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The Good Samaritan: A Phenomenological Sermon

Who has not heard of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, from Luke 10? Who has not been told that the parable calls us to love our neighbors as the Samaritan loves, in a disinterested manner, those in distress? And is the parable not teaching us that our deeds are the path leading to eternal life? But now, is there anything extraordinary about that message? What is peculiarly biblical about it? A close reading of Luke—one that accords with Jesus’s own counsel on “reading” as returning to the author’s own mind—suggests that much has yet to be discovered in our parable.
The “phenomenological sermon”[1] proposed here invites the reader to journey back to the heart of Luke’s celebrated story; perhaps even to “the other side” of the path trodden by fallen men who take for granted our common human condition.
With the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus “takes-up” (ὑπολαβὼν) the question, “and who is my neighbor?” (καὶ τίς ἐστίν μου πλησίον). The question had been asked by an “expert in law” (νομικός) who sought to “justify” himself (ὁ δὲ θέλων δικαιῶσαι ἑαυτὸν). Thus, the question is really about what makes something right or what justifies one’s judgment about something. What is the ground of right?  Is it the law, or something else? Jesus is answering this question and none other.  His interlocutor had appealed to the law and provided a correct reading of it (Jesus had confirmed: “You have answered correctly”—Ὀρθῶς ἀπεκρίθης). Ἐν τῷ νόμῳ τί γέγραπται”: “what is written in the law” and “how” (πῶς) we read the law are two conjoined questions where reading (ἀναγινώσκειν) entails returning to the mind of the author, almost “remembering” as in Plato’s anamnesis.[2] “What the law says” is a question inseparable from the path leading back to the actual content, message or spirit of the law. Here again, Luke’s terms point back to the ground of legal correctness, or orthodoxy, questioning “literal” accounts of the law as inseparable from interpretation. Jesus is calling the expert of law or “lawyer” to recognize that the law is irreducible to its Letter, extending between interpretation (human mind/life) and eternal life.
The expert had asked about the practical conditions for inheriting eternal life (τί ποιήσας ζωὴν αἰώνιον κληρονομήσω). The verb ποιέω is brought into play, suggesting that eternal life is inherited thanks to our works/doings (in the verb “inherit”/κληρονομέω, νομέω/allotting anticipates δικαιόω/making-right). But are our works the ground for justice, for our being allotted our lot (κληρονόμος)? What must I do to partake in eternal life? Is participation achieved through “my works”?
The expert of law (νομικός) asks Jesus, the practical teacher (διδάσκαλος), or teacher of life, about the meaning of the terms of the law. Is that meaning or spirit compatible with the Letter of the law recited by the legal expert? The legal expert seeks to justify his own role and thus “save” the Letter of the law. He asks, “Who is my neighbor” (τίς ἐστίν μου πλησίον), having already asked “what is written in the law” (“Ἐν τῷ νόμῳ τί γέγραπται”). The message of the law may be one with the interpretation, or our way back to the mind of the author, but the legal expert still needs to account for the Letter, or to “spell out” the spirit. He does so by asking about the identity of the neighbor that I am to love as myself, even as all of my love is directed toward God. If I love myself only in God, how am I to love my neighbor? I am to love him as I love myself, namely by loving him in God, not as my neighbor is outside of God, but as he is or shall be in eternity, or insofar as he partakes in eternal life. What is lovable about my neighbor? Only what partakes in eternal life. I can love myself justly only by loving God. To the extent that I do not empty myself in God, I should not love myself.  Now, the same should be said about my neighbor, whom I should love according to the same criteria I adopt for myself. For my neighbor is lovable only in the respect that he mirrors God. It is then God himself who justifies or grounds us, rather than our own works. What are we to do? Attribute our doings to God; place our own authority—our heart, soul, strength and mind (10:27)—in God. “Do this and you shall live” (τοῦτο ποίει καὶ ζήσῃ), where our mortal life is participation in or journey to God’s eternal life, just as reading is an ascending journey into the author’s mind.
It is through a parable that Jesus helps the legal expert account for the Letter of the law, thereby implying that, in practical terms, Law can never justify itself. We have no legal justification of the law. We do have, however, a pre-legal justification, or what philosophers might call a natural justification.
In our parable, a man (Ἄνθρωπός)—probably a Jew, but not considered here as such—“took-down” the path from the Capital Jerusalem to Jericho, through the desert.  And in the desert he was robbed of all of his clothes, beaten and left stranded, half dead. The man was thus stripped of all conventional attributes. Judging from his appearance, a passerby could not know if he was a Jew or not, but only that he was a man, an anthropos. “Now, co-accidentally” (κατὰ συγκυρίαν, from σύν + κῠρέω, entailing conceivably providential synchronicity), a priest (ἱερεύς) “was going down” (κατέβαινεν, entailing a κατάβασις or “descent,” echoing Jesus’s “upstream” ὑπολαμβάνω) that same road, thus distancing himself from Jerusalem. Having seen the man as man, the priest passed on the opposite side of the road, or rather set his course against that of the man. He thus saw the man-as-man, the “mere anthropos,” as an enemy, insofar as the man was not recognizable in legal terms. The Letter of the law did not allow the priest to see God in his neighbor stripped of all visible signs of citizenship.
Thereupon a Levite, assistant to the priest, arrived at the place (κατὰ τὸν τόπον ἐλθὼν) where the derelict lay and passed (the verb is, again, ἀντιπαρέρχομαι, from ἀντι + παρά + ἔρχομαι, or “to pass on the opposite side”). Of the priest it is not said that he stopped in any way in the place (κατὰ τὸν τόπον) where the victim lay, so the Levite has a slight advantage over the priest, with respect to what is right. The priest is radical in his separation between what is lawful and what is merely natural, as philosophers might put it. For the priest, law and nature are radically opposed to one another, so that each must go its own way, even if this means that Law loses all natural support, alienating itself from nature as it departs from the Capital of the Law. But then a journeying Samaritan (Σαμαρείτης δέ τις ὁδεύων) came to the wounded—not merely to his place—seeing him naturally as a man and so in feelings (σπλαγχνίζομαι, from σπλάγχνα or “sentiment”). The Samaritan, here, is not a man of Law, but a pagan whose conventions are very much transparent to our common humanity. He can easily see that there is dignity within human nature, even prior to the Law’s showing us that dignity. Precisely by not knowing the good law of Jews, the Samaritan can sense God within man, as opposed to conceiving God above man. Thereupon, the Samaritan cures the wounded man in a ritualistic manner (with oil and whine), suggesting that the priestly sacraments of purification find their rudimentary guise in paganism, which shelters men from the desert of violence in which, since Adam, fallen man as such finds himself at birth.
The pagan shelter is an inn, rather than a temple, and the Samaritan’s concerns (“he was concerned”—ἐπεμελήθη—about the wounded) are not full-fledged care of the soul, but Jesus is pointing beyond any overt temple and care. His Samaritan stands as natural anticipation of God himself, who shelters fallen man by commissioning his “inn keeper” to watch out for him (to retain concern for him, as the reappearing verb ἐπιμελέομαι indicates). The Samaritan pays “two dinars” (δύο δηνάρια) to the “innkeeper” or “he who welcomes every man” (πανδοχεύς, from πᾶν + δέχομαι), so that “fallen man” can recover his strength in anticipation of the Samaritan’s return. Then the Samaritan will amply reimburse the innkeeper for any expense he will have incurred in helping the wounded or fallen man recover.
In thus ending his parable, Jesus turns to the legal expert to ask him about the identity of the neighbor in the context of the parable. Once again, the expert gives the correct answer, defining “the neighbor” in terms of doing (the verb ποιέω returns) what is merciful toward man as man (Ὁ ποιήσας τὸ ἔλεος μετ’ αὐτοῦ). Now this “doing” hearkens back to the original question concerning works that lead to eternal life. What is it that we are to do? We are to place ourselves in God, our true place, as opposed to the place in which we have fallen as men, stripped of outward signs of divinity, or of our divine mandate. And we are to love our neighbor for God’s sake, just as we love ourselves in God. In other words, we are to recognize our neighbor as a sign of God.
Yet Jesus’s last question points to a further point. For Jesus’s “neighbor,” now, is not grammatically speaking the one we must help, but the one who helps. Who is the neighbor we must love as ourselves? It is the good Samaritan! Why? Not because he is a priest, or a priest’s assistant, but because he is a natural image of God.
Jesus has taken-up the question of meaning by showing that priests can take it “down,” or away from the source of Law. When this happens, we should look at noble pagans to see in them (beyond the ὁράω that the Samaritan, the Priest and the Levite all share) the sign of God’s providence. Indeed, the three characters of the parable must somehow converge in their calling. All the more where we come to see ourselves in our fallen condition as the man who was taking the path “down” from the Eternal City.
NOTES:
[1] The term “phenomenological” (after Jacob Klein’s Aristotelian reading of Husserl) indicates a reading that heeds phenomena according to its their own mode or logic of disclosure.  A phenomenological “sermon” (from serere or “to connect”) would be a discourse that ascends to meaning or understanding by retracing words back to it, following backwards the “downward” path that words would have taken to reach the reader.
[2] Luke’s ἀναγινώσκω (from ἀναγιγνώσκω, combining ἀνά and γιγνώσκω) denotes reading as ascending back to familiar knowledge, or recognition.
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Marco Andreacchio was awarded a doctorate from the University of IIllinois for his interpretation of Sino-Japanese philosophical classics in dialogue with Western counterparts and a doctorate from Cambridge University for his work on Dante’s Platonic interpretation of religious authority. Andreacchio has taught at various higher education institutions and published systematically on problems of a political-philosophical nature.

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