Disgusted by a Good Samaritan

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.