13th February 2026

SAMARITAN COMPASSION

A week or so ago I read this: ‘Minutes after Renee Good was shot in Minneapolis, a doctor who witnessed the shooting pleaded with federal agents to be allowed to examine her, shouting “You just killed my neighbour!”’ This suggests to me that our modern world still needs to read the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The Samaritans diverged from mainstream Judaism in three ways – first, their ethnicity was compromised following the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE. Secondly, for them sacred scripture was confined to the Pentateuch, and thirdly, they believed God designated Mount Gerizim as the true place for worship and sacrifice, not Jerusalem.

Thus when Jesus, in answer to a lawyer’s question, identifies the heart of the law to be ‘love God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself’, he establishes a mandate on grounds that both Jews and Samaritans could agree. But the lawyer persists by asking: ‘And who is my neighbour?’

Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan with its ethnicity-blind message. An assault on the Jericho road leaves a man, presumably Jewish, robbed and half-dead on the wayside. Three men encounter this pitiable scene. The first two – a priest and a Levite – see the man’s predicament but choose to ignore it and ‘pass by on the other side’. Only the third, a despised Samaritan, stops to tend to the wounded man’s troubles with no half measures, looking also to his future welfare.

So how is our neighbour to be defined – not by location or ethnicity, but first by need, and then by action to meet that need. How should the Good Samaritan story be read in Minneapolis today? There seems to be conflict between a national government set on ethnic exclusion, and local people motivated by a properly Christian compassion. From a distance the Minnesota situation is helpful because instead of philosophical ethics, it puts a variety of human faces on the concept of neighbourliness.

But where do we stand?

John Briggs