their hearts. They found in him no call for service; it was the private individual, the despised Samaritan, who realized that here was a piece of work waiting to be done. The Samaritan gave temporary assistance, arranged for the care of the traveller and supplied the funds. Beyond that he could not go; there was a work of nursing to be done for which he had not the time, nor presumably the skill. But the innkeeper was there for the purpose of attending to travellers, sick or well; he had the time, the skill and the apparatus, only he had to be paid for it. Even in the modern State there is abundance of work for the Christian philanthropist; it is for him to find the needy men who require help, to give direction to the work of assistance, to supervise it and, in a measure, to finance it; above all, to ensure that the task of the professionals from beginning to end is carried out in a Christian spirit. The criticism has been made that Christian charity as represented in the Gospels is conceived chiefly as ambulance work, that the follower of Jesus is taught to be more interested in the hospital than in the school, more concerned for wounded travellers than for those who are going about their business; that his relation to men is conceived to arise only when these are famine-stricken or in gaol. That the criticism is superficial is evinced by this, that it is least of all applicable in those regions which are most permeated by the Christian spirit. Our Lord always put the emphasis where, at the time, it most needed to be put; on the pitifully restricted outlook of some priests, for example, or the genuine goodness of some Samaritans. The plight into which multitudes in his day had actually fallen gave them the first claim for help. But what he was inculcating was a new attitude to one’s neighbour, a new conception of who our neighbour is. When this new conception of and new attitude to our neighbour have been learned, it will be as a seed that takes root and becomes a great tree with branches spreading in all directions. The Samaritan will recognize the traveller as his neighbour before he has been attacked by robbers and left half-dead. He will have something to say to the robbers, whose need, it may turn out, is much greater than that of the traveller. He will have a message for the priest and the Levite whose plight, it may be, in God’s sight is the most deplorable of all. In all the story the name of God is not mentioned, nor is there any hint of the source of the Samaritan’s goodness; but Luke follows the parable with the story of Martha and Mary.

Martha too was a Good Samaritan; but the best of Good Samaritans need to have their goodness replenished at the fountain. When the Master speaks, they must needs listen.