Random thought brought on by seeing a veterinarian sign on the drive to Coffee Land, but I think Jesus would really appreciate people localizing his parable of the Good Samaritan.
Because, like, it's a good story, right? When the administrator-guy and the holy man wouldn't help the injured, the Samaritan went out of their way to make sure the injured man was able to get the help they needed, paid out of their own pocket. And that's good and all, but what even is a Samaritan? Do you know?
Well, they're a ethnoreligious group from northern Israel who follow Samaritanism, which split from Judaism sometime around the 11th century BCE. There's only about a thousand of them left. But around the time of Jesus, they were not very popular with your average Hebrew. Remember the Seleucid empire that was oppressing jews? There's a yearly celebration about it, involving a candle that lasted for 8 nights. Yeah. So at the time the Samaritans had taken the opportunity to point out they're not Jewish, they're Samaritans, so they wouldn't be persecuted. So they were seen as, like, selling out their brothers and sisters in the faith. Then by the time the Romans took over the whole area, the province of Judaea contained Samaria.
So basically the Jews and the seen-to-have-sold-them-out Samaritans were stuck in the same province, thanks to some Romans consolidating the areas they'd conquered. Tensions between the two groups were high, and I don't imagine either of them liked each other very much at all.
To a Jew of the first century CE, a Samaritan is basically the worst kind of person you could be, and that's exactly why Jesus used them in the parable of the Good Samaritan!
The parable isn't about Samaritans. It's about how the worst person you can imagine is a better person than the people you idolize and uplift, if that person takes care of their fellow man. It's about how you should love your neighbor as yourself, and who is your neighbor? Everyone. All people are your neighbors. Help them when they need help!
And that's why I say it should really be localized. You should tell this parable differently than it was told in AD 29 or whenever. Do you hate Samaritans? Probably not! You probably barely know who they are, even after I did some explaining up there. So why use them as your example? If Jesus was here, I don't think he would have done that.
So like, if you were giving a sermon on the good Samaritan in the 1960s to a white church, you should be like "so the policeman walked past, and the pastor walked past, but then a poor black guy saw the injured man, and got him help at the local hospital."
In the 80s, his rescuer is Soviet. In the 2000s, they're a Muslim, from Afghanistan or Iran.
Today? Maybe they're trans.
As an American, there's been many times that "Mexican" would have been the best choice. Maybe even today, especially if you specifically make them an undocumented migrant.
But yeah, the point is that you pick the group of people most hated by the audience you're talking to, and make the point that THEY ARE A BETTER PERSON THAN YOU and ALL THOSE YOU UPHOLD AS PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY if they help their fellow man. If your worst enemy is lying injured in the street, you call the ambulance, you pay their doctor, you get them help. That's what Jesus says you should do. That's loving your neighbor, that's the Great Commandment.
And in the Roman province of Judea back in the first half of the first century, when talking to a Jewish audience, that meant the rescuer was a Samaritan helping a Jew. That was just the context for that one particular telling of the story. It shouldn't be told the same way today, or in the future. It should be an evolving parable, always changing, always adjusting the nationalities and situations and genders and everything. It's not a story about a specific event, it doesn't pretend to be history, it's a metaphorical lesson about what makes you a good person.
This parable is basically in the form of an "X, Y and Z walk into a bar" joke, and just like jokes, it should be updated over time. Those don't stay funny though the decades, as cultural attitudes shift. And this parable hasn't been updated in nearly two millenia, so it's long overdue.
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