Your Worldview Is Good, But Not Enough

When Jesus asks the student of religious law, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” (Luke 10:26), he is essentially asking how he would summarise the message of the Bible. I wonder how you would answer this question. What is the most important verse in Scripture? What is pleasing to God? How do you evaluate the success of your church?

The scholar’s answer is good, but it will prove to be inadequate. Jesus tells him it is a decent (orthos) answer (Luke 10:28). It’s not that this is the correct answer, but it’s an OK summary – “love God, love your neighbour.”

The Bible is a big book, and sometimes what we see in the Bible says more about us than it does about the Bible. We all have favourite sections, preferred emphases, and we all prioritise some parts over others.

The law student is soaked in the priestly school of piety. This is why Jesus will use the characters of a priest and a Levite in his parable. They will do what is right according to their worldview, but they will miss the wood for the trees and fail to help the beaten-up guy.

In the Old Testament, there were three perspectives in dynamic tension; the priestly (books like Leviticus and Ezra), the royal or kingly (narratives like Kings and Chronicles, and the wisdom literature), and the prophetic. These perspectives are all needed to round out the purposes of God. No one perspective on its own is adequate. At times, these voices are in necessary conflict with one another.

In the parable, the priest, returning home to Jericho after his two-week shift at the temple in Jerusalem, faces four dilemmas arising from his view of God and the world.

Firstly, the beaten-up victim is naked. Clothes were identifiers in the ancient world (and still are in many places). So the priest can’t tell what the man’s nationality is. If he is Israelite, then the priest has a responsibility towards him. But because he is naked, the priest cannot be sure of his ethnicity.

Secondly, the man is described as half-dead. Priests can’t touch a dead body for fear of being defiled. The man looks dead, but the priest can’t be sure, so he doesn’t risk it.

Thirdly, the priest, likely on his donkey laden with tithes received from his temple service (grain, wine, oil, maybe even a couple of live chickens!), would have had to load the prone man onto his donkey and himself walk the rest of the way – too much for his sacred dignity to bear.

Fourthly, the priest would have been suspicious – what if this is a trick, an ambush?

Maybe the priest even thought this guy deserved what was coming to him – that he had clearly reaped what he had sown and can’t have been a good person for such tragedy to have befallen him. After all, doesn’t God protect his own?

And so the priest did not help the man, and carried on towards Jericho. He felt no pang of conscience. He suffered no existential crisis. He did what he believed was pleasing to God, according to his theology and his worldview. He went home happy.

The priestly perspective, which emphasised personal piety, ritual purity, duty to family and nation, had no room within it for the rescuing of victims of unclear origins.

This is terrifying.

It’s highly likely that many Christians, living calmly within a worldview which emphasises personal holiness, bible reading, church attendance – a pastoral theology, if you like, might face a similar indictment for missing the wood for the trees, and failing to show love or concern for the three billion people on our planet who live in unreached spaces.

Herein is the great danger of a Christianity dominated by pastors and teachers, at the expense of other voices – the apostolic, the prophetic, the evangelistic. A risk-aversion. An insularity. A too-small sense of responsibility. A lack of mission. This is why Jesus’ question, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” is so telling.

“Likewise a Levite…” (Luke 10:32). The key word here is “likewise.” As priest, so people. If the priest’s negligence is an indictment of leadership, then the Levite’s inaction is an indictment of followership. Albert Einstein said, of people trapped within certain worldview paradigms:

“Few people are capable of expressing…opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” 

The echo-chambers created by mono-vocal Christianities make it virtually impossible for followers to think differently, to act differently. The Levite behaves the same way as the priest. This is the solemn danger of homogeneity. People who are the same share the same blind-spots, and the beaten-up guy is in the blind spot.

The turning-point in the story is verse 33, which is full of surprises.

Luke 10:33  But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

Because the Samaritan is an outsider to the priestly echo-chamber, he does not suffer the same constraints. Here we witness the power of outsiderness, the necessity of difference. Hence, D.T. Niles’ famous statement;

“The gospel is not safe in any culture without a witness within that culture from beyond itself.”

Jesus is teaching his disciples that the Church will need the Samaritans. That mission to Samaria will unlock grace for the Church in fresh perspectives. In this sense, mission is essential to our survival. Mission is the R&D development of the global Church. Mission saves us from ourselves.

Have you ever wondered why the Devil so powerfully traps Christians in ethnocentrism, prejudice, racism and cultural insularity? It’s because he is aware of the unstoppable power of cross-cultural Christian expression. He knows that we need each other to truly flourish, and he is committed to keeping believers siloed from each other, imprisoned within their own cultural norms.

The Samaritan demonstrates “compassion” – a word unique to God in Luke and Acts. The Samaritan feels the feelings of God.

The Samaritan, “came, saw, and had compassion.” Luke is here subverting Caesar’s famous phrase, “I came, I saw, I conquered” – a sublime literary indictment of Empire.

In the chiastic structure of this parable, where the punchline, or turning-point, is in the centre, the Samaritan will now undo all the wrongs done to the man; the problems created by the robbers’ theft and the priest’s and Levite’s neglect. As Kenneth Bailey explained;

“The robbers hurt the man by violence. The priest and Levite hurt him by neglect. The story implies the guilt of all three.”

Jesus’ parable posits the question to the listening scholar, “who do you think you are in the story?” If you are the priest or the Levite, beware lest in the insular contentment of your piety, you totally miss what really matters, without even realising it, without a flicker of guilt, with your conscience totally intact.

No – more likely we are the beaten-up victim in the story. More likely, the Church has been stopped on her journey, stripped of her dignity, robbed of her inheritance and left for dead by a worldview which is good, but not enough.

And Jesus, our good Samaritan, the gift of outsiderness made flesh amongst those we least expect and most despise, is the great hero of the human story. It is he who saw us in our prone state, he who poured on oil and wine for our healing – the oil of the Holy Spirit and the wine of the gospel. It is he who, at great cost to himself, dismounted so that we could be mounted, brought us to the inn, and promised “I will repay you when I come back” (Luke 10:35). As Matthew Henry wrote.

“We were like this poor distressed traveller. The Law of Moses passes by on the other side, as having neither pity not power to help us; but then comes the blessed Jesus, that good Samaritan; he has compassion on us.”

Jesus’ interlocutor, the Torah scholar, would undoubtedly have heard in this parable clear undertones of Ezekiel 16. In this chapter, the prophet re-frames the story of the people of God as that of an abandoned, naked new-born baby lying on the side of the road. God “passed by”, “saw”, “had compassion”, “anointed with oil”, clothed, restored to life. 

The prophet Ezekiel in his day butted heads with priestly arrogance and apathy. He re-told the story of Israel’s election as one of unmerited grace issuing from the compassion of God. He stressed, in this vision, the uncleanness and shame and ritual impurity of the victim, demonstrating that God’s compassion overcame such shortcomings, bringing cleansing and covering, removing stain and shame. David Bosch, reflecting on Ezekiel 16:4-7, writes:

“God refuses to bypass humankind… This is indeed one of the most powerful ‘mission statements’ in the whole Bible, since it depicts God as the One who has compassion on the lost and marginalised.”

Jesus, who frequently based his parables on a clear Old Testament theme, subverting and filling out mis-readings and misperceptions, here told the parable of the Good Samaritan based on a foundation of Ezekiel 16. This clarifies the theological implication – that the Samaritan represents God who acts with compassion. But it also shows that, to one trapped within a good-but-not-enough worldview derived from the priestly emphasis, Jesus refers to a prophetic Scripture. Specifically, he draws on Ezekiel, whose entire book is devoted to confronting and correcting the inadequacies of the priestly position.

Jesus appeals to one of the most profound missionary texts in the Old Testament canon in order to challenge insular theologies of personal piety. He includes the shock factor of a despised Samaritan playing the central role (the God-role) in order to confront the prejudice which often inhibits missionary endeavour. 

All of this remains a challenge to the Church today, which so often can proceed with her worship and concern for personal holiness without ever considering her missional responsibility to the unreached.