Of all the groups we meet in the Gospels, from the Scribes and Pharisees to the Sadducees and Sanhedrin, there’s no group that comes out of the story as well as the Samaritans do. When Jesus, in John’s Gospel, met the Samaritan woman at the well and she went to tell the people of her village about him, many of them believed in him and wanted him to stay with them. When Jesus cured the ten lepers and only one came back to give thanks, the one who came back was a Samaritan. And as a direct result of today’s parable the Samaritans have given their name to one of the great helping agencies in the world today. So who were these Samaritans? There are about five hundred of them of them still left today in the Middle East, split between the Palestinian town of Nablus and the Israeli town of Holon. But who are they and what is their story? Well, I will try to answer those questions today in the hope that, doing so, will help us understand why, when he told that parable, Jesus put a Samaritan at the centre of it.
The story begins a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of King David. That was Israel’s Golden Age, and under David and his son Solomon the people were united. After the death of Solomon, however, the Kingdom divided into two, Israel in the North and Judaea in the South, the latter centred on Jerusalem and the former in Samaria, on Mount Gerizim. This is what the woman at the well is referring to when she says to Jesus. ‘Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.’ But in 721 BC. disaster hit the Northern Kingdom. They were conquered by the Assyrians who took many of the most influential people off into slavery and brought in foreign workers to look after the land on behalf of the Assyrian king. The local people were still the majority – and so their religion survived – but crucially for our story, they inter-married with the immigrant population and so, as far as the people in the South were concerned, lost their pure Jewish blood. The People in Jerusalem despised the Samaritans for this and taunted them about it, while the Samaritans countered by claiming that they had an older copy of the Law than those in the South, still used in their worship today, and so were the real successors of Moses. And so a dispute developed which was still going on in Jesus’ day more than six hundred years later.
And it was made worse after the Jews in the South, having themselves been conquered and carried into exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 589, returned from exile in in 538 and started rebuilding Jerusalem. In an impressive act of generosity, the Samaritans offered to help with this work. But the offer was refused. The Samaritans never forgave the Jews for this slight and as a result, the split between the two sides grew even wider. There was constant bickering and periodic violence and when the Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim in 330 BC, it was eventually destroyed by the Jews around the year 129 BC. And so, in Jesus day, a Jew would not even pass through Samaritan territory for fear of being contaminated. Significantly, however, Jesus did, showing that he had no truck with this kind of hatred and prejudice. And it was while doing this that he met the woman at the well whose story we read in chapter four of John’s Gospel.
But for the average Jew of the time, such a thing was unthinkable. The Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues. They could not appear as witnesses in a Jewish court. They could not be converted to Judaism and were even, the Jews thought, excluded from the after life. So, in the light of all that, why, when he wanted to give what is in effect a picture of what lies at the very heart of his teaching, did Jesus choose a Samaritan as the hero of a story which, along with the parable of the prodigal son, has become the best known text from the whole of the New Testament? Well, there is a sense in which it is not up to me to answer that question. The parables of Jesus are like mirrors in which we are invited to see a reflection of ourselves. And so, in that sense, it is up to each one of us as individuals to look into the picture Jesus paints and see something of our own lives reflected there. But let me make some suggestions.
And the first is the utter absurdity of religion without, not just faith, but love. When the Samaritan woman talks about which of the two mountains God should be worshipped on, Jesus tells her that the day is coming when people will worship neither on one mountain or the other but in Spirit and truth. And to worship in Spirit and truth is to move beyond the world of religion, occupied in the story by the priest and the Levite, who did not want to be rendered ritually unclean by touching the man who had fallen into the hands of brigands, and do what the man in the story did. Performing religious actions like going to church and saying prayers without a love that is practical and real is of no value whatsoever.
And the second thing is to look again at the people we despise and look down on. Here, we really do have to speak for ourselves, but if I were to make one suggestion it would be the way we in Britain tend to view foreigners. We are not all racists or Xenophobes, but as an island nation we are probably more guilty of these things than most. At the heart of the dispute between Jews and Samaritans lay the question of racial purity and the superiority of one people over another. It’s an abomination, the results of which we saw under Hitler in the middle of the last century, and I invite you to see even the slightest trace if it in yourself today whether the victims of it are Jews, Moslems or even the English.
And the third thing I invite you to look at is your own family circle. The tragedy of the Jewish/Samaritan story is that the two sides were actually brothers and sisters of each other. History is littered with such tragedies and if there is even the trace of it in your family, see it for what it is and do something about it.
It was no accident that Jesus made the Samaritan the hero of this story.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the first reading this week, we hear how the Word of God is not beyond the sea so that someone will have to cross over and bring it back to us. It is not in the heavens so that someone will have to climb up and bring it down us. It is very close to us. It is in our hearts and in our mouths. It is part of our daily lives. It is in every person we meet, especially in those who, like the man who fell among brigands, are in need of our help. And so we pray that our faith will bear fruit in a love that is real and effective....Lord hear us
The priest and the Levite were good religious people who observed every detail of the Law. But when they came across the man who had fallen among brigands, they passed by on the other side. To have touched him would have made them ritually unclean and unable to take part in worship. Religious observance had taken precedence over love, the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. And so we pray for the grace to see any sign of this in the way we function together as a parish..........Lord hear us
Modern insights into DNA show in a way we never understood before how closely connected we are with people all over the world. The things which separate us from each other – race, colour, nationality, religion – are nothing compared to the things which unite us as human beings. And so we pray that the world will come to see this more and more in the course of this century and, with God’s help, recognize the sheer absurdity and foolishness of the prejudices which divide us.........Lord hear us
Abraham is the father in faith of millions of Jews, Christians and Moslems throughout history. We believe in the same God and share many of the stories which form the basis of the Scriptures. And yet history is filled the sad and often tragic story of violence and conflict between these three great faiths. In particular, we have fought and squabbled over the land we call ‘holy’ and the city, Jerusalem, which lies at the heart of it. And so we ask God to lead us out of this never-ending tragedy........Lord hear us
The conflict between Jews and Samaritans which, given that he was a Jew, was part of Jesus’ own personal history was, in essence, a family dispute. And so we pray for families everywhere which are torn apart by arguments and disputes which have grown out of all proportion and got completely out of control. We ask God to pour his Spirit into all those caught up in such situations and give them the courage they need to stretch out a hand of friendship and accept it when it is offered by others..........Lord hear us
The Samaritans, of course, have given their name to an organization which provides a listening ear twenty four hours a day to anyone who is in need. Many of those who phone the Samaritans are desperate and alone with no one to talk to and in some cases close to suicide. And so we pray for all those mostly anonymous men and women who are willing to sit by a phone ready to listen without judgement to so many stories of human anguish, that God may bless them and guide them in what they say......Lord hear us
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