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The story of the good Samaritan is perhaps the most misunderstood of all Jesus' parables. We've lost sight, over the nineteen centuries since Jesus told it, of its real impact. Since we're not familiar with the original context in which its hearers heard it, we've seen it reduced to a good neighbor story, a Boy Scout doing a good deed a day, a driver stopping to help a little old lady change a flat tire. The emphasis is on the good Samaritan, the one who stops to help. Although that's a wonderful value to impress on our young people -- helping neighbors in need -- that wasn't where the original focus was.


You see, the impact was on the hearers. They were suddenly exposed -- very suddenly and abruptly exposed -- to the reality, to the presence of the Kingdom of God. They had thought this Kingdom or rule of God in each person's life was coming, but when Jesus confronted them with parables such as this one, they found that it had arrived, had caught them off guard, caught them sleeping like the servants who didn't stay awake while waiting for their master to return.


First, let me say something about the Kingdom of God. The thing folks were waiting for was the coming of the Kingdom. You know, 'Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done.' In this case Kingdom means something like the kingship or the rule or the sovereignty of God in each person's life. And isn't that what we'd like to see? Each person in a relationship with God as his or her ruler, each voluntarily serving God, each seriously seeking to do God's will?


Of course, there are other images that go along with the Kingdom of God. The lion will lie down with the lamb; we will beat our swords into plowshares and share our fields rather than fight over them; there will be peace, justice, righteousness. But it's all based on the whole of creation being in right relationship with the Creator. Obviously there are a lot of things that will have to change for that to be realized.


Where do Jesus and his parables come into this? Well, I think Jesus knew that people's thinking was in a rut. They thought that the pecking order was fixed and unchangeable, that there could be nothing new under the sun (as the writer of Ecclesiastes said). It was like our thinking when we organized this country. Only men could vote. Who would ever have thought there was anything wrong with that? It was assumed that women not having the right to vote was fixed, correct, acceptable. It took many decades for that to be challenged.


The same was true of slavery. For economic reasons, or for whatever other reasons, for the longest time many people believed that it was acceptable to own another person. That idea persisted until the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.


Likewise, Jesus realized that his hearers thought the social order was fixed, set in stone, unchangeable. He realized they believed that the lion had the right to kill and eat the lamb. And when he realized the plight of his hearers, Jesus thought, 'I can confront them with parables and show them there is another way to work out the lion/lamb relationship and other relationships -- that the Kingdom of God is not just a dream, but that it is actually at hand, upon us, in our midst.' So he used parables, little stories which kept the hearers' interest, then suddenly sprang a point on them, confronting them with the possibility of a new reality, a new creation, a new hope for the world.


Parables work like the punch line of a modern joke. For example, someone asks, 'Have you heard the one about the dummy who said ‘No'?' And before you can stop and think, you answer 'No' -- and you suddenly realize, all in a split second, that you're caught, that you are, in fact, the dummy who has said 'No.' The joke's on you. You're confronted with a new reality, because in the moment before you weren't a dummy, and suddenly you've proven that you are. Reality has changed in a split second. Things aren't as you thought they were.


In Zen Buddhism there's a word, a concept, satori. It means 'the little point.' It's got to do with staring, for example, at a rose or a fly on the wall as you meditate, concentrating on one tiny point in the universe. As Westerners, we'd figure that, if we want to understand the world and ourselves in relation to it, we'd look at the world, at the larger picture. But to the Easterner, one begins to understand oneself in relation to the world by narrowing, not by widening, one's focus. To the Easterner, narrowing the focus is like concentrating all the energy into a laser. There's more, not less, power. We see it in the haiku poem, a compressed image which is designed to unfold and reveal its meaning.


The satori then, is that moment of heightened awareness, that explosion of understanding, what we call the 'Aha!' moment or the 'Eureka!' experience that comes out of focusing on the little point. It's like a tightly compressed hand grenade of awareness exploding in the mind. That realization, that sudden awareness that the world can be different than it appears -- that which Social Darwinists call the 'natural order of things' can be changed, that there can be peace in a world of war and violence -- that realization of the possibility of the present Kingdom of God is what Jesus confronts his hearers with. His parable springs it on them, and it leaves some of them with their heads spinning.


In the Parable of the good Samaritan, we must realize that the question is asked by a young lawyer, an expert on the religious law. He's wondering how far his obligation to 'love your neighbor as yourself' must extend. In other words, tell me the persons I'm required to love so that I can inherit eternal life, and, by God, I'll be sure to love them. 'Just give me a list, Jesus, and I'll fulfill my end.'


But the man is looking for limits, and Jesus believes the commandment to love the neighbor is about love without limits. We don't just love whites or males or heterosexuals or working class people or church members. But keep in mind, too, that although the question-asker is a curious lawyer trying to justify himself -- to make sure he accomplishes the checklist of 'neighbor-loving' so he's 'right' with God so he can get into the Kingdom of Heaven (see, he thinks it's a place you go to) -- although the question-asker is a lawyer trying to see how far he must extend himself, the people who are crowding around to listen to this exchange are pious Jews.


For them there's a pecking order. Things are fixed. The clergy -- here represented by priests and indirectly by Levites -- would be the ones you'd surely expect to help someone. After that you'd work down to a Jewish lay person, someone who would probably help a stranded traveler. At any rate, the story Jesus tells would have given his hearers a delightful and entertaining surprise if he had let the priest and the Levite pass by the man in the ditch, and then had a Jewish lay person stop. It would have seemed somewhat heroic, and the hearers might have felt good about themselves. But then it would have been just a nice little story.


We need to know that the pious Jews despised Samaritans -- not disliked, but avoided them almost under penalty of death. To the Jews, the Samaritans were the scum of the earth. Now recall the story. A Jew, and probably a pious Jew (since he is traveling to Jericho from Jerusalem), is set upon by robbers, stripped of everything, and left in a ditch to die. Along comes a priest, and the hearers think: a religious man like a priest will surely help a pious Jew in distress. But he doesn't; instead, the priest sees him, crosses to the other side of the road, and passes by. Next comes another person, a Levite, who was a designated lay associate of the priest. That's sort of an unordained lay pastor. He also sees the pious Jew in the ditch, crosses the road, and passes by.


It's now that Jesus' listeners expect to hear the master storyteller introduce a Jewish lay person, so that lay person can be a hero and help. But Jesus then says, along came a Samaritan -- the despised enemy, not only of the Jew in the ditch, but the despised enemy of the Jews who are listening to Jesus' story. They're appalled. And not only does the Samaritan stop, but he goes a step further by binding up the Jew's wounds, putting the man on his own donkey, and taking him to a place of lodging where he cares for him. The next day he leaves money with the innkeeper for extended care, promising he'll pay even more if there is additional care required.


Jesus' hearers must be astonished. They are suddenly confronted with two words that seemingly cannot work together -- good and Samaritan. Good Samaritan? And can you imagine the shift in thinking required of the Jew in the ditch who looks up and sees, through his fogginess and pain, a Good Samaritan? That certainly must challenge the wounded Jew's presuppositions.


But Jesus doesn't just leave those hearers hanging. you see, Jesus wants them to commit themselves in the story the way we did when we fell for the punchline of the dummy-who-said-no joke. Remember, it was then, when we found ourselves committed, that we truly found ourselves part of a changed reality.


In the Bible passage, Jesus has described this new reality, this image of possibility, of hope, this potential called the Kingdom of God. But he has to get his listeners to participate in it -- even if just for a moment. They have to see and experience that there is indeed a far, far better way, a more excellent way -- that the Kingdom of God isn't far off, that the Kingdom is a present as well as a potential reality. He's set it up, like the joke about the dummy who said 'no'… but he hasn't gotten the dummies to say 'no' yet, to fall in and find themselves confronted with a new reality, with a present Kingdom of God.


Now remember… the lawyer's original question was: 'Who is my neighbor?' It looked as if we were going to figure out whether the man in the ditch qualified as a neighbor whom we'd be required to help. But Jesus, in the punchline, recasts the question, redirects it, and asks, not: 'Was that injured man a needy neighbor?' but: 'Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?' Of course, since the answer is obvious, the lawyer quickly answers, 'The one who showed mercy on him.' And probably most of the other listeners, that crowd of pious Jews, were nodding their heads right along with the lawyer.


Just at that point it must have struck them -- and some of them must have had very puzzled looks appear on their faces, as the question came to mind -- 'Did I just agree that there may be such a thing as a Good Samaritan?' For some of them there's an inrush of understanding, of hope, of a possible new reality called the Kingdom of God. Suddenly the world doesn't have to be the way they thought it had to be. Maybe the lion can lie down with the lamb. Maybe the weapons of war can be turned into plows. Maybe there can truly be peace and harmony. What a thought, eh? It's the satori, 'the little point' that suddenly explodes and provides understanding and meaning. Wow!


Maybe when we hear the story of the Good Samaritan, if we are to truly hear it as something other than a Boy Scout good-deed story, we need to hear it in a modern context. Robert McAfee Brown suggests that Americans hear it as a 'Good Russian' parable -- with a person (an 'undocumented worker') getting mugged and left for dead in a ditch only to be passed by a Presbyterian minister, then by the head of a social service agency. Finally an atheistic Russian woman clerk from the Russian embassy stops and plays the Good Samaritan.1


That fresh image may work, but I think it might work even better if Jesus went to a Ku Klux Klan rally and they asked him whom they had to include as neighbors. Jesus then might tell the parable, having the Grand Master of the Klan crash into a ditch only to be passed over by a bigoted white sheriff and a bigoted white minister who had frequently bought drinks for him. Finally, along would come a black sharecropper playing the part of the Good Samaritan.


How do you think the hearers at the Ku Klux Klan meeting would respond when Jesus asked, 'Which of the three proved to be the good neighbor?' They'd suddenly find themselves pairing together the words 'good' and 'black.' 'The good black person.' And how would they deal with that topsy-turvy reality?


A present day example may help. It very much illustrates one individual's satori experience, a time when the punchline exploded and created a sudden, breathtaking awareness of the possibilities of the Kingdom of God. Dee Horn, a school teacher, tells about taking her class on a trip to Paris:


We ten hungry Americans grabbed food at a French Street cafe just as it was closing down. An hour later, stomachs churning, we decided to find the hotel where our luggage had been delivered and dig out our medicine kits. The luggage was there, but the rooms were full.


A sweating tour guide handed us a scrawled address and called cabs to take our group (nine high school students and a teacher) to another hotel.


One of the students had already begun vomiting. We had no time to question, no time to complain, no time to demand.


Directors could have grabbed cameras and made a movie to remember at the site of the second hotel. There was a shabby background, obvious clientele, red llghts in windows blinking off and on.


The logic in my brain said: We should leave this place. You could be sued, cut out of teaching forever.


But the churning action of my stomach said. You have no other place. Stay here. Even parents will understand.


The stomach won.


Inside, the night desk clerk wore the uniform of a supervising call girl of the streets of France… spangled, fluffy, overbright advertisement proclaiming, What you see is what you get.


Her face told me two things: She was the Madam of the house, and I could relax. She turned and yelled upstairs in colorful French that can be loosely translated, 'Hey, sisters, turn off those lights. We have real cow manure down here. Come fast and help.'


For days we vomited our way through memories of Gay Paree. Those women headed out to local stores for medicines and soups, washed filthy towels, cleaned odorous rooms, hummed songs to help us sleep. As my teenaged men gained health, they tried a pass or two. But the passes were returned by lectures -- lectures to curl teeth and make eyeballs roll. Those boys didn't try again.


When the tour bus came to pick us up, our tears were real. They took no funds to pay for all they'd spent. Through the translator they said, 'Send cards. We want to know when you are safe at home.'


Until that trip, I guess I thought just grandmothers and lifelong friends know how to help. People must be 'pure' to do real good. The kids and I have changed our thoughts. From our experiences with strangers who became our family in France, we know that goodness also comes from unexpected places.2


I'm not sure just what might give us that sudden flash of understanding, that Aha! moment which unexpectedly and almost violently fills us with a sense of possibility, of the presence of the Kingdom of God. After all, we may believe, as those pious Jews who were listening to Jesus believed, that we are the brothers and sisters of the household of faith, that we are the chosen people, the privileged people of God.


What would strike us like that Good Samaritan parable, confronting us suddenly as a flash of insight, a vision of the present reality of the Kingdom of God? Maybe to see that the nourishment, the true bread of life isn't always provided by the minister or the church-going lay assistant. Maybe we need to have Communion served by a lesbian, or to be cared for in our illnesses by a house of prostitutes, or to receive lifesaving CPR from a person with AIDS. In our need, in our life together on this planet, we need to discover ourselves suddenly ministered to by an unexpected neighbor, a neighbor we either hate or fear -- a Communist, an atheist, a black, or a homosexual. I don't know. But let's stop looking for limits, for checklists detailing whom we must love and whom we can exclude. Instead, let us be neighbors. And let us be open to the present reality of the Kingdom of God.


1. Robert McAfee Brown, unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Philadelphia Westminster, 1984).
2. Dee Horn, in Alive Now, MarchlApril 1988, pp. 12-13 used by permission.