“The ethnic and cultural boundary between the Jews and the Samaritans,” J. Daniel Hays writes, “was every bit as rigid and hostile as the current boundary between Blacks and Whites in the most racist areas of the United States” (From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race, 163). Hays’s excellent book alerted me to threads in Scripture that I had been prone to overlook or ignore altogether. Racial hostility and reconciliation, it turns out, not only is present in the Bible, but is a vital theme — a unique and striking way that God glorifies himself in the stories he has written in Scripture.
For those of us who have lived only in the United States, the stories we hear of past hostilities between whites and blacks here might seem like some of the most hostile in history.
The brutal atrocity of chattel slavery, and the curse of Jim Crow, still hang for many like dark clouds over our union, with painful and lingering consequences of various kinds. And for many, feelings of progress have quickly worn away over the last year, as shootings, protests, debates, and riots have ripped at old wounds. True unity and enduring peace can begin to feel like a naive fantasy. How could we ever overcome a history like ours? How could we ever bridge the gulfs between us? How could we ever make real, tangible, durable progress?
As we read more devastating headlines of racial hostility and ponder the heart-wrenching history of the last five hundred years, we might slowly begin to think that the Bible has little to offer us here. That racial brokenness sits somewhere on the periphery of God’s plan. That the early church knew little of what America has experience so deeply. This kind of hostility is anything but unprecedented, though, and it is certainly not foreign to Scripture, even in Jesus’s day. The cause for racial harmony in twenty-first-century America may benefit from a walk through first-century Samaria.
Every Bit as Hostile
If we are familiar with the Gospels, we might recall something of the fierce hostility between Jews and Samaritans. When Jesus asks the woman at the well, a Samaritan, for a drink, she replies, “‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans)” (John 4:9). No dealings. Not even a cup of water in the heat of the day. Imagine refusing someone something as small and life-sustaining as water simply because of their ethnicity. Sadly, we don’t need a lot of imagination in America.
“The ethnic and cultural boundary between the Jews and the Samaritans,” J. Daniel Hays writes, “was every bit as rigid and hostile as the current boundary between Blacks and Whites in the most racist areas of the United States” (From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race, 163). Hays’s excellent book alerted me to threads in Scripture that I had been prone to overlook or ignore altogether. Racial hostility and reconciliation, it turns out, not only is present in the Bible, but is a vital theme — a unique and striking way that God glorifies himself in the stories he has written in Scripture.
What Hays sees in the Judea-Samaria strife was especially eye-opening for me. Samaria appears in six major scenes in Luke and Acts, and only briefly elsewhere (except for the woman at the well). So, why would Luke keep returning to Samaria while others avoided going there? Luke in particular, it seems, wanted us to see the enduring power of the gospel to reconcile hostile peoples. He wanted us to believe that, despite how futile and frustrating the pursuit of racial harmony in diversity may feel at times, God really can do for us what he did for them.
Hints of Fierce Hostility
The first mention of Samaria in Luke far more than hints at the fierce hostility between these ethnic enemies. When Jesus took his first steps toward the cross, he decided to go through Samaria: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for him” (Luke 9:51–52). This may sound like the preparations he made for the Last Supper, but the story ends very differently. In this case, there was no supper.
“But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:53). There was room in the inn, but they refused him still. A Jew on his way to Jerusalem — a man with his blood, his culture, his religion — was not welcome here. Luke wants us to feel the offense, the prejudice, the antagonism. It sadly sounds like much of American history.
We know this was an assault because Jesus’s disciples were immediately ready to retaliate. “When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’” (Luke 9:54). Their response is as revealing as the Samaritans’ offense. There is a deep-seated, long-standing animosity between these groups. The kindling had been laid over centuries of hatred. Jesus knew, very personally, the pain and strain of ethnic hostility.
Even when wronged, though, Jesus smothered the disciples’ wrath (Luke 9:55–56), foreshadowing the far greater peace he would bring. But the images of falling fire do light the stage for the next mention of Samaria (in the next chapter). The bitterness in their refusal becomes the backdrop for a familiar and surprising parable.
Mercy Subdues Hostility
We know the story of the Good Samaritan. In fact, when we hear of Samaria, that’s likely the first thing that comes to mind. A lawyer was trying to justify himself, believing he had sufficiently loved his neighbors (at least neighbors as he liked to define them), but Jesus pressed on a sensitive and stubborn nerve: his quiet ethnic animosity. If he wanted to inherit eternal life, he would have to lay down his ill will toward Samaria. This was his sell-all-you-have moment.
For many in America, we are experiencing our own sell-all-you-have moment. God is violently confronting worldly ways of thinking and advocating on the right and the left. Will we in the church tolerate racism, in all its forms, traditional and progressive? Will we turn against one another? Will we turn a blind eye to injustice? Will we let the godless have their way? Hays writes,
The relationship between Whites and Blacks in America, even within the Church, is remarkably similar to that between Jews and Samaritans of the first century: one that has historically been characterized by prejudicial animosity and distrust, with clear boundaries delineating “them” from “us.” The Good Samaritan story, especially when placed within the overall theology of Luke-Acts, likewise destabilizes our inherited “Black-White” worldview, and challenges us to move beyond the “us-them” mentality of our culture to an “us-us, in Christ” unity that demolishes the ethnic boundaries of our society. (171)
We don’t know how the lawyer responded to Jesus. Did he keep excusing and justifying himself? Did he stay in line with the ethnocentrism around him? Did he shout, “Crucify him!”? Or did the walls around his narrow definitions of “neighbor” collapse before Christ?
Luke’s point, however, isn’t how the lawyer responded but how we will. With so much stacked against racial unity and neighborly love in America, how will we answer the call? Will we prove to be neighbors across difficult or strained barriers? Will we live with compassion and mercy and love?
