In Steinbeck’s classic, East of Eden, Liza Hamilton serves as the matriarch of faith for her family. She is a pugnacious advocate of biblical morality and reads the scriptures daily as the guide for her life. Yet there are cracks in her pious veneer. Steinbeck describes her use of the Bible sublimely:
Her total intellectual association was the Bible … In that one book she had her history and her poetry, her knowledge of peoples and things, her ethics, her morals, and her salvation. She never studied the Bible or inspected it; she just read it … And finally she came to a point where she knew it so well that she went right on reading it without listening.1
The final line is haunting. When we hear today’s scripture lesson, it is too easy to read it quickly and then move on because of its wide familiarity within our culture. “Oh, the Good Samaritan — I know what that one’s all about.” Yet biblical texts that are familiar to us are often the very ones whose messages have often been muted rather than unleashed. Let us come to the story of the Good Samaritan with fresh eyes and ears that truly see and truly hear.
There is much more to this story than a cutting critique of religious leaders whose actions don’t match their preaching. There’s more to it than merely a model of neighborliness. In this text, Jesus explodes expectations for God’s people and tears down notions of status in ways that invite his hearers to become part of God’s mission in the world today.
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