Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) by Cahill Thomas

Author:Cahill, Thomas [Cahill, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307755100
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

It is fair to say that there is no teaching of Jesus with wider currency than this story of the Good Samaritan, who makes his only appearance in Luke’s Gospel. There is no cause to think that Luke made the story up and put it in Jesus’s mouth. Its accurate Palestinian setting—the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, which was indeed perilous—all but forbids such a conclusion. More than this, the parable of the Good Samaritan is of a piece with the most basic substrate of Jesus’s teachings: the obligation of kindness to everyone and anyone who falls across my path, especially someone in trouble.

But we may posit a reason why Mark and Matthew, evangelists closely associated with Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora, failed to include this story. The Jews despised the sectarian Samaritans, who possessed the Torah but not the Prophets and who worshiped not in the Jerusalem Temple but on Mount Gerizim to the north. There is no hatred so intense as odium theologicum—hatred for those nearby who are religiously similar to oneself but nonetheless different. Through the ages, Christians, for instance, have been far more hateful to Jews, to Muslims, and to one another than they have ever been to Buddhists and Hindus. The Samaritans were the neighboring heretics; and for them the Jews reserved a contempt they did not display even toward gentiles. Is it not possible that Mark and Matthew felt they could overlook this one example of Jesus’s teaching on universal kindness (after all, they already had so many others), since a Samaritan as the model of Christ-like behavior would rub so many Jewish Christians the wrong way?

But Luke’s gentile Christians needed to be reassured that there was more than one way to be Christ-like, more than one path that could be taken if you would follow in the footsteps of the Master. You needn’t be a born Jew, raised in the traditions of the ancestors. There was no background that was unthinkable: it was even possible to be something as freaky as a Samaritan. As we stand now at the entrance to the third millennium since Jesus, we can look back over the horrors of Christian history, never doubting for an instant that if Christians had put kindness ahead of devotion to good order, theological correctness, and our own justifications—if we had followed in the humble footsteps of a heretical Samaritan who was willing to wash someone else’s wounds, rather than in the self-regarding steps of the priest and the immaculate steps of the levite—the world we inhabit would be a very different one.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is followed immediately by a scene from Jesus’s life that only Luke recounts. Jesus enters a village where friends of his, Martha and Mary, have a home. While Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he had to say,” Martha “was distracted by her many household tasks.” At length, Martha, feeling sharply the inequity of the situation, upbraids Jesus: “Sir,

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