The Samaritan and Hardship

A meditation on the difficulty of Luke 10:33-35 in times of strife

And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?”

So he answered and said, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbour as yourself.’ ”

And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”

But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Then Jesus answered and said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion. So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.’ So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?”

And he said, “He who showed mercy on him.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

This piece of scripture (Luke 10:25-37) is possibly the most famous piece of moral teaching that emanates from the word of the Lord, even in our current world of secularist hegemony. When invoking the name of Christ, the average person, the otherwise indistinguishable member of “the Crowd”, will probably be able to recount the Second Greatest Commandment¹ and allude to some of the parables. That seems a safe bet, even in an age where religious education is at an all-time prioritarian lowliness. If we’ve succeeded in broaching the notion of the parables, “the Good Samaritan” is almost certainly in the top three; some vague allusion to doing good when others don’t or at least something to the effect of helping the abstract “neighbour” shines through, granting the small hope, the smallest of hopes against all hope, that good news does endure as relevant to a world that would much prefer it was forgotten. Depending on how my day is going, this sliver of theological understanding that emerges from the person who otherwise has no interest in religious matters fills me with either elation or despair.

However, that simple yet venomous Kierkegaardian barb sticks in the mind, awakening the spirit from its objective relationship to this parable; much like the terrifying story of the Binding of Isaac, we are alerted to the thought that “[t]here were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it render sleepless?”² The terrible fear descends: what if we have misunderstood the Samaritan as well? What if Christ had something a tad more challenging for us than simply “be nice”?

Christ and Paul on hardship

Of course, all scripture should be understood as presenting a cohesive whole, of sorts. But, as S. K. was always quick to reassure “that single individual”, we are not saved by our intellectual pursuits and through a robust account of systematic theology. Retelling a logical “closed system” of faith by rote³ is simply not a salvific issue⁴; instead, we might hope that we simply understand what is presented to us, and how we can embrace it - no, how we do embrace it in our life, in our “deeds” [Gjerninger]⁵. In that sense, we might feel comfortable to follow S. K. in his appropriation of the words of the apostle in his meditation: “Hardship is the Road”⁶, an allusion to 1 Thessalonians 2:9.

“Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.”

Here, we are awakened to the possibility of a lesson beyond the lesson, of a thought beyond the thought, that God reaches out to us in such a way that He tells us about the Good Samaritan not to implore us to “be nice”, but rather to bear the cross; that to preach the gospel is to do the gospel (Romans 2:13), and to do the gospel, as did Paul, requires toil and hardship⁷. Only by understanding the individual characters of the story - the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan - can we hope to understand the message that extends beyond the objectified knowledge that sits in the background of our cultures, fossilized and distant.

The priest and the Levite

We should highlight an often overlooked notion of our first two characters placed into “the moment”. The priest and the Levite are united in that they are moral agents relating to the Kierkegaardian existence-sphere of “the ethical”. Like Judge Wilhelm⁸, they are defined by their personal appropriation of a code of ethics, a system of moral action that dictates how they should act in the world - “contours” to the life which determine the good and the evil, presenting a type of character which exudes morality. They have personally appropriated ethical frameworks into their lives in the normative sense; for our philosophical shorthand, we shall call their particular ways of looking at the world as “first ethics”.

Within their system of “first ethics”, there are, obviously, moral obligations. However, moral obligations do not exist in a vacuum; with moral decisions having a real effect in the world, i.e., that are directly linked to the actions of the moral agent, the decision will have a double effect in non-moral terms as well: firstly, the moral agent becomes an existing individual who acts in time, who turns genuine thought into existing action - no longer do we trick ourselves into thinking we are oiling the wheels of history by writing sabre-rattling prose and revolutionary exegetics, but rather remember that genuine thought and genuine action are tied in a dialectical relationship; secondly, that the particular moral agent is not only cut off from certain moral decisions but also that the moral agent bars themselves from “non-moral” activities as well - if we were to consider the chocolate trade immoral due to its reliance on slavery, we might bar ourselves from buying chocolate as a consumer as well making the seemingly non-moral choice of purchasing goods in a capitalist economy a moral action, or, if we were to consider abortion to be immoral due to the sanctity of life, we might decide that we don’t wish to work in areas which could create new techologies or medical treatments that facilitate that process.

This, then, allows the individual to exist within the web of interconnectivity, the notion of “being-in-a-situation”, to allude to Gabriel Marcel, that accompanies all human life in a meaningful engagement with both things and others around us. In that sense, ethics shapes the way we interact with reality in both obviously ethical and non-ethical situations - but this brings us into tension with “the ethical”. Let us explore how these Jewish ethicists interact with the call of the ethical dilemma.

The priest and the Levite arrive. While a more proper exegesis would demand the individual treatment of these two particular figures, we will take them as a unity. While we might view the priest as representing the law and the Levite as representing the prophets, as did Origen⁹, we can view both as (in different ways) fitting into the Kierkegaard concept of “the ethical” and everything that comes with that. We continue…

For anyone even passably familiar with S. K.’s work, his growing disdain for “the priestly class”, the spiritual mercantile class selling promises of salvation to the flock they lead into destruction¹⁰, typifies his emphasis on the necessary personal responsibility of ethics. Priests, especially the corrupt priests of the Danish Lutheran church, were equivalent in their profane quality to “the crowd”¹¹, money¹², and dilettantism¹³. The priest, as the arch-example of “the ethical”, passes the beaten man in the road without a care - he has duties to attend to, rituals to carry out, and purity to maintain, so the needs of this poor soul come second. “The ethical” cuts off the possibility of helping the individual as “the ethical” cuts off both certain moral and non-moral actions that the agent takes in their life. In a cruel twist of irony, in maintaining the Law, the priest seems to have inverted the illustration we laid out above - ethical commitments determine non-ethical commitments, which is the turned upside down as non-ethical commitments of ritual determine ethical commitments. As the aesthete¹⁴, the ethicists find themselves in a contradictory moment: the ethical eats itself and destroys the very “contours” that it attempted to establish; for the existing individual, existing within the web of interconnected moral decisions, ethics have been found to be unimportant in the mind of the ethically-directed individual¹⁵.

The Samaritan

“Hardship is the road - and this is the joy: that it is not a quality of the road that it is hard, but it is a quality of the hardship that it is the road; therefore the hardship must lead to something; it must be passable and practicable, not suprahuman.”¹⁶

We now arrive at our unlikely hero: the Samaritan. The unlovable object of Palestinian Jewish culture, scandalously identified by Ellisen as the “half-breed” of Christ’s contemporaneity¹⁷, the “Other” forgotten as neither Jew nor Gentile. I’ll stop short of elaborating on the more eccentric interpretations of this maligned figure, but the image is clear: the individual was chosen clearly to show that he is an outcast of society, an individual who inspires revulsion in the minds of the audience. We meet him in Luke 10:33, with the emphasis on that most holy of holy characteristics: “he had compassion”.

Compassion is an interesting and misunderstood quality. The first temptation here is to view compassion as something which indiscriminately attaches love to any and all objects as they are; compassion, then, becomes reduced to sentimentality and often carries a rather distasteful and saccharine “glassy-eyed” moralism that people find more repugnant than a genuine Christian “offence”. The Christian is a particularly open target for this kind of lovelessness as they face the call for an infinite love for the neighbour, but that requires for us to avoid ignoring the individual as they actually are, to avoid poeticizing and Romanticizing the suffering object before us and remembering that they are also a subject that exists with less poetic and less Romantic qualities that seem undeserving of such “glassy-eyed” sentimentality.

The second temptation is to imply that compassion is to compare one’s object of love with one’s existing comfort, allowing for one to alleviate their sense of a “call to compassion” with a reduced sense of morality (and all reduced senses of morality are immorality for the one who knows better, by definition), allowing for the paradoxical notion of a “preferable compassion”, which might be better understood as “discriminate compassion”. The most self-deceptively alluring type of this “compassion” is to reduce the other to an object that is “the same”, something that we can identify our own qualities in and ignore the genuine existence of the other as the other is. We find ourselves thrown into the other side of the dialectic: whereas sentimentality betrays the other in that we fail to recognize their finitude for the finitude it is, the “discriminate compassion” that tells us to “look after our own first” teaches us to prioritize that finitude and conceals their infinitude from our eyes. In hiding ourselves from sentimentality, we find that we have willed to harden our hearts to the other; we harden our hearts to the beaten man on the road to Jericho.

In this moment, the Samaritan simply is compassionate; neither discriminate nor sentimental, willing to overlook differences, not to the end of reducing the object of his concern to a mere reflection of himself and neither falling into the trap of Romanticizing to the point of idealism. He simply is compassionate. And in this state where he simply is compassionate, the Good Samaritan becomes the agent of the ethical-religious, rising up and over the worldviews of “the ethical” Jewish leaders. In this sense, the Samaritan does not allow for the Law to become itself an obfuscation to ethical responsibility because his understanding of the Law is not reduced to simply seeing the texts as only particular stories with particular conclusions in their particular settings, but rather elaborations on a theme; an underlying logic that breaks through any possibility of an objective standard of moral teachings that are fixed and immovable in the life of the moral agent. This, no doubt, is absolutely scandalous to a particular flavour of Christian - especially if they are the kind that would be interested in seeing the Ten Commandments in classrooms, as if we learn morality via osmosis. Asking children about other displays in classrooms often comes with a confused surprise that there is anything there at all, implying that the “problem” is not in the particular piety of what is shown to us, but the force or persuasion that is used in making what is shown to us an appropriated value. The individual must become a neighbour to the neighbour: “The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbour, and when I fulfill my duty I show that I am a neighbour. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbour but about becoming a neighbour oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbour just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy.”¹⁸

In that sense, the appropriate values of the Samaritan clearly showed a stronger faith in God than the Jewish officials: he understood that the Law is only the mode by which we are drawn to God, to understand both our sin and our infinite qualitative difference to the Lord - but, alone, it cannot teach us how to be ethical. Instead, the explosion of faith comes from the meaning of the Law, the mode by which we are forced to interpret our sin and the infinite qualitative difference: Christ, in His love, in His compassion.

On encountering the beaten man on the road, we find that the Samaritan - regardless of what else he is committed to, bearing in mind that the Samaritan Pentateuch is largely similar to the Hebrew scriptures in all forms which we might consider important - rises up over the ritual commandments, over the cautious confinement that “the ethical” requires of us, over the non-ethical commitments that we have found ourselves committed to, in order to chase the genuine absolute: the will of God. This difference, prior to the visible enacting of the act of love for the neighbour, is the invisible leap¹⁹ up and over “the ethical”; the movement in which the believer, through an act of will to supersede the legalistic framework of “the ethical” and the fatalistic helplessness of Religiousness A, grasps the nettle²⁰. The Samaritan, in this gentle act of compassion which his pious half-brethren did not express, against all good reason, tended to the other as the other in the loving compassion to reflect the Greatest Commandment in the second: as God loves humanity infinitely, as God freely chooses to continue to love humanity as humanity without condition or prejudice, the believer turns to the other, the first you recognised as one who is different from the I and requires something from the I that only the I can provide, and delivers compassion against reason. The eternal and necessary logic of God’s infinite, uncompromising, foolishly reckless love for the other as the other breaks through and shatters all other ethical systems; Christianity refuses to be reduced to a theory amongst theories, a code amongst codes - the divine voice roars forward “you shall love your neighbour”, that unlovable object; the divine voice roars forward “you can love your neighbour”, regardless of danger, fear, or any other apparently rational explanation that absolves us from responsibility for the object of God’s love, the you. Here, against “first ethics”, when “the ethical” collapses in on itself, we find the Kierkegaardian kernel of religious wisdom: “second ethics”, or ethical action and thought beyond a “closed system” of moral abstraction.

The path

What is important here, alluded to in the invisibility, prior to the act, of the difference between the Jewish leaders and the Samaritan, is the recognition of what Paul identifies which razor sharpness in 1 Thessalonians 2:9: “remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship”. Faith demands toil and hardship because, as the Jewish leaders are evidence, faith requires us to make the invisible commitment, the choice against reality, that we can and shall choose the other in the moment of ethical agony; when the road we are led upon presents us the choice to dialectically ascend over the hopeless ethical and the hopelessness of Religiousness A; our tendencies toward sin mean that we are naturally disposed to fit in, to hide in “the Crowd”, to slink away from responsibility when we find ourselves actually placed under the call of the cross.

“But since hardship is the road, the hardship cannot be removed without removing the road, and there cannot be other roads, but only wrong roads.”²¹

We rationally search for reasons to avoid this responsibility to love as God loves the other as the other, either in the quiet retreat into the secular reason of “the ethical” or through the legalist comfort of blasphemously prioritizing the word of scripture as the abstract half-idea of the divine over the self-revelation of God through Christ, but cannot escape that our duty to the other as the other is to walk the road towards the other as the other and to know that the road is hardship. Each step in “the task is a deliberate attempt... since there is only one single road”.²²

“I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles—or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road.”²³

On this road, on this dangerous road, it is then the choice to grasp the nettle, to grasp Religiousness B, to do other than that which might be, which separates the faithful from hopeless. The Samaritan is our ideal: when every step on the road is an opportunity to eschew responsibility to the other as the other, when we could refuse to walk the road of hardship, to stop by the beaten man, to treat his wounds, to gift him travel to Jericho, to find him shelter, to pay his keep, to promise more, to promise to return to settle our debts - all of these opportunities grant us a chance to step off the invisible road of compassion in an effort to follow the Lord, to absolutely relate ourselves to the absolute, to remove our appropriated sense of duty to the other as the other in the moment when we are granted an opportunity to fail. This compassion, which is neither discriminating nor sentimental, is the difference; and we shall be different in the quiet silence of faith, which leads to the explosive difference of faithful works. It is a dialectic, my reader; it is not a matter of faith or works or even faith and works, but that faith is works and the faithful works are faith.

And this dialectic, only realisable by the existing individual, only realisable by “that individual”, you, my reader! is shown to us by the realisation that hardship is the road. When there is a chance to avoid our responsibility, that is the moment of faith: and it demands that we remember, that we become contemporaneous with Christ, and hear those terrible words: you shall love your neighbour. But the road is hardship! You shall love your neighbour. But the path is dangerous! You shall love your neighbour. But the cost is high! You shall love your neighbour. But the danger is upon me! You shall love your neighbour²⁴.

And so be it: the Christian is not guided to walk the same road as the hopeless, but to walk the invisible road that shows us clearly that the road is hardship. The dialectic demands love because love is the only mode by which we navigate the road that is hardship, through the quiet commitment that faith, hope, and love are the mode by which we walk (1 Corinthians 13:13) and the quiet knowledge that hardship we face on the road is necessary for those who seek first the kingdom (Matthew 6:33). In times of chaos, in times of peace, in all times when the possibility of absolving ourselves of responsibility to God and the neighbour as the neighbour presents itself, we remember that faithful Samaritan who knew that the road is hardship and hardship is no excuse for falling into either the quiet retreat of secular reason in “the ethical” or through the legalist comfort of blasphemously prioritizing the word of scripture as the abstract half-idea of the divine over the self-revelation of God through Christ. To absolutely relate ourselves to the absolute, to faithfully follow in Religiousness B, to will one thing in the purity of heart is to know when to follow a rule and when to break a rule; and to absolutely relate to the absolute in the quiet faith of the Samaritan is to seek first the Kingdom of God because the Kingdom is at hand - it is right here, in front of us. And all choice is preceded by deliberation:

“Therefore one weighs [veie] on the scale, but a person deliberates [overveie]; thus he does more than weigh in the same sense as the scale does. He over-weighs [over-veie]; he is higher than the weighing; he stands above the weighing - he chooses.”²⁵

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The Deliberation

For I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’ (Matthew 25:42-43)

Where are the Christians?

Far-right protestors attempt to set fire to a hotel holding asylum seekers in Rotherham and block the exits. Source.

They recognize that the road is hardship and walk forward in hardship regardless; they hear the call “where are you?” and understand, they see, the unlovable object: the neighbour. Does the Christian become Abraham (Genesis 12:1), become Isaiah (Isaiah 6:8) and say “here I am!” when the road is hardship and every step along the road, the only road, is towards the duty to the neighbour? Is the offence of Matthew 25:42-43 handwaved away when the neighbour can become an object of discriminate or sentimental love? Can we break from “the ethical” and serve our neighbour as the neighbour when the road is hardship, the path is dangerous, the cost is high, and the danger is upon us? Can we become the Good Samaritan when history hands us the opportunity?

Possibility not, and God’s forgiveness should give us some solace in that refusal. But, if I had failed, I daren’t breathe a word that I am a Christian before the Lord as “a false witness will not go unpunished and he who speaks lies shall perish (Proverbs 19:9)”.

“There is a kind of sagacity that is quite reluctant to make a complete break with the good but is also exceedingly reluctant to renounce the pleasant days of a soft life and worldly advantage.”²⁶

“The merciful Samaritan is not praised for having given spiritual instruction to the wounded man, for reminding him how much he was loved by God, or for providing him with spiritual reading for his stay in the ditch. The Samaritan is praised for having given the man precisely what he needed, which in this case was help for his physical, material, bodily pain and suffering.”²⁷

1. The secular urge to insist that Christ was “a great moral teacher” (as if that is praise) usually hangs on forgetting that the dictum that “you shall love… with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind your neighbour as yourself” is said in the context of and is necessarily linked to the missing words above: “the Lord your God”.

2. Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 28, [J. de silentio]

3. Indeed, Climacus would go as far as suggesting such “objective” views of faith are truly the sign of the faithless: “[Objectivity] helps all mankind to cheat, by copying these off and reciting them by rote”. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 68, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

4. For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourselves! and Three Discourses (1851), p. 54, S. Kierkegaard

5. “Loving the Ones We See: Kierkegaard's Neighbor-Love and the Politics of Pluralism”, J. E. Veninga, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 108-109, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

6. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 289-305

7. “Strengthening in the Inner Being”, from Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 83, S. Kierkegaard

8. Either/Or, vol. II, ed. [V. Eremita]

9. Homily 34, para 3, Origen, from Homilies on Luke, p. 136, tr. J. T. Lienhard

10. “A result” in Articles in The Fatherland, from Attack on "Christendom", p. 48, S. Kierkegaard

11. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 11, S. Kierkegaard

12. Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 34, [J. de silentio]; “The causes of bourgeois culture: Kierkegaard's relation to Marx considered”, from Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 42, p. 81 J. Aroosi

13. JP, III 3334; “Friedrich Nietzsche: Rival Versions of the Best Way of Life”, T. Miles, from Kierkegaard and Existentialism, p. 276, ed. J. Stewart, in relationship to Goethe’s championing of promiscuity

14. For example, Kierkegaard’s characters “A”, Johannes de silentio, Constantin Constantius, the Young Man, etc.

15. “The Meaning of Kierkegaard's Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre”, J. J. Davenport, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 80, edited by J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd

16. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 300

17. Parables in the Eye of the Storm: Christ's Response in the Face of Conflict, p. 142, S. A. Ellisen

18. “Loving the Ones We See: Kierkegaard's Neighbor-Love and the Politics of Pluralism”, J. E. Veninga, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 110, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

19. Not a leap of faith!

20. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 45, [J. Climacus], tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie; "States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering" in Christian Discourses, p. 158, S. Kierkegaard

21. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 299

22. Ibid., p. 299

23. “I've Been to the Mountaintop”, M. L. King Jr.

24. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 302

25. Ibid., p. 307

26. Ibid., p. 298

27. Love's Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard's Works of Love, p. 34, M. J. Ferreira