Calling All Samaritans

I expect no one will read this, seeing as how I haven't updated in almost a year, but I have to write anyway.

We did the parable of the Good Samaritan in church today, and quite wonderful it was. I got intrigued when the pastor began describing how Samaritans were viewed by the Jews. Oh, I knew the two groups hated each other - loathed each other - despised each other; I didn't fully understand why.

You see, the Samaritans were simply not good enough. They were the bastards, the half-breed descendents of Jews who had compromised the true faith. Some synagogues would close their services with a prayer that God would exclude the Samaritans at the resurrection - basically, "Damn them, O Lord." Worse than pagans, these people had known the true faith but adulterated it almost beyond recognition.

At least, according to the Jews.

It occured to me to wonder what sort of unholy practices these Samaritans accepted. Perhaps they embraced the legitimacy of other faiths. Perhaps they accepted homosexuals. Perhaps they allowed women a place of power. Perhaps they despised the self-righteous hypocrisy rampant among the Pharisees and Sadduccees of the day. Perhaps they simply challenged the status quo.

Probably not.

But still. The Jews had a violent hatred of the Samaritans because they regarded them as second-class, illegitimate members of the same faith; the Samaritans had a violent hatred of the Jews in response. It sounds awfully familiar. It sounds, in fact, like Christianity in modern America, where anyone much to the left is a heretic and anyone much to the right is a fanatic - at least in the eyes of whoever speaks. Having moved to the left of the traditions in which I was raised, I feel very much like a Samaritan at times. And hatred of the self-righteous can get so very, very easy.

So I want to issue a call to all Samaritans: Let's see how we can imitate the Good Samaritan. So we are despised, rejected, hated; so what? We still follow a God who calls us to respond to hate with love, to bigotry with charity, to coldness with warmth. And that call does not extend only to those outside the faith, but to those so far in that they're heading out the other side. And perhaps we can remember that while Jesus spent a lot of time attacking the Pharisees and teachers of the law, while His only encounters with Samaritans were friendly ones, He nonetheless considered Himself a Jew and not a Samaritan. There is a place between fanaticism and heresy.

Oh, and that great line from the movie Luther: "It is easier to hate evil than to love good." But not better.