 |
| Ferdinand Hodler's Good Samaritan |
So in the name of “full disclosure” I personally was not
disgusted by a Good Samaritan, but I think somebody else was. We tend to think
that Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan was a story of how to treat others
kindly (as good as that may be) as if the Samaritan is our role model, but
Jesus wasn’t actually answering the question of how to treat others
kindly. He was answering the question “who
is my neighbor?” and he goes about answering it in a radically significant way.
Anatomy of Disgust
There is an
aspect in the science of human behavior to help us understand what Jesus was
doing especially since the stigma he exposes is ever-present. Though the psychology of disgust was not a
developed theory in first-century Palestine, Jesus managed to addresses it very
well. Richard Beck actually presents this idea in his book Unclean in relation to other sayings and parables Jesus infuriated
others with, but it also applies to the Samaritan. Beck’s definition of disgust
is that it is a psychological boundary that marks objects, ideas, or persons as
exterior, alien and therefore unclean.[1]
He helps us
to understand this idea through something called the “Dixie Cup” test. The test is to imagine being asked to spit
into a Dixie cup and then asked to drink the spit. How would that make you feel? Most people are automatically disgusted by
the thought of drinking their own spit even though it was not so bothersome when
it was saliva in their mouth, but as soon as it is outside one’s mouth it gets
a new name and the feeling of uncleanness and disgust arise.[2] We might have similar feelings occur when we
find a hair in our food or are asked to consume a foreign dish containing bugs
or worms, both healthy alternatives to processed foods, yet some become
disgusted.
The expulsive aspect of disgust,
however, does not begin and end with oral issues or food but extends itself to
the stimuli of gore, deformity, hygiene as-well-as sociomoral disgusts like
moral offenses and particular social groups.
Some of these boundaries can become problematic and worrisome. “Whenever
disgust regulates our experience of holiness or purity we will find this
expulsive element… The worry, obviously, comes when people are the object of
expulsion, when social groups (religious or political) seek purity by purging
themselves through social scapegoating.”[3]
The Parable
With this in mind, Jesus then tells
the “Good Samaritan” story to a Jewish lawyer who wants to know who he should consider
his neighbor. Jesus tells about a man
who had been robbed, beaten up and left for dead on the road (Lk.
10:25-37). As he tells about the Jewish
Priest and Levite purposely avoiding the man in the road, this lawyer would
have probably made excuses for them. He
identified with them and knew the Jewish law and vows they were bound to as it
was considered unclean to touch someone who might be dead… or pagan. However, when the Samaritan passed by and
stopped to help, much racist tension would have probably arisen within the lawyer
because the two groups had a long-standing feud and disgust toward one another. Now the lawyer has put himself in the place
of the man in the road. His thought process
might have look liked him seeing the Samaritan as a dirty, long-nosed, sub-human,
pagan that has no business breathing the same air as him let alone touching him,
even if it was to save his life. This was an unacceptable gesture. Suddenly, this Jewish lawyer has to face the
idea that this ethnic group he and his country-men are at odds with is his
neighbor. This social class his religious leaders had taught him were unclean he
is now commanded to love.
However, this would not have only
been limited to the Jewish lawyer, but would have crossed the sensitive
boundaries of disgust for most of Jesus’ listeners who thought of Samaritans as
unclean and alien. The previous goal was
to set them on the outside marginalizing them, not call them neighbor and
interact with them on a personal level. A
scandal for sure!
When we answer this question in our
personal spheres we might be disgusted to think that we too have Samaritans Jesus
is calling our neighbor and are worthy of our love. Common tensions to consider
might be U.S. citizens and illegal Mexicans, blacks and police, or even
right-winged Evangelicals and the LGBTQ community. Outside the US it could be Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine and on it
goes. Or, perhaps it’s less radical than these and it is a person you are
critical of or a person who disagrees with you. The point is that we should walk away from the Good Samaritan asking ourselves what Samaritans have we drawn boundaries of disgust with? Then consciously remove those boundaries because they are our neighbor.
[1] Richard Beck. Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality
and Mortality (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books 2011), 2.
[2] Ibid, 1.
[3] Ibid, 16.
