Arizona is a state where most of the population is from somewhere else. That includes me. When I moved to Tucson from Kansas in 1973 to go to graduate school, the state’s population had just topped 2 million. Forty-plus years later, we’re closing in on 7 million, and most of that growth has come from immigrants like me.
I’ve been wondering lately whether the transient nature of Arizona’s population is responsible for some of our mean-spirited politics. If you’re living here, but your real “home” is somewhere else, maybe you’re a little less invested in your new community. If your family and your roots are in California or Ohio, maybe you’re unenthusiastic about helping to pay for public health and education in this new place that’s so unlike “home.”
This has been on my mind lately because Arizona has a new governor (born in Ohio), and judging from his proposed budget, he’s even more hostile to higher education than was his predecessor. I should probably note that I’m a recently retired employee of the University of Arizona, so I have an interest in that institution’s success. And in ASU’s and NAU’s as well – this isn’t about rooting for the Wildcats. I agree with Robert Reich, who has written that “A decent society wouldn’t push millions of students into debt. It would recognize that higher education isn’t mainly a personal investment; it is a public good.”
I worry that the very concept of “public good” has largely fallen by the wayside in Arizona and the United States. Any politician who campaigned on the platform of building a decent society would likely be the object of ridicule. I find this trend pretty dispiriting, although I assume that sooner or later the pendulum will begin its inevitable swing in the opposite direction.
I take some comfort in the fact that most major religions – including the two that I know most about, Christianity and Buddhism – admonish their adherents to take care of one another. That advice wouldn’t be necessary if it was happening routinely. Jesus and Buddha both knew that “loving thy neighbor” was unnatural.
Like most Americans, I don’t know many of my neighbors. The family next door is terrific. Paulo is from Italy, and his wife Anna is from Guadalajara. They have two adorable kids, and they’re both great cooks. Across the street, it’s a different story. That house is rented by a shifting cast of college students who occasionally throw large parties. Naturally I have warm feelings towards the neighbors next door, and I occasionally find myself annoyed by the neighbors across the street.
And that brings me to the Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is found in the Gospel of Luke. At this point in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ ministry, he’d begun to make enemies. His adversaries would plant their best debaters in the crowd when Jesus spoke, trying to either catch him in a contradiction, or trick him into saying something that would get him in trouble with the Roman authorities.
On this occasion, Jesus had been preaching on “love thy neighbor,” and one of his adversaries in the crowd spoke up and said, basically, “OK, loving my neighbor sounds good, but who is my neighbor? The folks next door are pretty nice, but that crazy family at the end of the street, who always have a couple of old chariots up on blocks in the front yard, and throw wild parties every weekend? Surely I’m not expected to love them?”
That’s a paraphrase, obviously. Maybe Dan can spare enough pixels to reprint the verses here, from the King James translation of Luke 10: 25-37.
25 And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him [Jesus], saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
26 He [Jesus] said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
27 And he [the lawyer] answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
28 And he [Jesus] said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
29 But he [the lawyer], willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
37 And he [the lawyer] said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.
Reading the story today, Jesus’ question about who was more neighborly provokes kind of a “DUH” response, right? Come on, this is not a hard question! OF COURSE, the guy who came to the aid of the traveler was more neighborly than the two men who passed him by.
So then what’s the point of the parable? In order to understand the parable the way Jesus’ audience heard it, we have to know what a Samaritan is, or was.
The earlybooks of the Old Testament chronicle the rivalries between the Twelve Tribes. The warring tribes were united for a time under the strong kingships of David and Solomon, but after Solomon’s death, things came apart. Solomon’s line continued to rule the southern Kingdom of Judah, while the northern Kingdom of Israel went its own way. The capital of the northern kingdom of Israel was Samaria, and its people were called Samaritans. Since the Old Testament was written from the perspective of the Southern tribes, the Northerner Israelites were described as the bad guys.
To make things even more complicated, in about 772 BC, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria, and the Assyrians moved some Israelites out and replaced them with ethnic groups from other parts of their empire to pacify the area. Today, we’d call it an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Over the next seven centuries, the people of Samaria evolved a kind of an alternate universe version of Judaism. They had a sacred mountain, Mount Gerizim. They had Ten Commandments, but they weren’t exactly the same as the Ten Commandments of Moses.
By the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans hated each other. From the Jewish perspective, Samaritans were more than just foreigners – they were also heretics. And the road between Jerusalem, which was the capital of the Kingdom of Judah in the south, to Jericho just across the border in the northern Kingdom, was notoriously dangerous – narrow and winding, with plenty of places for robbers to wait in ambush for unwary travelers.
So that’s the context for the Parable of The Good Samaritan. In the 21st century United States, it would be like saying a man was robbed and left for dead, and a priest and a prominent member of the church’s governing board both passed him by, but a member of Al Qaeda stopped to help him.
And Jesus said you not only have to love this Al Qaeda guy, but you have to love him “as yourself.” Not just admire him grudgingly for helping the victim, but love him as though he were YOU. What’s up with that? As I consider that question, it helps me to look at some parallels between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of the Buddha.
Maybe you heard, a few years ago when the Dalai Lama was in the United States, a newscaster trying to joke with His Holiness, about the Dalai Lama ordering a hot dog, and saying “Give me one with everything.” The Dalai Lama was trying to be a good sport, but he clearly didn’t get the joke.
That attempt at humor was based on a common misunderstanding – the idea that Tibetan Buddhism believes we are “one with everything.” Not at all. Instead, the Tibetan Buddhist world view is that everything in your world comes from you, from the karmic seeds you’ve planted in the past by the way you’ve treated others.
And that’s why it’s important to love thy neighbor – even the obnoxious ones – as thyself. Because if you respond to obnoxious people with anger, you’re only planting the seeds for more obnoxious people in your world in the future. If, instead, we can manage to deal with an unpleasant person mindfully, understanding that we’re creating our future by how we act in the present, we can maybe make some attempt to treat the unpleasant person with love.
Love, in this context, doesn’t mean approving of their actions, and certainly not helping them hurt others. Instead, it means doing what Jesus said elsewhere: Luke 6:31: “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
If I went temporarily crazy and started hurting people, I’d want someone to stop me. That doesn’t mean I’d want them to shoot me dead – just to use the minimum amount of force necessary to restrain me until I came to my senses.
Similarly, if you had a child, and he was throwing a tantrum and endangering himself as well as others, you wouldn’t grab a baseball bat and try to break his head open. You’d try to get him in a bear hug or something, and hold him – lovingly but firmly – until he calmed down.
What Jesus and the Buddha are trying to teach us, is that if we want eternal life – remember, that was the first question the lawyer asked, which prompted the Parable of the Good Samaritan – we have to act towards others as though we’re giving them lessons in how to treat us. We have to respond with love, even when the circumstances aren’t very conducive to love.
If I were to be completely honest, I’d admit that it’s hard for me to treat even the people I love that mindfully. When Christmas rolls around, I have a tendency to give gifts that I would like, or that I think the other person SHOULD like. It’s much harder for me to actually put myself in their place and ask “what do they really need from me?”
And so the Parable of the Good Samaritan turns out to be not simple at all. Putting its lesson into practice is hard work. But it strikes me that Jesus and the Buddha are both saying that the ball’s in my court. I need to drop my self-righteous attitude and try to cultivate some compassion for the politicians (and those who elect them) who strike me as crazy and dangerous. Not to support them, certainly, but instead to resist them mindfully rather than simply dismissing them as venal morons.
The path to building a decent society, in other words, has to start with me. Am I up to that task? The jury is still out.
