Nothing burns my butt like watching people who call themselves Christians lashing out at immigrants. Tell me you never crack a Bible without telling me you never crack a Bible.
The Bible is rife with references to welcoming the stranger, in the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the New Testament. But the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 is the chef’s kiss of welcoming the stranger. Jesus, as He so often does, weaves a story that doesn’t give the listener an “out.”
In this parable, a Jew is beaten, robbed, and left for dead by robbers. Two fellow countrymen, a Jewish priest and a Levite, pass him by without a thought to help the beaten man. These were two of the highest positions in the Jewish religion, but they didn’t want to risk becoming “unclean” by touching a corpse, as that would lead to some ceremonial hassles to regain their cleanliness status. So much easier to just go on by, indifferent to whether the robbery victim lived or died.
But then comes the Samaritan. To the Samaritan, the Jew isn’t just a foreigner; he’s the member of a tribe that is the sworn enemy of the Samaritans, Jews being a group that considers Samaritan women perpetually unclean and the men to be not real descendants of Abraham because of the Samaritans’ intermarriage with Assyrians. (Some scholars think that the Jews returning from Babylon had conducted as much intermarriage, but they used it as an excuse for hating Samaritans.)
But the Samaritan doesn’t pay any attention to the enmity between the two peoples. Not only does the Good Samaritan rescue the Jew, the Samaritan pays for the man’s lodging and health care, unlike the other two. And Luke ends thusly:
Verse 36: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
Verse 37: The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Jesus couldn’t be more clear. We have a duty to refugees, naturally. But we have a duty to immigrants, even if they come from countries that we don’t like. We are to do likewise, to be like the Good Samaritan, not the callous priest or Levite.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most famous stories in the entire Bible; how can so many people get it so wrong?
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