A Cross-Cultural and Liberative Hermeneutics of Luke 10:25–37 in Asian and Asian-American Perspective: Reading One Text through the Two Lenses 1

Introduction

The Lukan parable (Luke 10:25–37) is one of the famous parables in the biblical tradition. The methodological reading of the Lukan parable, however, reveals some contrasts. While Asian liberationists ² see the victim in the parable as the primary agent who embodies Jesus Christ, Asian theologians ³ who focus on the intercultural hermeneutics treat the Samaritan as the primary agent who embodies Jesus Christ’s cross-cultural mission of healing and helping the victim. For example, Suh Nam Dong, one of the pioneers of Minjung theology once asked: ‘who plays the role of Christ among the characters in the parable?’ His answer is: ‘the victim attacked by the robbers plays the role of Christ’. ⁴ Although he may not reject Suh’s position, Peter Phan sees the Samaritan’s act of border-crossing as an embodiment of Jesus’ border-crossing mission and as a model for the church’s border-crossing mission in a multicultural world. ⁵

This paper argues that emphasizing one agent without embracing the other has the limitations for a fuller hermeneutic of the Lukan parable. My question is: how do the Good Samaritan and the wounded victim differently embody the nature and act of Jesus Christ? For the purpose of our conveniences, I regard reading the parable through the lens of the Samaritan as a cross-cultural hermeneutics and reading the parable through the lens of the victim as a liberative hermeneutics. In order to apply a fuller meaning of the Lukan parable for our contemporary context, we should use the middle ground as the methodological tool that reads one text through the two lenses of the Samaritan and the victim. Although the innkeeper’s willing act of welcoming the wounded victim into his inn (10:34–35) plays an important role in the application of the Lukan banquet for the church’s welcoming the stranger-victim in its community, I focus on the centralities of the Samaritan and the wounded victim in this paper. The paper is divided into three parts.

First, I begin by exploring the identity and act of the Samaritan. Second, I explore the identity of the victim and discuss a victim-oriented liberative hermeneutic. I then examine both agents from the christological perspective. Finally, I offer five proposals for reconciling two different models for an Asian cross-cultural and liberative mission.

Reading the Parable through the Cross-Cultural Lens of the Samaritan

What are the major themes and issues in reading the Lukan parable from the perspective of the Samaritan? I draw three themes from reading through the lens of the Samaritan. The first theme has to do with the identity of the Samaritan (who). The second theme is his action (what). The third theme has to do with why he did (why). To begin with the first one, the ethnic identity of the Samaritan can be described into two ways: he was not only the ethnic margin in the context of the Jewish majority, but he was also the despised and alienated dweller in the Jewish culture. ⁶ The main thrust of the parable is what did the marginal Samaritan and how did he do it? In verse 34, it is noted that the Samaritan has a compassionate heart for the victim and healed him at the cost of his properties. What I focus is a threefold relation of the ‘Samaritan’s heart, hand, and feet’.

By heart, I mean the Samaritan’s compassionate heart. By feet, I mean a metaphor of the Samaritan’s crossing frontiers beyond the Samaritan ethnic border. By hand, I mean a metaphor of the Samaritan’s helping the suffering victim. While the three are inseparable in the actions of the Good Samaritan, I prioritize the heart because it is the source for the other two. According to the parable, the Samaritan’s feeling of compassion (10:34) is the ground for his act of crossing the ethnic borders and helping the suffering victim by bandaging his wounds. Although the priest and Levite were the two religious leaders who first saw the attacked victim, they were not compassionate for him and hesitated to cross the religio-ethnic border (10:32–33). By contrast, the Samaritan did not hesitate to cross the border for the sake of healing the attacked victim (10:33–34). Compassion is the motivating power for the Samaritan’s daring act of crossing cultural border and healing the victim. Joel Green is right in saying that ‘neighborly love knows no boundaries’. ⁷ Green argues that the Samaritan’s neighborly love by crossing a cultural border is the main feature of the parable. ⁸ It is because of his compassionate heart, cultural crossing and providing a hand to the needy that the Samaritan was called ‘good Samaritan’ in contrast to the bad priest and Levite who did not help the victim in need.

The question we must ask is: why did the priest and Levite not assist the wounded victim? No particular reason is provided in the parable. Some scholars assume here a concern with defilement. A man who is half-dead (soon to be dead) and his corpse impurity might have brought the defilement to the two holy men who just journeyed from Jerusalem with the completion of their temple duties. ⁹ The half-dead person appears to be sinful, according to Jewish law. In other words, the priest and the Levite had eyes to see the victim, but they did not have the compassionate heart and the cultural-crossing feet to reach out to him. The Samaritan had eyes to see, the compassionate heart to care for and the willing feet to cross the ethnic border for the wounded victim. As Green rightly notes,

What distinguishes the Samaritan from the other two is not fundamentally that they are Jews and he is a Samaritan nor is it that they had high status as religious functionaries and he does not. What individualizes him is his compassion, leading to action in the face of their inaction. His actions condemn their failure to act. Unlike them, he had compassion, and this is the turning point not only of his cross-cultural encounter, but, indeed, of this narrative unit. ¹⁰

It is argued that the Samaritan embodies Jesus Christ in two major ways. First, he embodies Jesus’ compassion. Scholars, such as E. P. Sanders, ¹¹ and Brendan Byre ¹² argue that the ethics of compassion is the bridge between Jesus and the Samaritan. While Saint Augustine emphasizes the Samaritan-victim relationship as an allegorical reflection of Jesus the Savior-sinner relationship from the perspective of salvation, ¹³ Sanders emphasizes the Samaritan-victim relationship from the ethical perspective. Although salvation or healing and ethics are both evident in the Samaritan’s action, I find Sander’s view more helpful. In line with Sanders, I argue that the Samaritan-victim relationship is not about the Savior-sinner relationship that construes the victim as an image of the sinner and the Samaritan as Jesus, but it is about a neighbor-neighbor relationship. ¹⁴

Second, the Samaritan’s border-crossing embodies the act of Jesus’ border crossing. Phan is right in seeing the mission of God as a border-crossing through Christ. According to Phan, Jesus is a border-crosser and His incarnational life of mission is border-crossing. The incarnation is the border-crossing act by which God steps out of Himself and crossing into the world in compassion (Jn. 3:16). ¹⁵ What Jesus and the Samaritan have in common is their acts of border-crossing. Yet, the starting power for Jesus’ and the Samaritan’s acts are different. While Jesus’ is a move from the center to the margin, the Samaritan’s is a move from the margin to the margin. Kosuke Koyama is right in saying that Jesus, the center-person came to us as a margin from the center. ¹⁶ In both cases, compassion is the motivating power of their border-crossing for helping the needy. We may have the compassionate heart, but if we do not have the daring feet to cross the borders, we cannot reach out to the needy. A threefold ethic of compassion, border-crossing and helping the victim is essential in the life and act of the Samaritan.

Reading the Parable through the Liberative Lens of the Victim

What are the major themes and issues in the liberative reading of the parable through the lens of the wounded victim? What are the similarities between the wounded victim and Jesus? I draw two themes from the parable for the liberative reading. First, in term of the identity, the wounded victim’s identity is anonymous and unknown. While the Gospel of Luke provides the ethnic identity of the Samaritan, no clue for the ethnic identity of the wounded victim is provided. ¹⁷ This creates the room for scholars’ debate. Some scholars, such as Robert Tannehill argue that the wounded victim was ‘more likely to be Jewish’. ¹⁸ But more scholars focus on the anonymity of the victim’s identity. ¹⁹ I consider the latter to be more helpful for two reasons. For one, if the wounded victim was Jewish, why did the priest and Levite not assist him as their fellow Jew? Based on their failure to assist the victim and their view of him as an unholy person, it is appropriate to see the victim not as a Jew. For the other, the anonymity of the wounded victim allows us to help anyone regardless of one’s religion and ethnicity. It further allows us to see all human beings simply as fellow neighbors. The Samaritan did not care about the victim’s identity. His primary concern is to see him simply as a fellow human in need. ²⁰

Second, there is the relationship between the nature of the wounded victim and the suffering Jesus. This demands a reading the parable from the perspective of liberation hermeneutics. According to a liberative reading of the parable, the victim attacked by the robbers embodies the suffering Jesus. Suh, a political theologian of Minjung liberation theology, explains the relationship between the victim and Jesus. He wrote,

The moaning (han) of the person, who was attacked, deprived of his money, beaten by the robbers, and most dead, is the calling of Christ to passers-by. One’s attitude to the moaning person is exactly his or her attitude to Christ. One the response and action to the moaning, a latent humanity within a human being either weakens or disappears. Therefore, on this moaning, the crossroads between salvation and Damnation exist. ²¹

Suh’s aim is to make the bridge between the victim and Jesus from their common experiences of the wounds, pains, powerlessness, and helplessness. For Suh, the person who was attacked by the robber was Jesus Christ. ²² Just as the cry of the suffering Christ touches the compassionate heart of some women who kept an eye on Him from afar, so does the screaming of the wounded victim touch the compassionate heart of the Samaritan. Likewise, Ahn Byung Mu, another minjung theologian also makes a similar concept of the relationship between the wounded victim and Jesus. He wrote,

I think that Christ is not an almighty being who can provide an easy solution to the complicated problems, but a screaming person whose scream touches our heart and deconstructs our routine life and the conventional logic in it. ²³

A liberative reading of the Lukan parable through the lens of the wounded victim is not merely about how we help the victim, but rather about how we see him as the social image of Jesus Christ. C. S. Song develops such kind of liberative hermeneutics. In his book Jesus, the Crucified People, ²⁴ Song develops what I call the ‘double knowledge of the suffering Jesus and the crucified people’. Song’s use of the crucified people is more inclusive than the Lukan use of the wounded man in a way that it encompasses Asian women, men and children those who are politically oppressed, economically exploited, religiously alienated, sexually abused, and ethically discriminated against. ²⁵ According to Song, suffering is the bridge for the double knowledge of Jesus and the victim. Song is not interested in a question of how Jesus became human. Rather his interest is how the suffering Jesus can be related to the images of suffering people. ²⁶

He argues that ‘to know Jesus we must know the wounded people first’. ²⁷ His approach to an Asian Christology is grounded in ‘Christ from below’ rather than in ‘Christ from above’. He argues against the idea that knowing Jesus comes from knowing God first. On the contrary, Song asserts that we know Jesus through the lens of the suffering people. Without knowing the suffering people who are the images of the humiliated Jesus (Phil. 2:7), there is no concrete way of knowing Jesus. This is, for Song, a contextual concern of ‘existential necessity, not just of academic curiosity’. ²⁸

To bring the Lukan parable in conversation with Song’s concept of the double knowledge of Jesus and the suffering people, we may note that the wounded victim in the parable embodies the social image of the wounded Jesus. What Jesus and the wounded victim have in common is their social experiences of torture, pain, and powerlessness. Jesus suffered torture in His body and suffered the betrayal of His disciples. ‘On the deepest level, the cry of the suffering Jesus relates to God whom He calls ‘Abba, dear Father’ since His baptism’. ²⁹ Likewise, the victim in the parable suffered torture his body, suffered the abandonment of the priest and the Levite. Jesus died in human loneliness, whereas the wounded victim was half-dead, but he did not die. Jesus and the victim in the parable had the common experiences of powerlessness in the hand of the torturers, but they did not have the same experiences of helplessness. The victim in the parable was half-dead, but he did not die because he had a helper, whereas Jesus died in loneliness.

Despite some divergences, a liberative reading of the Lukan parable allows us to see the bridge between social images of Jesus and of the wounded victim. While Song and some Asian liberationists depict Jesus as the crucified Asian men and women, I prefer to depict the suffering Jesus as the analogous images of the suffering Asian people. By the latter, I mean Jesus’ suffering is vicarious for the sake of salvation and redemption (Is. 53; Rom. 5:8–10). But our human suffering is not redemptive. This means that our human suffering is not to be understood as equal to the suffering of Christ. The point is that the incarnational suffering of Jesus is an incarnational channel through which He shares His presence and liberation among the suffering people and wounded victims. ³⁰

It is argued that a liberative reading of the parable does not simply mean that we see the victims in our contexts as the mere objects for receiving help. The liberative reading of the parable rather means that we see the suffering Jesus in the face of the wounded victims. Liberation hermeneutics is not primarily about what we do for the wounded victims, but about how we rightly interpret them as the humiliated images of the suffering Jesus (Phil. 2:7). Jürgen Moltmann is right when he said, ‘liberation theology is victim-oriented’. ³¹ When he said this, Moltmann refers primarily to Christ as the analogous image of victim who suffers at the hands of the powerful and secondarily to contemporary victims who suffer at the hands of oppressors who rob their inherent rights and dignity. It is because Christ Himself passed through the human tortures that He is compassionately present in the suffering of the victims as their divine brother. ³²

Reconciling Two Readings for the Ecclesial Mission of God

Can we reconcile two readings? My answer is yes. Jesus is the first answer to the question of reconciling two readings. Our Asian yin-yang thinking is the second methodological answer to the question of reconciling two readings. According to ying-yang methodology, ³³ Asian Christians should not choose either the Samaritan or the wounded victim to apply the contextual meaning of the parable. We should embrace both victim-oriented and Samaritan-oriented readings because they embody the life and action of Jesus. I take reconciling two readings to be relevant for the current challenges and future directions of the Asian churches. I propose five themes for the mission of God.

First, I propose that the marginal identities of the Good Samaritan and the wounded victim are central for formulating social and ecclesial identities Asian Christians in the context of other religio-political and social majorities. The task of the church is to read the Lukan parable from the perspective of marginality. In his book Marginality: The Key for Multicultural Theology, ³⁴ Jung Young Lee depicts the marginal identity of Jesus Christ as a model for the marginal identities of Asian Christian communities. ³⁵ According to Lee, the ‘incarnation of Christ is a metaphor of divine marginalization and divine immigration’, ³⁶ to the risky world from the center of heaven. Lee compares Jesus’ incarnational marginalization and immigration with the immigration and marginalization of Asian Christian communities in the US. Of course, there is no mention of the immigration of the Samaritan and the wounded victim in the Lukan parable. But their marginalities do reflect the marginal identities of Asian Christians. Since the Samaritan and the victim both share their common identities of marginalization, we should not read the Lukan parable only through one lens, but through two lenses.

Although the Good Samaritan’s marginal identity is comparable to some marginal Asian Christians, I focus more on the similarities between the wounded victim in the parable and the suffering Asian Christian communities. I consider suffering to be the heart of their similarities. In Asia, Christian suffering can be understood in terms of economic suffering and ethnic discrimination caused by political oppression and cultural domination. ³⁷ But in the US, Asian Christian suffering can be understood in terms of racial discrimination and linguistic struggles. Some Asian Christians in the US do not have problem with economic suffering, but they do have some problem with adopting foreign languages in a foreign land. ³⁸ As a result, they experience racial discrimination at works and schools. ³⁹ Just as the wounded victim cries for help, so grassroots Asians cry for help. Reading the parable through the lens of the Lukan victim means that we are to embody God’s liberating presence in the midst of those who cry for racial justice and freedom. The ecclesial task is not simply to see them as the passive receivers of justice, but to empower them as the subjects struggling for racial justice and freedom.

Third, the Good Samaritan’s act of border crossing is essential for the Asian churches in the context of multi-religious and multi-racial societies. As I have said, border-crossing is primarily grounded in Jesus’ incarnational act of crossing human cultures without crushing them (Matt. 5:17). In reaching out to the other in need, we must cross their cultures with humility. Koyama once observed that there are two different kinds of Christian minds. One is the crusading mind and the other is the crucified or humiliated mind. The crusading mind builds the walls and stands against the other who is different from us. By contrast, the crucified mind is not condemning because it is rooted in the humiliated mind of Christ (Phil. 2:5). The crucified mind loves and sacrifices for the other in light of the claim that all humans are created in the image of God as neighbors. ⁴⁰ While the crusading mind builds the walls against the other, the crucified mind builds the bridges by embracing the other’s otherness as one’s identity marker.

Third, the Samaritan-victim relationship reveals what Koyama calls a ‘stranger-centered theology of hospitality’. ⁴¹ Koyama’s stranger-centered theology of hospitality is important for a new understanding of how the Samaritan and victim relationship indicates their mutual strangeness to each other. Primarily, Koyama’s use of stranger-centered theology is grounded in the theological insights that Jesus came into what Karl Barth calls the ‘far country’, ⁴² as a border-crossing stranger and servant. According to Luke 9:58, Jesus came into the world as a stranger who had no place to put His head. Secondarily, Koyama’s stranger-centered theology of hospitality reflects the Samaritan-victim stranger-centered relationship and the church’s relationship with the other strangers in a multicultural world. When the strangers are to meet, they have to cross their different cultures and to recognize their otherness. Letty Russell rightly said: Cultural differences are not a problem, but the failure to recognize one’s differences is the problem. ⁴³ Recognizing one’s otherness is what Russell calls ‘just hospitality’. ⁴⁴

Living in a multicultural and multi-religious world as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27) and as the image of God (Gen. 1:27), we are strangers to one another. But if Jesus’ act of just hospitality by reaching out to us by embracing our human otherness and the Samaritan’s act of just hospitality by reaching out to the victim by crossing their cultural borders are two contextual models for the Asian churches, then, we ought to reach out to all the needy victims by crossing their cultures. The double natures of the anonymity of the victim and the mutual strangeness of the Samaritan and the victim are purposeful for our multicultural ministry. They demand the twin tasks of ‘universalizing the victims and personalizing the strangers’. ⁴⁵ Universalizing the victims and personalizing the strangers are the core heart of the Samaritan-victim relationship. While the anonymity of the victim demands that our ecclesial hand be extended to all victims as neighbors in need rather than confining it to a familiar community of friends and relatives, the Samaritan’s personalizing the victim-stranger demands humanizing the strangers as God’s image.

Fourth, but related to the third, Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s question: ‘who is my neighbor?’ is another important theme for our ministry. In answering the question, ‘who is my neighbor (10:36)?’, John Calvin rightly argues that a universal motivation for hospitality and healing is directed toward a universal and embracive interpretation of the neighbor—‘the whole human race’. ⁴⁶ Calvin’s focus is on how Jesus answers the question of lawyer by using the religious and marginal other [Samaritan] as a neighbor. For Calvin, Jesus’ intentional use of the religious and marginal other the Samaritan in a Jewish context reveals that the truth that ‘the greatest stranger is our neighbor because God has bound all humans together, for the purpose of assisting each other’. ⁴⁷ Jesus’ intentional use of the religious other, the Good Samaritan as an example of neighbor has a contextual meaning for our multi-religious world. The God who used the religious other the Good Samaritan as a healer in a Jewish context may use the Good people from other religious cultures for His mission of hospitality and healing in our contemporary world. ⁴⁸ Are we willing to cooperate with them for a wider mission of hospitality and healing?

Finally, the compassionate heart of the Good Samaritan is what makes the Samaritan good. Jesus uses ‘compassion’ as a major word to justify the Good Samaritan as a neighbor for the lawyer (‘the one who shows his compassion’). Jesus goes on to command: ‘go and do likewise’ (10:37). If we apply the action of the Samaritan for the contemporary ecclesial practice, the language of ‘going’ demands the ecclesial cross-cultural mission and the language of ‘doing’ demands the ecclesial liberating action. I argue that the languages of both going and action are grounded in the feeling of compassion or orthopathy. The priest and the Levite had the eyes to see the victim, but they did not have the compassionate hearts. But the Samaritan chose to help and heal the victim mainly because he had compassionate heart. Compassion is the motivating power for his healing ministry. Song is right in saying that the ‘heartache of God is the source for theology’. ⁴⁹ Song and Koyama portray Asian God as the ‘hot-hearted God’. ⁵⁰

I argue that Asian churches must imitate the Samaritan’s embodiment of the hot-hearted God as the source for healing and liberating the wounded victims. It is true that the Samaritan’s cross-cultural act of healing the victim tends to do with charitable and medical works ⁵¹ rather than with prophetic liberation. In both cases, compassion is the ground. Liberation theology is not merely about ecclesial action, but rather it is about the ecclesial reflection on God’s orthopathy (compassionate heart) and orthopraxy (prophetic action). Our ecclesial action is secondary to God’s compassion. Although the Samaritan’s compassionate act of charitable and healing work is essential, it is argued that charitable work is not enough in the context of human injustices and robberies. Our ecclesial ethics of compassion must embrace both healing work and prophetic liberation. While we extend our charitable work to the needy without changing social structures, we should also be prophetic in speaking out against structures that cause social injustices. I name charitable healing ‘soft liberation’ because it does not change structures. I name prophetic justice ‘hard liberation’ because it criticizes and changes structures by force.

We need both soft liberation and hard liberation in our contemporary context of human domination and violence that rob and violate the inherent rights and dignity of the marginal Christians and other minority non-Christians, such as the minority Muslims in Myanmar. While the political issue of the conflict between the Buddhist majorities and Muslim minorities in the Rakhine state of Myanmar is complicated, what is not complicated is the need of the church’s extending its charitable and healing work to the minority Muslims who are wounded by the Burmese soldiers. In this concrete context, the ethnic minority church in Myanmar should certainly embody the Good Samaritan who extends his charitable and healing hands to the victim wounded by the robbers.

I propose that the church has two tasks: the ecclesial prophetic resistance to the unjust systems and robbers and the ecclesial solidarity with the wounded victims. While standing in solidarity with the wounded victims as neighbors by crossing their religio-ethnic cultures, we must resist the unjust systems and robbers by crushing and transforming their colonized minds and oppressive acts. This means that liberation has to be done on both sides of the oppressors and the oppressed margins. Jürgen Moltmann argues that liberation of the oppressed leads to liberation of the oppressors. ⁵² I respectfully disagree with Moltmann’s reversal of the process of mutual liberation of the oppressors and the oppressed. I argue that liberation of the oppressors from their colonized minds rather leads to socio-political liberation of the oppressed. In my view, it is more appropriate to say that liberation of the oppressors from their colonized minds and immoral acts is a prerequisite for liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors. I further argue that we should not only envision ‘liberation from’, but we should also envision ‘liberation for’. The goal of mutual or inclusive liberation of the oppressors and the oppressed is for establishing a reconciled and embracive community where the oppressors and the oppressed margins embrace one another as new humans in love. ⁵³

Conclusion

In this paper, I have explored two different ways of reading the Lukan parable. After demonstrating some major themes and issues in two readings of the parable through the lenses of the Good Samaritan and the wounded victim, I have suggested that we should reconcile two readings for the ecclesial cross-cultural and liberative mission. When reading the parable through the lens of the victim, we see Jesus as our marginal image who struggles for liberation in an unjust world. When reading the parable through the lens of the Samaritan, we see Jesus’ incarnational act of border crossing by reaching out to us as divine-image bearing neighbors as the model for our ecclesial act of border crossing by reaching out to the religio-ethnic other as fellow neighbors by crossing their cultures and embracing their religious otherness in a multicultural world. If we embrace both agents, not either-or, we would be able to grasp a fuller meaning of the traditional Lukan parable for the contemporary Asian and Asian American ecclesial existence.