A fundamentalist pastor was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and deaprted, leaving him half dead.
Now by chance an evangelical was going down that road and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a liberal Catholic priest and bible scholar, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Buddhist homosexual, as he journeyed, came to where he was and when he saw him he had compassion and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying "Take care of him, and whaterver more you spend, I will repay you when I come back."
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This is, of course, an abridged and updated version of Luke's famous parable. Today the parable has become deadened to our ears and is known now as a story of how to be a good neighbor.
But in the first century, Jesus' story would have had quite a startling effect. Startling and alarming.
To any Jew back then listening to Jesus tell this story, he would know that a Samaritan was a member of the bastard race of Jews. They were seen as the illegitimate heirs of Abraham. The first-century Jewish mind could no more conceive of a Samaritan as "good" any more than they could envision loving one's enemies.
This fixed and frozen text that is preserved for us in Luke perhaps took at least a half hour or more to perform. It contains all the elements of a great narrative story with an unusual "punch line." Jesus begins to unfold the tale slowly. Nothing seems out of the ordinary (and would not be to any member of his audience then): A mugging on a known and dangerous stretch of road, a gentle lampooning of who passed as "religious" and "righteous" during that time, and then comes the clincher: Divine help from an unexpected source.
The religious mandate of reaching out to the less fortunate was a long-held tradition for the Jews. But care for the widow, the orphan and the destitute was especially pertinent during a time when the Roman Empire and the top tiers of society expoited more than 80 per cent of the total population.
Re-casting the Samaritan as a "Buddhist homosexual" comes closer to replicating the original force and bite of Jesus' didactic parable. It wasn't the good neighbor that God sent after all. It was the queer, the faggot, the fairy. The enemy.
The Samaritan