The Good Samaritan, a parable of latter-day saintliness?

The preaching that was preached to me this past Sunday was ostensibly about the parable of the Good Samaritan. The preacher took the opportunity to share with us some history which he believed we needed to understand in order to understand the Gospel reading, namely Lk 10:25-37. He reviewed the basic story of the Jews’ Babylonian exile, the introduction of the Samaritan people into the vacated land of Israel and their development there of a syncretistic religion which included significant Judaic elements, followed by the return to Israel of the exiled Jews and their subsequent hostility towards the Samaritans and towards the Samaritan corruptions of the Judaic faith. In this context he described in particular the Pharisees – a name meaning ‘set apart, separated’ – as a manifestation of a particular attitude towards the Samaritans – the ‘corruptors of true religion’ – which prevailed among some or most of the Jews of Jesus’s time, but especially among the Pharisees. The preacher’s take on Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan was that Jesus was engaging in a kind of expanding of religious consciousness, challenging the Pharisees’ negative stereotypes of Samaritans and Samaritan religion, and the Pharisees’ practice of valuing and cultivating separateness from the corrupting influence of their neighbors. Instead, it seemed the preacher was suggesting, Jesus rejected such separateness. Jesus wants to be a friend to all, and thus to destroy separateness. His mission, and so ours too, starts with relationship, and this emphasis on relationship is incompatible with the separateness of the Pharisees. He also threw in some bland remarks about the need to avoid being either 'all head and no heart' (presumably like Jesus’s interlocutor in the Gospel reading?), or 'all heart and no head' (it’s unclear to whom this was meant to refer).

This analysis struck me as superficial and misleading. It was what the preacher wanted to say, and probably sat well with most of the pew-sitters; but it wasn’t what Jesus said or implied in the day’s Gospel reading. In the Gospel, an expert in the law – a ‘lawyer,’ who may or may not have been a Pharisee – asks Jesus about eternal life, and Jesus directs him to the law – the law of Israel, the law revealed by God, the law by which God chose and set apart and sanctified a people for himself. (If you’re not familiar with these concepts, by all means read the Old Testament!) The ‘lawyer’ then asks Jesus about the meaning of the law, and Jesus tells him a parable about love of neighbor, wherein a Samaritan shows love to a stranger in need: to a Jew, that is, with whom he has no prior relationship and with whom, we may well assume, he does not go on to have any subsequent relationship. That is to say, in despite of those who wish to read into it certain views about evangelization that are trendy in these latter days of Christianity, it is not a story about the connection between mission and relationship. (If we consider the example of Jesus himself, his public ministry – his Gospel mission – lasted only three years and touched the lives of many thousands of people. There is no indication that ‘personal relationships’ were the essential element of his mission and every reason to think that they were not, since, simply practically speaking, that model would have been impossible.)

What about the business of the ‘separateness’ cultivated by the Pharisees, and criticized by Sunday’s preacher, ostensibly speaking with or for Jesus in doing so? I gather that that kind of thing is a popular line among Christians of these latter days. We all believe (of course!) in a ‘universal call to holiness’ – whatever we take that to mean. It suits many people just fine to be told that they shouldn’t separate themselves from others, and that others should not feel separated from them. Thus, for example, a lot of people believe in a universal call to receive Holy Communion. This call is for everyone, that is, for whomsoever shows up to mass, whensoever and howsoever often they happen to do so – unless they’re too young (don't have an official 'first communion certificate') or prefer not to – but then they should still be universally encouraged to come up to at least receive a ‘communion blessing.’ Why? Because this minimizes 'separateness.' Jesus may, or may not, have been serious about the separation of the sheep and the goats on the Last Day when he shall come in glory, but surely that kind of thing has little to no application to us now. The ‘universal call to holiness’ means that we should recognize that everyone is holy – ‘everything is grace,’ as some so sweetly say – and that Christ has destroyed all enmity between the sheep and the goats.

Except that that is anything but what Jesus Christ preaches. (By all means read the New Testament, in its integrity, if you doubt this!) So far as I recall, Jesus never criticizes the Pharisees for their separateness. He does criticize them for their hypocrisy, their lack of integrity. (Seven times he calls scribes and Pharisees hypocrites in Matthew 23; in Matthew 5 he says we must exceed their righteousness, and be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect, loving even our enemies – which seems different from pretending we don’t have any, or that we’re all already righteous and perfect enough). But hypocrisy is not even remotely the same as separateness. Hypocrisy is as different from separateness as it is from holiness. In fact ‘holy’ (Hebrew qodesh) means pretty much the same as ‘Pharisee’ – set apart, sacred, consecrated. (Jeremiah 1:5, for example, reads: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee” (i.e., "made thee holy"), also translated as “I set thee apart.” Paul’s letter to the Romans begins: “Paul, servant of Jesus Christ, called an Apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God (Latin segregatus (segregated); Greek aphorismenos (at least reminiscent of the Hebrew to Aramaic derived pharisee)).”) The Pharisees cultivated separation because they believed in the call to holiness – like Abraham, Jeremiah, the blessed virgin Mary, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, etc., and like Jesus Christ: “be holy” (see Leviticus 20:26: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine”; cf. 1Peter 1:16; etc., etc.!). They read the Psalms, as we should too (Psalms 1 and 119, for example), and so believed in the connection between loving God, loving the law, and loving holiness. For a preacher to disparage separateness, then, is effectively for him to disparage holiness. And this suggests that he may not know what holiness is, at least from an authentic Judeo-Christian perspective; and even though he may well be rightly ajudged a rather exemplary preacher of latter-day Christianity – which is interesting, isn’t it?