Greatest Teacher? The Pharisee and the Good Samaritan

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(This is an abbreviation/summary of the talk I gave in Denver. It’s based on material from Jesus Asked.)

I no longer say Jesus was one of the greatest teachers that ever lived. That has a problem with it. A great teacher should have encyclopaedic knowledge and be able to clearly and convincingly answer any objection or question. That wasn’t really Jesus. Sometimes he even seemed to duck questions asked of him. Often Jesus didn’t answer the question as much as he answered the person who asked the question.

So… when looking at a piece of Jesus’ teaching it is important to ask who he was talking to and why.
That’s certainly true of Luke 10 which contains the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke writes that the man is a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, a member of the party that sought to live out the principles of the ancient Jewish scriptures in every day life, unlike the rival party, the Sadducees, who concerned themselves with matters more directly spoken to by the text: temple and sacrifices and festivals.

When our Pharisee is told love your neighbour as yourself, he wants to clarify and delimit his responsibility. He asks “And who is my neighbour?” but what he means is “Who do I have to love, and who can I get away without loving?” When Jesus replies with a story about a man who gets beat up and left for dead, our Pharisee doesn’t go into blank, receiving-teaching mode — he’s thinking, anticipating. He must expect that the story will include a Pharisee walking down that road, helping out the man in need, and Jesus will say this is the right thing — anyone in trouble is the neighbour to whom you must give love.

A priest?! When the first person down that fictional road is not a Pharisee but a priest, a member of the rival Sadducee party, our Pharisee must have feared that Jesus would have the rival do the right thing. “If, then, even a Sadducee can recognize a neighbour in need, how much more you — a Pharisee!” But after priest and levite, Sadducee after Sadducee, walks by without helping, surely, the listener thinks, surely the next character down that road will be a Pharisee. But no. The next person coming down the road is someone totally unexpected: a Samaritan. A hated peoples from the north, they shouldn’t really be part of this debate or this story. It will have taken him totally by surprise.

“Which man proved to be a neighbour to the man?” Jesus asked at the end. Our Pharisee may have answered in a daze. There is the obvious lesson that prejudice must be laid aside and all are or can be neighbour. But I think it will have struck our Pharisee that there is only one person in the story with whom he can identify, only one character left who could be a Pharisee: the man in need. Perhaps it isn’t so much a story about the Samaritan as about the man in need. Perhaps it isn’t so much about delimiting who I have to love as neighbour but about who I would want to help as a neighbour if I were in need.

Jesus doesn’t answer the question as much as Jesus answers the person. So perhaps we shouldn’t think in the abstract about the greatest teacher, but more personally about the best teacher you ever had. Because the best teacher is likely to be different from your smartest teacher, from your most persuasive teacher. I think it’s likely that this person is special not because of how they addressed the questions, but how they addressed you — how they challenged you.

Jesus of Nazareth. Best. Teacher. Ever.

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