‘When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them
and healed their sick.’
Matthew 14:14
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One of the many phrases that have come into the everyday speech of even those who know nothing about Christianity, is ‘The Good Samaritan’. It is the parable (teaching story) Jesus tells in Luke 10:25-37 of the response of a Samaritan man to the plight of a Jew who had been mugged by robbers and left badly injured on the notoriously dangerous road down from Jerusalem to Jericho. In Jesus’ story, a Jewish Priest and a temple worker coming down the road both ignored the fellow Jew’s plight and kept on walking. In contrast, a Samaritan man travelling the same road, takes pity on him and goes out of his way to help the man in distress. He treats his wounds with expensive oil, dresses them and then takes the man to a hotel where he can rest and recover, and he pays all the expenses involved.
The essential background to this story is that the Jews and the Samaritans were the most bitter of enemies, and to Jesus’ largely Jewish audience the idea that a Samaritan of all people would stop and help a Jew would have been verging on the obscene.
Jesus tells this story in response to a question from an expert in the (Old Testament) Law (a religious lawyer) regarding what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus gets the ‘expert’ to answer his own question by asking him ‘what does the Law say?’ The man responds by stating the two great commandments – ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. Jesus says you are right, now go and do it!
However, the man pushes his question further, wanting elucidation as to who his neighbour is, for being a Jewish leader he would want to put limits on who can be counted as a neighbour. Largely for him he would only include fellow Jews. Jesus’ story would have shocked him because it shows that his neighbour is anyone even, as Jesus said elsewhere, his enemies such as a Samaritan.
The key thing Jesus taught here is that there are not boundaries to ‘Loving our neighbour’, and Christians are called to even love enemies. That is in fact to reflect of the nature of God and practice God-type love. This means having compassion for those in need, even if they are our enemies, even as we have been his.
The Good Samaritan story, has it that he ‘took pity on him’ (NIV). The verb used is the Greek word ‘Splagitsomai’ meaning ‘to have compassion’. It is far more than just a ‘feeling sorry for’ type of emotion’. Rather it is literally a deep ‘churning of the bowels’ one. For the Jews, the seat of the emotions was not the heart as for us, but the bowels and this is the emotion at the heart of the story; God-type love manifesting itself in deeply moving compassion. This is an emotion exhibited by Jesus himself at various times. As examples, for the widow who has lost her only son in Luke 7:13; for the ‘helpless’ people in Matthew 9:36; and for the sick in Matthew 14:14.
It is of the essence of Christian faith to reflect the very nature of God in having a deep Jesus-type compassion for the needy, whether the need is spiritual or material. This is acting as the ‘SALT’ that Jesus said Christians are (‘Are’, not ‘are to become’, Matthew 5:13). Over centuries, Christians acting as the SALT of the Gospel have driven the flowering of many organizations established for the benefit of those in need and society in general, for example-
‘The factory schools for workers’ children, paupers and orphans, the Ragged schools for poor children, the Salvation Army, the London City Mission, George Muller’s orphanages in Bristol, public libraries, evening education institutes for working class people, the National Children’s home, the YMCA, Barnardo’s Homes, the NSPCC, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, the RSPCA. St John’s Ambulance, the Red Cross, hospitals and a legion of other organizations originally formed by Biblically driven Christians for the benefit of society’.
Similarly, it was the bible-driven desire to help the poor and those in need that caused George Cadbury to build well-serviced houses and townships for his workers in his Bourneville chocolate factory; that motivated Mrs Elizabeth Fry to work for reform of prisons in England; that was also the motive for William Wilberforce and other Christian parliamentarians to work for the ending and policing of the North Atlantic slave trade, an endeavour that cost the lives of hundreds of British Royal Navy sailors.
In contrast, compassion for the needy and acting for the benefit of those in need, including enemies is not a core characteristic of most other religions. For example, if a Hindu sees a beggar in the gutter his religion does not require him to help. For the beggar is there because of his Karma, that is how he lived in his previous incarnation. His hope is to live a better life now and so receive a better status in his next reincarnation.
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The retreat of Christianity in western countries has left a Vacuum, that has been filled with a whole range of fundamentally demonic influences that are tearing the fabric of society. While it is a spiritual vacuum, there are material consequences. One of these is the loss of the God-reflecting exercise of Compassion flowing from a deep emotional concern for the needy, whether spiritually or materially, even enemies.
As ‘down we have come’ into George Orwell’s ‘Cesspool full of Barbed Wire’, God’s good plan for the functioning of society is now usurped by a Kaleidoscope of ‘Identities’, Tribes. In contrast to Jesus’ teaching in the Good Samaritan story, Tribal thinking sets up Compassion-blocks to any people not in their tribe, as would have been the mindset of the religious expert in Jesus’ story.
This tribalism has always been the mark of pagan societies and here we are again. In the place of the Good Samaritan model and ‘acting for the interest of others’ (Philippians 2:3-4) even enemies, we have ‘acting for the interest of the Tribe’. Further, as part of the tribal conflict we have invented new language such as ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’.
The reversal of the evacuation of the Gospel influence in society, and the consequential Compassion-deficit, can only be achieved by a movement to re-evangelize the West to resurrect the now virtually invisible Biblical world view. This task is the responsibility of every individual who claims to enjoy the present and eternal benefits won for us at great cost on the Cross by Jesus.
There is no possibility that this task can be achieved while living the comfortable, Christianity-lite, convenience-church, Sunday gathering life that is standard. On the contrary, it will require every Christian to fulfil their essential reality of being SALT. That involves using every opportunity in their networks and spheres of influence to import a God-reflecting biblical world view into the conversations, discussions and activities they engage in every day.
unbounded church 