Dan Balilty for The New York Times
During our son Isaac's previous pastorate he helped form a praise ensemble of which he was a guitar-playing, singing, member. After several possibilities were floated for a name they settled on The Fairly Good Samaritans, which made me laugh out loud. It's a playful take on the name often given to Jesus' parable found only in Luke about am excellent Samaritan who cares for a beaten man after supposedly devout Jews pass him by. Samaritans were regarded with disdain in Jesus' time because of religious practices which digressed from traditional Judaism.
Despite this, Jesus the Jew had his longest recorded interaction in the gospels with a woman from Samaria, and there is also a story about Jesus healing lepers in Samaria. With the Good Samaritan parable this is a fair amount of airplay.
Every once in a while I come across a news piece about the Samaritans of today -- yup, they're still around, although their numbers are dwindling. In the fifth century there may have been more than a million Samaritans but after centuries of persecution, their numbers have dwindled to about 800. In the recent New York Times piece it's noted that:
As children, they grow up speaking Arabic. As teenagers, they study at schools run by the Palestinian Authority. As retirees, many regularly smoke shisha in the Palestinian city of Nablus, farther down the slopes of Mount Gerizim.
But they also hold Israeli citizenship, often work in Israel, pay for Israeli health insurance and visit relatives in a suburb of Tel Aviv. In Israeli elections, several say they vote for the right-wing, pro-settler Likud party. Yet the Samaritans are still represented on the dormant council of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
So it goes in Al Tor, a five-street village, known as Kiryat Luza in Hebrew, whose beige houses are home to some of the last members of the Samaritan religion, an ancient offshoot of the Israelite faith. Their unique Samaritan identity — not Muslim, not Christian, but not quite Jewish, either — allows them to drift, sometimes uneasily, between Israeli and Palestinian societies.
It's easy to read the bible dismissively as though it's a compendium of mythical tales, or, conversely, as a book of devotion which is not connected to real people with real lives. The ongoing existence of Samaritans --fairly good and otherwise -- reminds us there is more to our gospel story.
Dan Balilty for The New York Times
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