Go figure

Had the first "Bible study" in the Cultures of the Religious Right class, something new and a bit tricky to do, not just because I'm not a Biblical scholar, but also because Bible Study is a devotional practice, and that kind of devotion has no place in a secular academic setting. But I felt that students needed experience with the Bible, and also want to test the hypothesis that a Bible study group is more like what we do in our seminar college than we might suppose - or at least, different for different reasons than we might think.

I decided a suitable first text was Luke 10:25-37, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It's a story most people know, accessible and relatively straightforward, not to mention a part of common speech. At least one student didn't know this was the source of the phrase "good Samaritan"; in fact, many folks probably think the phrase redundant since the only Samaritans they've ever heard of are good ones! There were a few other points I was hoping to make, such as what a parable is (and isn't), and that the summary of the law which precedes this one ("'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 neighbor as yourself.'") consists of quotations not from Jesus but from the Hebrew Bible. I was also going to mention - though it has nothing to do with the evangelical religious cultures this course explores - figurative/allegorical readings, like this one from Origen (which is in background of the famous Good Samaritan window at Chartres below - my pic from July 2003: notice the Samaritan story coming up the center to undo the story of the Fall narrated around it): The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the [inn], which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. … The manager of the [inn] is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Savior’s second coming.

But in the heat of the moment, my contrarian pedagogy (or pedagogical contrariness) led me to suggest that it was an anti-religious story. The religious specialists in the parable, not to mention the legal scholar to whom Jesus addresses the parable, love their neighbors less than the outlaw Samaritan. Wouldn't we all be better off paying less attention to religion and more to our neighbors?

And yet, the claim that piety makes people self-righteous rather than righteous may seem intuitively true to us in part because of the place of this parable in our sacred tradition! Go figure.