Crossing the Street

It takes a cold, hard, godless heart to step over a wounded man on the street.

But in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite didn’t step over the half-dead traveler. I think we picture them doing so, in our collective imagining of this well-known story, but the words of the Gospel are quite clear. “When he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side,” Jesus says of both.

So they saw him. They saw his need. It made them uncomfortable; it confused them — many scholars have said that Judaic law concerning the touching of dead bodies might have made them reluctant to approach — and so they decided the simplest way to file this situation in the Not My Problem category was to cross the street.

But that still leaves a half-dead guy on the road. And we all, 2,000 years later, still think of the priest and the Levite as cold and hard and godless — even if they didn’t want to be, even if they didn’t think of themselves that way — because the bottom line is, they didn’t see the half-dead guy as their problem.

As Christians we know that everyone is our neighbor. It’s drilled into us from the first time we hear this reading.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I find myself crossing the street a lot more than I should.

There is so much pain and suffering in the world. We certainly can’t begin to alleviate it all. But we have to start with the pain and the suffering that we see, that’s right in front of us — even if it’s something we really, really want to ignore. Even if we find it inconvenient or confusing or scary or weird.

The heroism of the Good Samaritan wasn’t in his selfless actions, although those were certainly commendable. It was in his courage. “He approached the victim,” Jesus said.

Can we approach the victims we see? Do we have that courage?

©LPi