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Strangers in Our Midst:
The Good Samaritan Today
by Lilia Fernandez
New World Outlook
Associated Church Press Award Winner:
Honorable Mention for Biblical Interpretation
Most people are overwhelmed and confused by the complex realities of living in globalized and multicultural communities. People feel insecure and yearn for decisive one-step solutions to difficult problems. It is therefore not surprising that anti-immigrant legislation has won widespread approval in the US Congress. This legislation discourages future immigration, severely limits government subsidies for elderly and disabled immigrants, and penalizes refugees who have resided in the United States for more than five years.
Often overlooked is the fact that many of these newcomers are joining family members in immigrant and refugee communities. These communities have formed in the last 20 years in the wake of violent political upheavals. Spawned by the bipolar tensions of the Cold War and of the civil and ethnic wars that erupted in its aftermath, these upheavals have made sudden mass migrations of desperate people an increasingly common occurrence.
The arrival of the new information age and the global economy have created additional pressures. Profound social and economic changes have produced a widening gap between those who are participants in these changes and those who can never hope to play a productive part in the work of the next millennium.
Today, in the midst of mass movements of uprooted peoples and global economic restructuring, we are asking our leaders to legislate simple solutions. In response, they have made a focused allocation of responsibility for the support of immigrants and other newcomers who are in need. We have not asked Congress to consider the key questions of where power and means reside. We want only to be absolved of any shared responsibilities.
The titles of the welfare and immigration laws enacted by the US Congress in 1996 are misleading in themselves. One is called "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act"; the other, "The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act." The terms personal responsibility, work opportunity, reconciliation, and reform all speak to deep values held both by citizens of a democratic nation and by followers of strong religious faith traditions. However, people do not often stop to ask the difficult questions behind these words. Are personal responsibilities being shared by all members of our communities? Have the people targeted for reform had reasonable or adequate opportunity to develop the means to complete the tasks demanded of them?
Parallels With a Parable
We are not unlike the lawyer whose dialogue with Jesus frames the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
Prompted by Jesus, the lawyer answers his own first question correctly: To inherit eternal life, you shall love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. But seeking to impress his companions with his knowledge of Judaic law, he poses a second question: "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus' response characteristically gives more than has been asked for. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the question becomes not whom must I love as my neighbor but what must I do to be a good neighbor.
Jesus taught us about the reign of God and what kind of world
God seeks for us by speaking in parables--examples in story form
taken from everyday life. Through these stories, Jesus teases our
minds into the deeper reflection that assures the continuing
relevance of the Gospel message. The symbolic language Jesus
employs prevents us from using his teachings to create simple
legalistic solutions to our problems. Instead, through the eyes of
the Good Samaritan, Jesus challenges us to grapple with what love
and neighbor mean in action.
Called To Be Neighborly
How might our reactions to the new US laws be changed if we were to view ourselves as people called by God to be neighborly? How might the story of the Good Samaritan force us to sort out our connections to or disconnections from others within a Christian way of life and sense of community?
Jesus recounts the story of a man who, while traveling the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, is accosted by bandits, severely beaten, and left for dead in a ditch. First a priest and then a Levite (a temple functionary) pass by and ignore the man's plight. We are repelled by the idea that people in the professions would fail to intervene in such a dire situation. We are then astonished when the injured man is not only rescued but extensively cared for by a despised outcast--a Samaritan. We are compelled to widen our focus from stereotyped categories of people--respected professionals, despised outcasts--to consider whose actions were the more neighborly. More critically, we are being asked to enlarge the scope of our adherence to the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves by expanding our concept of who our neighbors are.
The reversal of the legal expert's question--from a focus on others to a focus on our own responsibilities--gives a clue to the parable's message. God's commandment to love your neighbor is not limited by the number of people in need of love but by the capacity to love of those subject to the command. The change of focus in the parable also forces us to confront the responsibilities of discipleship--not from the comfort of our own perspectives and goals but from the point of view of those who are in dire need. This means that it will not be our own agendas and comfort levels that will control our decisions but the well-being of those "in the ditch" that will govern the scope of our obligation. It is wholeheartedly agreed that immigration controls must be effective and that fraud and other criminal acts must not be a part of the process. But conscientious citizens and people of faith must demand that people's real-life situations be brought to bear when public policy is formulated.
In contemplating a modern version of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we might ask ourselves how to confront the root causes of forced human migrations today. Why are we not speaking about the welfare, responsibilities, and work opportunities of all God's children--especially in the light of growing poverty and prejudice: problems that are exacerbated by global economic restructuring. How are we, who experience not only God's grace but also economic well-being, to respond to our encounters with the world's uprooted--whom we now find on our own doorsteps?
When we ask only for simple legal solutions, we effectively exclude the strangers in our midst from the communion table of fellowship in God's household. We treat them as impediments to our own progress instead of seeing them as opportunities for redeeming and reconciling discipleship. Even worse, we stereotype them. We use harmful labels--such as illegal aliens--to effectively preclude our ever having to consider them as members of our neighborhoods and congregations.
The parable of the Good Samaritan challenges us to understand that violence towards those who are the least powerful among us can take the form of legislative acts or of human indifference and disconnection. Jesus asks that we who would be good disciples be good neighbors--be willing to think and act beyond what has ordinarily been expected. This is the message of the incarnation itself and the meaning behind the message when Jesus tells the lawyer to "go and do likewise."
This article is reproduced from the March-April 1997 issue of New World Outlook, the Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church, by permission of the editors. Copyright 1997 by the General Board of Global Ministries of The United Methodist Church. All photographs are copyright © The General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church
and courtesy, New World Outlook magazine. All photos in this article were taken by Lilia Fernandez.