In their book How to Read the Bible (p.133), Fee and Stuart present a modern version of the Good Samaritan to help us experience the impact of the first telling. “As an audience it assumes a typical, well-dressed, middle-American Protestant congregation.”
A family of disheveled, unkempt individuals was stranded by the side of a major road on a Sunday morning. They were in obvious distress. The mother was sitting on a tattered suitcase, hair uncombed, clothes in disarray, with a glazed look to her eyes, holding a smelly, poorly clad, crying baby. The father was unshaved, dressed in coveralls, the look of despair as he tried to corral two other youngsters. Beside them was a run-down old car that had obviously just given up the ghost.
Down the road came a car driven by the local bishop; he was on his way to church. And though the father of the family waved frantically, the bishop could not hold up his parishioners, so he acted as if he didn’t see them.
Soon came another car, and again the father waved furiously. But the car was driven by the president of the local Kiwanis Club and he was late for a statewide meeting of Kiwanis presidents in a nearby city. He too acted as if he did not see them, and kept his eyes straight on the road ahead of him.
The next car that came by was driven by an outspoken local atheist, who had never been to church in his life. When he saw the family’s distress, he took them into his own car. After inquiring as to their need, he took them to a local motel, where he paid for a week’s lodging while the father found work. He also paid for the father to rent a car so that he could look for work and gave the mother cash for food and new clothes.
Obviously, this version does not present a completely equivalent situation, but it does shock us somewhat, reminding us of how the lawyer must have felt when he was confronted with a “good’ Samaritan who for him would be virtually the same as an atheist for us.
The parables were not comfortable, “nice” stories. They were intended to provoke a reaction; they should provoke a reaction in us also.
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