The other day I was involved in a conversation about the parable of the good Samaritan that Jesus tells in Luke 10:25-37 in answer to the question posed by an ‘expert in the law.’ In the conversation I was in one person gave an explanation of the Samaritan and why it was a big deal that Jesus used a Samaritan as the ‘good guy.’ The problem was, and it was not appropriate for me to point it out at the time, the explanation the person gave only touched on the eclectic religious practices of the Samaritans that the Jews of the time found abhorrent, but it missed a big chunk of why they were so eclectic in their religion and the underlying issue.

For those interested, the context for the Samaritans can be found in 2 Kings 17:24-34. As a people group they were an outworking of the mode of empire building undertaken by the Assyrians. When the Assyrians conquered Israel and resettled Samaria, they placed in the land people from various parts of the empire. They did the same thing in many places they conquered. The theory is that this practice was pursued to strip nations of their identity and to mitigate against organised rebellions among groups from a shared identity who would ferment trouble more easily.

Of course, this meant that Samaritans were not only different from those who strongly identified as Israelites, but they also represented an oppressor of the nation and were seen as impostors in the land. In the eyes of the Jews they were a bastardized people group who had no place among them. The parable of the good Samaritan was far more hard hitting than simply being about a person with different religious practices – it struck at the very core and identity of the people of the time who identified themselves as Jewish and posed the abhorred ‘other’ as the hero of the story.