Why Did Jesus Cross The Road? To Get To The "Other"

By Ruben Rivera© Thanksgiving Day, 25 Nov 2010

"To end otherness, every single one of us, like Jesus the archetypal Samaritan, must cross the road. Christians will readily acknowledge that Christ crossing the road was the greatest divine act of all. If so, then people crossing the road may well be the greatest human act of all." Ruben Rivera

My profession and my passion have long situated me in the midst of dialogue and debate over the application of faith to challenging contemporary issues. At the university where I teach, one long-standing issue is the work of reconciliation. Depending on one's social class, race, gender, political party and the like, there are for the word "reconciliation" a variety of definitions, visions for successful outcomes, and of course "ways" of getting there.(1)

Empirical evidence shows that North American Christians tend to see reconciliation as "vertical", a term I have used for some fifteen years to indicate an emphasis on individual conversion, or "getting right with God". Of the two parts that make up the Cross upon which Jesus was crucified, this can be seen as the vertical piece that extends from earth to heaven, symbolically representing humans reconciled to God. Based on the growth of their churches, evangelical Christians in particular have been very good at the work of vertical reconciliation.


Unfortunately, what evangelicals, and Christians in general, have historically not been so good at is what I call "horizontal reconciliation"(2): a radical conversion and reorientation that leads to justice and equality for, and harmonious conviviality with people different from themselves. Using the image of the Cross again, this is the piece that extends horizontally, to any and all parts of the world, reconciling humans to each other. Genuine reconciliation, said Miroslav Volf, would result in the "embrace" of the "other", and in so doing, bring an end to otherness.(3)

Cristo Redentor, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Christianity loves to tell how God came to earth and became the archetypal "other": he was Nazarene, but "can anything good come from Nazareth?"; the friend of society's outcasts; and himself an outcast, "had no place to lay his head"; the "prophet unwelcome in his own country"; the "corner stone that the builders rejected"; mocked, slandered, oppressed, and horribly crucified. Indeed, judging by the Anglo Saxon standard that has dominated the globe of what it means to be human and what it means to be beautiful(4), Jesus would still qualify as "other" today, in our society, even many of our churches.

From Mike Fillon, "The Real Face of Jesus,"
Popular Mechanics, 7 Dec 2002.
Image of an average 1st century Aramaic-speaking male Jew based on data gathered from forensic anthropology and biblical texts. Would this Jesus be embraced if he came for the first time today? Or would he be treated as other?

Yet, the Christian story is essentially this: God, the Holy Other, so loved sinful others, that God came to earth as socially other in order to end otherness forever.

So the redemption of God is both vertical and horizontal. Yet, Christians tend to focus on the former while ignoring, downplaying, or openly resisting the latter.

If anyone imagines that they and their religion are exempt from this historical observation, ask yourself a simple question. Despite the many ways you are a good person, who are the human beings who to you are "other"? These are the individuals, groups or parties that you see as different and not in a good way. They are excluded from your life and certainly your heart. Just the fact of their existence, but especially if they are competing for something you want, is threatening to you. The "other" are those who do not meet standards that you yourself fail to meet sometimes in your life. But when the "other" disappoints you or commits a wrong, you likely blame it on internal traits, and therefore are apt to talk judgmentally about them. Yet when you or your in-group commit a similar wrong, you likely blame it on external causes, and therefore are apt to talk about you and your group in terms of the need for understanding and mercy.(5)

How do you think of certain people or groups? How do you speak of them? The poor, the rich, blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Asians, whites, gays, straights, liberals, conservatives, men, women, the old, the young, the disabled, immigrants, non-English speakers, other religions? Create your own list. Who is "other" in your heart?

Judging from the rampant otherness in the world's societies, including our own, it seems that people from all religions have learned to exorcise social justice and responsibility from their personal piety in direct contradiction to their religion's teachings. And yet, here-and-now horizontal reconciliation is the only evidence that vertical reconciliation has occurred at all.


In Christianity, for example, you must love and treat others the way you want to be loved and treated. Nor can you claim to love a God you have never seen, and not love persons you can see all around you. (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31; 1 John 4:19-21) In Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats, not to care for society's least cared for, is not to care for God. And no heaven for you. Don't believe me. Check for yourself (Matthew 25:31-46).

One of the most powerful of Jesus' teachings on otherness and reconciliation is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. (Luke 10: 25-37)

The parable is a response to an expert in Judaism who attempted to separate love of God from love of people, even though he just finished saying (and Jesus thereafter affirmed) that the two loves are inseparable "in order to inherit eternal life". (Luke 10: 25-28)

"...You shall love the Lord your God....and your neighbor as yourself", says the religious expert, quoting famous commands (Deuteronony 6:5; Leviticus 19:18) in the Torah (or "Law" as it is translated in most English Bibles), the first five books of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. Jesus replies, "You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live."

The expert then asks Jesus "...and who is my neighbor?" People are listening to the conversation, you see. And the expert needs to justify his unspoken but clearly narrow definition of "neighbor" as being applied mostly to those who belong to his in-group, in order to continue his exclusion of untold numbers of people, classes and groups, and still be able to "inherit eternal life."

To me, this religious expert represents all religious people past and present who want the world to believe that they love God even while maintaining otherness in their hearts and social institutions. The Parable of the Good Samaritan refutes this as a lie.

In the parable, a traveler is beaten, robbed, stripped naked and left for dead. A Jewish priest sees him but passes by on the other side of the road. A Levite, or member of the priestly class, also keeps to the other side of the road and does nothing. But a Samaritan [whom Jerusalem Jews despised as half-breeds with a competing, illegitimate temple of worship at Mt. Gerizim (John 4:9, 21)] had compassion on the traveler, bound up his wounds, took him to an inn and paid all the costs for his stay and recovery.

Dinah Roe Kendall, "The Good Samaritan"

Jesus then asks: "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?"

The Jewish expert was checkmated and he knew it. For the Priest and the Levite in the story were part of his in-group, and any such story would have included them as the most likely candidates to be the heroes. But instead, the person he would have thought the least likely candidate, a Samaritan, turns out to be the one with true religion.

The lesson is so plain that even a child can see it, and so to Jesus' question the Jewish expert must answer: "The one who showed mercy [on the traveler]." Jesus responds: "Go and do likewise."

This parable can be viewed from many angles. It has often been pointed out that Jesus refutes the unscriptural and hypocritical narrowing of "who is my neighbor?" by turning the tables and effectively saying: You are asking the wrong question. The real question you have to answer is, "To whom are you a neighbor?"

I find the logic here to be profound. The religious expert's original question was, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" But then he sought to justify himself not being a neighbor by implying an outward cause: that is, there are many people who are not worthy to be called my neighbor, and I am therefore not required to love them as I love myself. Jesus' response argues: You didn't ask what other people had to do so that you can inherit eternal life. You asked what you had to do. That was the right question. Your second question about who is a neighbor to you was the wrong one. For people do not have to be neighbors to you for you to inherit eternal life. Their actions don't save or condemn you. You have to be a neighbor to them. All of them. Your actions save or condemn you.(6)

Though Jesus does not use terms like "in-group" and "other", his parable effectively obliterates any in-group expression, including religious, that maintains otherness.

In the parable, the assaulted traveler is "other" both to the robbers who nearly kill him and to the religious who would have let him die. The Samaritan is "other" to Jerusalem Jews like the expert questioning Jesus, who would never have thought to include him in any story where he was God's hero.

And of course, Jesus himself is "Other" -- a sort of archetypal Samaritan who, as the teacher of this parable (as well as in the gospels as a whole), crosses the road out of love for a person so dehumanized, so disregarded and treated as "other" that even laying there and bleeding out the last drops of his life, no one else, not even those who claimed to know and love God, had enough compassion to save him, even though it was mandated by their faith and well within their power to act. During his ministry Jesus repeatedly crossed the road to get to "others", at great cost to his reputation.(7)


This parable powerfully illustrates what reconciliation is all about. There is no vertical reconciliation with God without horizontal reconciliation with others. The work of horizontal reconciliation, and not just vertical, is how we join God in ending otherness forever.

To put it another way, to end otherness, every single one of us, like Jesus the archetypal Samaritan, must cross the road. Christians will readily acknowledge that Christ crossing the road was the greatest divine act of all. If so, then people crossing the road may well be the greatest human act of all.

Why did Jesus cross the road? To get to the "other".

Should we not all "go and do likewise"?


Ruben Rivera
-------
Note: I wonder if Christians today are in some ways like the Jerusalem religious leaders in Jesus day? In other words, who are the Samaritan "others" to Christians today? One glaring example in a post-9/11 world is Muslims. Can American Christians imagine a world in which Muslims can be God's heroes? What reaction would we get in our churches if someone preached on "The Parable of the Good Muslim"? (Stay tuned. That will be the subject of my next article.)
---------
Notes:
1. A recent helpful book in this regard is Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing (IVP, 2008).
2. For the issue as related particularly to race, see, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996).
4. Special Beauty Report: Erasing Ethnicity, MSN Report, 27 Oct 2007 (google "erasing ethnicity" to find articles).
5. See chapter 8 in Emerson and Smith on the inward preferential and outward prejudicial tendencies of ingroup dynamics.
6. Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats (or last judgment) is clear on this (Matthew 25:31-46).
7. Perhaps one of the greatest insults Jesus' opponents hurled at him was this: "Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan who is demon possessed?" (John 8:48). Of course Jesus had his own harsh words for those who robbed religion of love, social justice and mercy and replaced them with ritual, hypocrisy and oppression, especially against those who challenged their authority (Matthew 23).