The Good Samaritan and the Blessing of Uncertainty

A Sunday School illustration of the
Good Samaritan. Click to enlarge.

I remember countless pastel-colored Sunday School pamphlets in my childhood containing depictions of the Good Samaritan parable, from Luke’s Gospel. They always contained a fair-skinned man lying beside the road, usually with remarkably little blood, despite the injuries he sustained at the hands of robbers. They usually also contained images of a priest and Levite in silken robes, ostentatiously looking anywhere other than that wounded man.

These pamphlets usually moralistically proclaimed how the priest and Levite had the forms of religion, without the spirit. Good people, these lessons intoned, would never walk past a wounded person without stopping for help. And maybe that’s true. But the older I get, the less comfortable I become with considering that the final word. Because, in choosing a Samaritan as the model “neighbor,” I believe Jesus touched on something deeper.

As Obery M. Hendricks writes, the temple priesthood was deputized to perform actual governance in Roman Judea. While the largest number of Jews were an occupied people, taxed and beholden to Roman military might, priests had greater autonomy, because they professed loyalty to ha-Shem, but obedience to Rome. Thus, like many of today’s megachurch pastors, priests cosplayed at piety, but showed first love to the occupying authority.

Therefore, their lives had a nominal level of certainty. Unlike Mary and Joseph, the priests probably wouldn’t find themselves uprooted for tax purposes. They probably wouldn’t have their lands expropriated to repay somebody else’s debts. If they traveled that storied road from Jerusalem to Jericho, they probably didn’t travel alone, despite what Sunday School pamphlets depicted; they probably had a retinue of bodyguards and functionaries at all times.

The priest and Levite weren’t just religious leaders; they were political and economic leaders too. They were the middle class of Roman Judea, the people who weren’t really free, but had the trappings of prosperity because they complied with an imposed social order. They bought into the system, and the system rewarded them by letting them feel superior to those who didn’t buy in. Their power was transient, but it was theirs.

Unfortunately, then as now, that level of socioeconomic certainty wasn’t permanent. One bad choice, one show of weakness, could yank it away. Dr. King himself called the road from Jerusalem to Jericho “a winding, meandering road….really conducive for ambushing.” Perhaps the bandits who left that nameless Jew bleeding beside the highway were still there. Maybe they deliberately left that man as bait for the tenderhearted.

For anybody wanting to live, leaving that man there isn’t an unreasonable action. The priest and Levite had economic security in an insecure time. They had power among an occupied nation. Why risk squandering it because this fool went, unaccompanied, along a road famous for being dangerous? The priest and Levite had too much to live for. Leaving that unfortunate wreck was a fair price for continued certainty.

That Samaritan, however, had no such certainty, simply by being a Samaritan. If Jews were occupied and oppressed by Rome, then Samaritans were occupied and oppressed by Jews. Throughout the Gospels, the word “Samaritan” is synonymous with somebody who has nothing left to lose: the Woman at the Well, the one leper among ten. Because modern Christians encounter the word “Samaritan” coupled with the word “Good,” we’ve forgotten its origins.

“Samaritan” is the N-word of ancient Judea.

While the priest and Levite kept walking, lest something unplanned interrupt their socioeconomic certainty, the Samaritan, in his uncertainty, stopped. He had no further guarantee than anyone else that those bandits wouldn’t reemerge, intent for second helpings. But his uncertainty, his lack of absolute worldly foundations, gave him authority enough to overcome whatever fears might’ve possessed him, and do right.

Many White Christians today think faith alone protects them. We saw this recently, when many thought Jesus would protect them from COVID-19. But Christians have no such certainty. Doing right by the powerless has cost numerous Christians their lives: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and innumerable less-famous Christians have met their fates because they chose uncertainty over power. That Samaritan loved enough to overcome his limited worldly comforts.

This judgment covers me, too. I know I use my house, books, and job as justifications to avoid sticking my neck out. I love the limited amount of certainty the world extends me, as compensation for being White, male, and willing to comply. This tells me I need a new, countercultural prayer: I need God to offer me the strength to be uncertain, and in my uncertainty, to act.