Let’s talk about the Good Samaritan, which is one of the stories that Jesus told as recorded in the New Testament, a story that was about many things, but the fullness of the story is that it is about Jesus and mercy and the community of his followers.
In summary, a member of a despised religious sect, the Samaritan did what the good and proper people of the community did not do: he saw a man beaten and brutalized in the road, and the Samaritan went to him, took care of him, paid for his restoration, and made sure that the man recovered.
That Good Samaritan did a good thing to someone in distress, and if the story stops there, then we have learned a good lesson, right?
But what the story doesn’t tell us in the background, and doesn’t tell us “the rest of the story.”
That Samaritan came from somewhere. What I mean by that is that he was prepared to do good, by his nature and by the culture around him that taught him to do good for other people. It’s true that in Jesus’ telling, we don’t know the rest of the story (because it was only a story), but I imagine that in real life that Samaritan didn’t just spend the rest of his life waiting by the roadside for people to be beaten so he could rescue them.
I imagine that at some point his compassion and capacity for love would have impelled him to seek out why that road was a place of brutality, and so he sought what he could do—along with his neighbors—to make that road a place of safety for travelers.
Rather than just wait for the next victim, I imagine that the Samaritan man, being a human being with the capacity of reason and forethought and compassion, would have tried to figure out how to stop the brutality from happening in the first place, even as he made himself ready to help the next victim.
I imagine his mind and his faith worked together to change the world around him so it was less brutal and more compassionate. What person, committed to mercy and healing, wouldn’t also be impelled to do the same thing?
I guess this is one of the things that causes me to despair (among the many things) here in this great nation of ours—we have a large population of people notionally committed to the way of Jesus, and even with a large plurality of such followers, we see the road where our Black neighbors are being beaten and killed near daily.
And not only do we not tend to them in their immediate pain and grief, we are largely unmoved to do anything to make that road safer for them.
This inaction and indifference lead me to despair for my own faith siblings, and they lead me to the point of utter despair that this religion we call “truth” is actually not true at all, as it seems incapable of causing the people who believe in it to change their behaviors so as to act like the people who follow Jesus.
How can we hear the words of Jesus, the purported “leader” of our lives, and be so complacent about this daily brutality meted upon our Black siblings?
If Jesus exists and Jesus’ words have power, then where are the wyte followers of Jesus doing what they can to bind up the broken and also making the road a way of safety?
Tyre Nichols was beaten alongside the road and left for dead. And in my despair and grief and anger at the acceptance of the casual state brutality meted out to my Black siblings, I am asking for help in my doubt and rage because both my faith community and my faith tradition tell me that the story might have a conclusion that I can’t yet see. Maybe the story hasn’t stopped yet. Maybe there is a second chapter.
I just don’t see many people working at writing that next chapter so that I can see it.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay