The Good Samaritan: Explaining a Story Jesus Told

This Sunday, the Gospel Reading was The Parable of the Good Samaritan as contained in Luke 10: 25-37. In the verses leading up to the parable proper, a lawyer asked Jesus what he could do to attain eternal life. In reply, Jesus asked him what the Law prescribed, and the lawyer answered that the summary of morality was to love God intensely, and similarly to love one’s neighbor. Jesus affirmed the lawyer’s response. However, in order to test Jesus, the lawyer persisted by asking who one’s neighbor was. It was then that Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. A summary report of the parable proceeds as follows:

A man that was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho met some robbers. They attacked, beat and left him half dead. A Jewish priest was passing by after this brouhaha. He saw the man, but walked on without helping. Similarly, a Levite was passing. He too saw the man, but passed by. Eventually, a Samaritan – and Samaritans were not friendly with Jews, and the wounded man was a Jew since he was traveling from Jerusalem – stopped, loaded the man onto his animal, and brought the wounded fellow to an inn, paid for his treatment and promised to check back on him. After telling the story, Jesus asked the lawyer who of the three - priest, Levite and Samaritan - behaved like a true neighbor. The lawyer stated that it was in fact the Samaritan, and Jesus encouraged the lawyer to behave likewise.

The focus of this post is to argue that true Christian faith has charity as its greatest requirement. To begin with, if we view the world as a collection of siblings parented by a universal God, then we mandatorily realize that every person on earth is a brother or a sister, and we consequently owe them a significant measure of charity. It is ironic for a person to claim to believe in God as parent of everyone, without acknowledging that every human person is a brother or a sister because of the universal parenthood of this God in whom such a claim to faith is made.

What the foregoing means is that all people are supposed to be charitable toward one another. This is an obligation of faith. Indeed, faith is vivified by charity. Charity is the starting point in the quest for faith, making it a necessary component of true belief. Contemporary global society is multicultural, and very needy. Loneliness and poverty are two such needs, and a Christianity that cannot serve these human needs must question its perennial relevance. Prayers, devotions and contemplations are simply not enough.

However, some ministers sometimes do not care enough for practical Christianity. They sometimes get caught up in the theoretical aspects of theology – recall in this regard the demarcation that Aristotle made between theoretical and practical wisdom – and forget the pragmatic aspects, which include helping the poor and needy, and seeking to alleviate human suffering. Like Mother Teresa, many charitable ministers and lay people have felt the need to pay significant attention to the human needs of congregations. Recall in this regard Mt. 25: 40: “And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’” Jesus clearly sees charity toward the other as an act of faith performed directly for the Christ’s benefit. Also, in 1 John 4: 20, we find that “whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” A story was once told in this regard of a devout Christian minister. He always prayed long in church, until one day he heard the voice of God say to him: “Stop now, get up from your prayer and go help the poor outside.” 

The world we live in today is highly interconnected. When the lawyer asked Jesus who his neighbor was, he probably expected to hear Jesus say his fellow Jews. However, the world is so interconnected that our neighbor is everybody. Through media technology, for example Facebook, the world has shrunk significantly. At the micro level, using social media, individuals can chat, interact and effectively communicate with one another. At the macro level, occurrences in one part of the world be they economic, social, cultural or material readily affect other parts thereof. Nations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to act concertedly to solve global concerns.

In other words, regardless of race, ideology, worldview and other demographic specifications, charity encourages individuals and groups to interact with one another in mutuality. This charitable interaction will ensure harmony among the various elements of society. When people are more charitable toward one another, there is likely to be less conflict. If conflict is the product of hatred, and charity is the opposite of hatred, it is logical to assume that an increase in charity will be a decrease in conflict. In place of conflict on the other hand will be collegiality and a greater push toward human progress in such a fashion as to elevate the collective status of the species.

More so, selfish human nature does not accommodate the other, or seek to reach out to help anyone else. It is closed in on itself and willful, impulsive and violent. It cannot see the other, and cannot see God, if we logically assume that loving God is proved by loving the other, as James avers. What this means is that an uncharitable soul cannot even begin to locate God, or in short cannot even begin to have faith. Therefore, charity is a starting point for faith. I look beyond myself to the other, ultimately to God, and in locating God, I have faith. This reaching out is practical. It goes beyond the demographic demarcations that seek to cage the human soul. It does not segregate. Recall in this regard all the qualities ascribed to charity in 1 Cor. 13, and how St Paul makes it the substance underlying all demonstrations of faith: “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, and is not pompous. It is not inflated, it is not rude. It does not seek its own interests; it is not quick-tempered, does not brood over injury; it does not rejoice over wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never fails.”

St Paul subsequently proceeds to show how all the other demonstrations of faith, such as prophecy, tongues and knowledge, fade when not grounded in love, and how without love all the otherwise beautiful demonstrations of ministerial prowess become simply self-aggrandizement. Only love justifies effective ministry. This is love for the other because of God, an unconditional, selfless, reach-out-and-touch kind of love that seeks nothing in return for itself in exchange for the good that it seeks for the other. It is a love that is able to transcend the self and actively seek the good of the other in a well-wishing way. It is agape.

It is charity and pastoral care that will seek to make amends for the hurt caused by ministers of the Church. It is charity and pastoral care that will help to ensure that such hurt does not continue unabated. It is charity and pastoral care that will make the world begin to see the Church with renewed trust and confidence. It is charity and pastoral care the Church needs to effectively shepherd the faithful in an increasingly secular and multicultural world.

In Igbo culture, love is known as ihunaya, which literally means “the seeing of another person.” Love then is interpersonal perception. I look at you and I see you. This is a special kind of seeing, though. I don’t just see a person with limbs and torso, but a human being in need of my help. I don’t observe a person simply in terms of their demographic or biological characteristics, but more importantly as a child of God, a sibling and fellow human being, to whom I have an obligation of charity. Interpersonal perception as an aspect of interpersonal relationships takes place in a network paradigm. When we walk along the road for example, interpersonal perception is what makes us move aside to allow the other person pass. It is also what makes us give up our seat on the bus so an older or sicker person may have it. It is interpersonal perception that makes us not simply shove the other person in a hallway, but say “excuse me, please,” before we walk politely past them. All these are culture-based, and are traits of our basic humanity.

Interpersonal perception is however not limited to these simple acts of courtesy, but goes well beyond them to include conscious efforts to alleviate human suffering. Joining a nonprofit organization to help save lives; donating blood regularly at the local Red Cross for the same reason; giving alms every once in a while; volunteering at the local food bank or animal shelter – all these are fruits of interpersonal perception. They are practical theology, and they are manifest ways of saying “I see you” to the other person. They are ways of showing love, ihunaya, to the other person, because of God. If I see you truly, I love you truly.

The Greek word, ἰδὼν, is also important to know. It is translated: “having seen,” and it appears in Luke 10: 31, in reference to the priest and what the priest did just before he walked by without helping – he did see the man. It also refers to what the Levite did before he too walked by without helping. Both the priest and the Levite saw the man, and both did not help him. The Greek word, ἰδὼν, appears in Luke 10: 29-37 three times. Firstly, the priest saw and passed by on the opposite side. Second, the Levite saw and he too passed by on the opposite side. Third, the Samaritan saw, but he was moved with compassion to help. The Greek word, ἰδὼν, appears in the entire New Testament fifty-nine times. In each case it refers to the act of seeing, the circumstance of having seen

In the story of the Good Samaritan, two types of ἰδὼν or ihunaya are observed. The first is the “seeing” that produces no charitable reaction because it is less than optimal and is distracted by biological or physical or demographic circumstance. This is the seeing that the priest and the Levite do. The second is the seeing or ihunaya or ἰδὼν that the Samaritan does, which moves him to compassion, to act and help the man that was beaten half dead by the robbers he met along the way as he journeyed from Jerusalem to Jericho. The first seeing is a selfish seeing. It is a seeing that does not reach beyond itself. It is closed in on itself and directed inwards. The priest and the Levite saw this way. They were not showing love, even though they were “people of faith.” But were they really people of faith? We have already established that charity is the starting point of faith, and that charity is selfless – but if the priest and the Levite were not charitable, but only selfish, were they then truly people of faith? They could not be, not by the descriptions hitherto afforded.

Jesus encouraged the lawyer that asked him what to do to inherit eternal life to behave like the Good Samaritan, in other words, to see with compassion. Conversely then, he was asking the lawyer not to be like the priest or the Levite who saw selfishly. If the summary of the law and of morality was to love God and neighbor intensely, then seeing selfishly would not suffice; seeing selfishly would cause the individual to fall foul of the law; seeing selfishly would be to be denied communion with God – seeing selfishly would be to have no faith. Charity in search of true faith then is proper seeing, ihunaya, the seeing that goes beyond the self to embrace and perceive the other and help when moved with compassion at the seeing. Charity in search of true faith is optimal interpersonal perception.

Before we discuss optimal interpersonal perception, however, let us talk further about less-than-optimal seeing, the kind shown by the priest and the Levite. Less-than-optimal seeing is the state of seeing only demographic and biological characteristics in somebody, rather than seeing the person as a child of God and consequently a sibling. We see a person, and we begin to think of the many reasons why we cannot or should not help them: they do not look like me; they owe me money; I am busy; I am praying, and so forth. Recall in this regard the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, as narrated in Luke 18: 9-14. The opening words for the passage are: “He then addressed this parable to those that were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.” These words refer to those who do not see optimally. They see others in terms of comparative demography, for example: I am rich, while they are poor; I am strong, while they are weak; I am of a superior caste, or race, or culture, while they are not. In other words, these less-than-optimal seers are “convinced of their own righteousness and despise everyone else,” based on the fruits of their comparative demography. At the end of the parable (of the Pharisee and the publican), we are told that it was the publican, the optimal seer, the one who saw himself as truly human, stripped of pretensions, that went home at rights with God – that had true faith (recall that having true faith is defined in the context of this paper as encountering or locating or discovering God).

Less-than-optimal seeing thence is a refusal to see the other person as a child of God, as a human being, as one to whom I owe an obligation of love because of God. Less-than-optimal seeing is selfish, egocentric – in short is opposite of all the characteristics of love as described in 1 Cor. 13. Less-than-optimal interpersonal perception is in one word – hatred. In other words, the priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan hated the wounded man, when they should have loved. Small hate, erroneous hate; hate based on negligence – all is hate. Recall that we have already shown that we cannot love the God we cannot see if we cannot love the people we can see. Optimal interpersonal perception, ihunaya, is love.

We are still talking, in any case, about less-than-optimal interpersonal perception, or hatred. This is the opposite of love. It is selfish, egocentric and wicked. It defines the other based on comparative demography. It is the cause and precipitation and catalyst of human suffering and indeed all the evil there is in the world. The priest and the Levite had less-than-optimal interpersonal perception. What makes their hatred worse is that they were in a better position than the Samaritan to have optimal perception, to have ihunaya, because they were Jewish, just like the wounded fellow. Recall in this regard what Jesus said to the Jews in John 9: 41: “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘we see,’ so your sin remains.”

Jesus said the foregoing to the Jews in reaction to their hatred of him. He was one of them, a Jew. He shared their language, culture and ancestry – the Jews were supposed to be able to relate to him with ihunaya. In other words, they were supposed to see him optimally. Yet they could not, and the reason they could not was that he was actually not just one of them, but he was God; he had come from heaven, and they did not, could not, realize it. But in their pride they did not allow for any incapacity in themselves for not realizing the divinity of Jesus, but assumed that they did in fact know all about him, and judged him mischievously and purposefully deviant, deserving of hatred and the capital punishment.

All the foregoing underscores the need to see our brothers and sisters optimally. We are to see them truly and wholly. We are to see them as God sees them, in the greatest and clearest and best way possible. We are not to be like the priest or the Levite that saw less than optimally, but like the Samaritan that saw optimally and was consequently moved to compassion to lend a helping hand. What then does it mean to see optimally, to have ihunaya for our brothers and sisters? To see optimally; in other words, to have optimal interpersonal perception or ihunaya, is to see everyone as a child of God, and so a brother or sister. To see accurately is to see truth for what it is. If the truth as given to us by faith (revealed by the God that neither deceives nor is deceived) is that God is the parent of all, and so we all are siblings, then to be blind or oblivious to this truth is not to see well. But to affirm this truth is to see well. So, optimal seeing is seeing that we all in this world are obligated to one another in charity.

In phenomenology, there is a renewed push for optimal perception. Robert Sokolowski is at pains to show how the perception afforded by phenomenology helps us break free from the egocentric predicament. The egocentric predicament arose with philosophers like Descartes and others like him that did not allow for the existence of epistemological realism in the correlation between the objects of the intellect and the objects in the natural world. Optimal seeing however, as proposed by phenomenology, avers that rational human beings can properly perceive objects in the natural world for what they are; individuals with the power of reason can properly intuit or intend reality with all reality’s manifold sides, aspects and profiles, and establish a unity in this manifold, by adopting a transcendental (rather than an egocentric) attitude. This transcendental or phenomenological attitude transcends the biological or physical self and its limitations and distractions and focusses on the intellectual self, with its powers of cognition, memory, imagination and anticipation and so is able to form accurate categorical mental depictions of phenomena.

Notice in any case that this sort of accurate intentionality cannot be done except when the predicament of egocentricity is sidestepped. In other words, if the individual is trapped in himself or herself, they cannot properly perceive. If they are distracted by physical, biological or demographic distractions, they cannot see truly. If they are hamstrung by selfishness, they cannot observe phenomena for what they truly are. But with a phenomenological or transcendent attitude, unshackled by biological and physical distractions, and adequately selfless, they can begin to see reality for what it is. Similarly, optimal interpersonal perception is only achieved when the individual is not being selfish or egocentric, but sufficiently displaced to consider the other. The Samaritan saw the wounded man, but not as a Jew. If he did, he would not have helped at all – because Jews and Samaritans were quarreling at the time. Recall in this regard the scandal the disciples felt when they saw Jesus chatting with the bad Samaritan woman at the well who had been married five times and currently lived with a man that was not her husband. She had three strikes against her: She was Samaritan; she was a woman, and she was bad. The disciples of course did not see her well enough, and so they were scandalized.

If the Good Samaritan had observed only on the basis of demography, it would have been very bad for the wounded Jew. Luckily, the Good Samaritan had optimal vision, ihunaya, and so he did in fact see the wounded man as a fellow child of God; was conscious of him as one in need of his help, and so the Good Samaritan was moved with compassion and did in fact help the man. The Good Samaritan had optimal consciousness because he saw the whole of the wounded man, and not just the aspect of him that was Jewish.

Another way of thinking about optimal interpersonal perception is as seeing someone spiritually rather than physically. To see someone spiritually is to look beyond their material composition, past the flesh and blood and bone and sinew, and see through to the heart, to the soul of the person. Recall in this regard that when Samuel was sent to anoint one of Jesse’s sons to replace Saul as King, he nearly wanted to anoint Eliab because he was very handsome. However, God cautioned him to look beyond the bodily (physical) appearance of the man for that was not the one chosen. Not only that, Jesus severally, in very many portions of the New Testament, calls on the Jews and his disciples to look beyond the physicality of reality to encounter the spirituality thereof.

Some of the many situations we can find in the New Testament in which Jesus calls people to look beyond the physical to discover the spiritual reality within the individual that we encounter daily include: his asking the Jews and his disciples to look beyond his flesh and blood to see the source of their salvation. Jesus also informs those around him that the seemingly small amount the widow put into the coffers of the temple was greater in value than the plenty others put in. More so, he calls on his disciples to seek the inward meaning of piety and not be like the Pharisees and leaders of the Jews who loved to show the outward signs of piety: wearing gloomy faces when fasting; wearing long tassels to seem religious; praying at the street corners so that people might catch a glimpse of them, and numerous other outward, observable, physical gestures of piety. For Jesus, the people that emphasized the physical received only a temporal reward, while those that emphasized the spiritual received a more lasting recompense.

What the Parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us in short is that charity is a necessary foundation for true Christian faith. Discussing charity as essential Christian obligation has been seen to be justified by the increasing neediness of the human condition in a multicultural and global world of ours. In this regard, charity has been seen as a galvanizer of the various demographic elements that make up society. Toeing the foregoing Cartesian, charity has been seen to be synonymous with optimal interpersonal perception, or ihunaya, which is the Igbo transliteration for charity. Optimal perception is correctly perceiving everyone in the world as a brother or a sister because of the divine universal parentage that faith in God affords.

Optimal perception is being able to look beyond the demographic or biological or physical characteristics of the individuals we encounter to see them spiritually, in the same way that God would see them. The Good Samaritan displayed this sort of optimal interpersonal perception in the way he was moved with compassion to help, having seen (ἰδὼν) the man that had been left for dead by robbers encountered on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. This optimal interpersonal perception is essential in advancing the cause of harmony not simply in the Church that is in need of it, but also in the world that is a true modern family.