"Go and be like a Samaritan." These were fighting words Jesus spoke to the lawyer who stood up to test him. Even to go and do like a fictional Samaritan in a made up story was a detestable assignment for a good Jewish man in 1st century Palestine. The Samaritans were a hated minority; and as we saw a couple of weeks ago, they had no love lost for the Jews either. For Jesus to call this man, a man who knew the law, who knew the prophetic literature surrounding the exile, to live a life modeled after an ethnic group that was in his eyes outside of the law, dating from the repopulation of Palestine by the Babylonians was high treason.
But that is what Jesus does. He makes our enemies our models for life, be they Muslims, Evangelicals, Democrats, or Anglo-Catholics, Jesus calls us to find the good in their life so that it might be an example for our own.
No comments:
Post a Comment