How many of us still believe in “good guys and bad guys”? Are there such things?
We live in a world where political commentators have been describing the difference between parties in starker terms than a lot of recent science fiction movies or even some video games have drawn the line between good and evil, “good guys” and “bad guys.”
When I was in high school, the heroes in the Lord of the Rings could slay orcs left and right without anybody batting an eye since orcs were always and only the bad guys, but that was a fantasy. In reality, my parents and Church of the Brethren background made it clear that life and people are a whole lot more nuanced.
But nowadays, lots of fantasy games let you play as an orc, so orcs can be heroes too, while social media feeds are awash in the dominant messages of our culture wars: “they” are trying to ruin America and are clearly all bad guys, so show them no mercy.
The funny thing is that in stories about good guys and bad guys, you really have to know who people are from the start because you’re not going to be able to tell them apart from what they do. To poke fun at one of the oldest and generally family-friendly video games, the basic plot of Mario games is that Bowser, the big spiky bad guy, has kidnapped a princess, so Mario must be justified in squashing countless denizens of Bowser’s kingdom on his way to kidnap her back. You might think that both kidnapping and a killing spree would make people “bad guys,” and that between the two the latter is worse, but Mario is the good guy…so the seemingly “bad” things he does don’t count.
Similarly, for anyone who believes in political good guys and bad guys, there’s very little that a politician could do that they wouldn’t try to argue was “justified” by all the history of alleged evils committed by the other side. Once there are good guys and bad guys, the “good guys” can do things that would otherwise be bad, but, just like Mario, it’s all in the name of defeating “bad guys” so it really doesn’t count. Maybe somebody who is so clueless that they can’t tell who the hero is would try to look at each party’s actions and compare them objectively, like this crazy pastor trying to compare Bowser’s kidnapping with Mario’s killing spree, but for anybody who knows the difference between good guys and bad guys, that’s missing the whole point.
And, because that’s the way it works when we’re playing “good guys and bad guys,” it becomes very very important for people to be able to judge the difference between the two at first glance. Otherwise, we might start to see someone’s actions and make our judgment about whether their actions seem good or bad, rather than judging the character as a good guy or bad guy. Every genre has its tropes for how to immediately sort people on sight, but let’s use the classic example of Westerns: what color is his hat? White hat? Good guy. Black hat? Bad guy. When you have to spell it out like that, it’s so clearly just one step removed from the assumptions that our police and legal system have been making for centuries: White skin? Innocent. Black skin? Suspect. If you believe in sorting good guys from bad guys, better tell them apart right away…
But that whole game is awful, though, isn’t it? Jesus wouldn’t play that game, and I think you’ll find that he tries on many more than one occasion to demonstrate its absurdity and cruelty. But today I’ll stick with this story we know so well, the parable of the so-called “good samaritan.” Jesus never calls the Samaritan in the story “good,” he just describes what the Samaritan does. And this scholar of scriptural law who asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” in the end finds his answer to be “the one who showed mercy.” But in between, Jesus tries to upend our whole practice of assigning categories of good guys and bad guys. And then we, the church, bumbling disciples like we so often are, all the way back to Peter, pretty much refused to really grasp the point, so we’ve taken to calling it the Parable of the “Good Samaritan.”
Let’s take it from the top, and today let’s look for whether Jesus’ world, the vision Jesus is trying to offer, is dealing with “good guys and bad guys” or something else…
It begins with this lawyer–meaning a scholar of scriptural law–standing up to test Jesus. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now, like most religious questions, those few words have a whole lot of assumptions baked into them. Inherit eternal life? If we take that too literally, we’d be asking, who are you going to inherit that from? Is the Lord, the God of Israel, going to die and leave an inheritance to God’s people? There’s something else in this lawyer’s mind for the phrase “inherit eternal life” to make sense.
It’s really an interesting question, “what must I do to inherit?” Usually, someone inherits by simply surviving the relative who dies and is going to leave an inheritance, and I guess not alienating them to the point of disinheriting. Alternatively, our inheritance has already been passed to us, if we think of things like my daughter inheriting my stubbornness. So I’m going to suggest we hear the lawyer’s question as something like this: What do I have to do so that I am counted among God’s chosen children? How can I make it clear that I am one of the good guys?
Now, if I had someone ask me as their pastor what they had to do so that they would count as one of God’s children, as though they were actually afraid that God would disown them, that would be a completely different scenario, and I think Jesus would have given a very different response. God made each of us who we are, and nothing about us–not our orientation or race or gender or anything else–could take away who we are as God’s children. But this lawyer was trying to test him, and Jesus knew this fellow wasn’t really worried that he would be counted out from among God’s people, so Jesus begins by asking what he sees in the law, what he finds there.
Of course, the answer is again quite famous to us, and many of us might be able to say it by heart: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Excellent, says Jesus; do this and you will live. You want abundant life? Stop worrying about qualifying for inheritance sometime in the future; live like God’s child right now–which is an action to take, not something you have to work to be.
But, we read, this man wanted to justify himself. He wanted to be able to draw a line and say, “See! Look! I am on the good side; I am a good guy, and they, those ones on the other side of the line, are the bad guys.” Maybe he wanted to have a line not to cross, but then the freedom to raise whatever hell he wanted as long as he stayed on the “good guy” side of the line, the way that the cowboys in white hats are never bad guys no matter how many people they shoot. Maybe he had a specific person in mind, like an immigrant living just far enough down the block he thought he should check whether they counted as his neighbor. Who knows, besides that man and Jesus?
But to try and set him straight, Jesus tells this story: There was a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead…
Alright, so there’s clearly some groundwork laid here. Robbers are the bad guy, like Bowser, and this traveler is like Princess Peach, and the good guy should come along and save him. Awesome. Good guys and bad guys, and we know who they are because somebody is in trouble. If a new character comes into the story and slaughters all the bandits, we’ll know that even though they killed a bunch of people, they’re probably the good guy because the robbers are bad guys, and doing bad things to bad guys is supposed to count as good. Alright.
…Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side…
Okay…well…that makes a little bit less sense. But maybe the priest is an NPC–a non-player character–and they can’t do much, because they’re not the hero.
…So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side…
Yeah, priests and Levites are generally good guys. If we were in tune with how things work and got the mental pictures in our head like we’re supposed to, the way that this scholar would have from Jesus telling the story, it would be really really obvious that these guys are the “white hats.” If this was a different genre of story, Jesus might as well be saying, “and then the knight in shining armor heard the princess screaming, and took the fork in the road leading away from the dragon’s lair.”
But it gets even better: …a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two day’s wages, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’
Do we know who our Samaritans are today? It’s really, really uncomfortable to recognize who our Samaritans are right now, today. Like, if I invoke something past tense, and say, “if we were an all-white congregation in 1959 Mississippi, you could take out the word Samaritan and put in African-American,” then we would all nod along and say, yeah, back then and down south people were racist. And if I were to pick something closer to the present, and say, “if I were preaching in October 2001, the Spirit might lead us to consider hearing this story with the world Muslim in the place of Samaritan,” then we might just remove enough to recognize how anti-Muslim sentiment helped trap our country in wars that we’re still fighting, but that hasn’t managed to stay at the forefront of our news in a long time.
But do we know who our Samaritans are today? Or, to use that awful trope one last time, do we know who’s wearing the “black hats” if we were in a Western movie today? What kind of clues do we see today, and have that internal and automatic reaction that tells us we are not on the same team as this person, because they are clearly one of the “bad guys”? It’s not really comfortable to name who that is out loud, and in our day and time we might have different ideas about what that might be, but Jesus did say it out loud in his day because this scholar of scriptural law needed to hear it: And then the “bad guy” came near and had pity on him, and bandaged his wounds, took care of him, and paid for his recovery.
And then Jesus asks him which one was the man’s neighbor. And you know what? The lawyer can’t even say “the Samaritan.” It’s too hard for him; too uncomfortable to talk about the group that he had such a strong reaction to. He says, “the one who showed him mercy.” Jesus finally got him to give up on the categories and labels for people, and actually look at whether the action they take is good or bad! For the first time, instead of worrying about passive categories like good guys and bad guys, who counts as a neighbor and who gets the inheritance, this lawyer is tricked into naming that what people actually do matters. So Jesus tells him, “Go and do likewise.”
We don’t know for sure if that lawyer ‘got it’. He might have gone back to his prejudice and his sorting people into boxes and his preoccupation with making clear that he was in the box of good guys. Or, he might have actually let go of his good guys and bad guys and realized that it didn’t matter if the character was a Samaritan because the action the Samaritan took was admirable. I kinda hope that it was the latter and that he found his new way of living to be really living, just as Jesus had said.
But the church, in the way that we have often told the story, setting it apart with a section header that Luke definitely didn’t have in the original that lets us know we’re reading the Parable of the Good Samaritan, definitely didn’t get it.
First of all, calling him “the good Samaritan” is a little bit less problematic than if we had parables titles like “the parable of the innocent Black man” and “the parable of the non-terrorist Muslim.” If we really believed that Samaritans, in general, were good, couldn’t we just say, “the parable of the Samaritan”? And if we wanted to really describe the character, wouldn’t it be better to stick with the words of the story, and say, “the parable of the Merciful Samaritan”?
Lots of folks after Jesus are just as focused on drawing those lines to make clear that we’re the good guys as the lawyer in Jesus’ day. When we read the story, we need the title to say “Good Samaritan” so that we know ahead of time who the good guys are. Otherwise, we might think that when a biblical scholar stands up to ask Jesus a question, he might be a good guy, like other people we know who study the Bible. But he can’t be a good guy, right? He’s one of those hypocrites, not like us, but them, those hypocrites over there like the Pharisees and stuff. (Wasn’t it a Pharisee who walked by? No, that was a Levite? Oh well.) We might not even know what a Levite is, but we’re definitely the good guys because if we saw someone on the side of the road then we would stop to help if it was safe, like in the daytime, and if we knew it wasn’t a scam, but they probably have their own phone to call for help anyway, and then it’s too late because we already passed them…
But what if it really is a story about seeing the right thing to do, and not a story about trying to be the good guy? What if part of the whole point is that sorting the world into good guys and bad guys is incompatible with loving your neighbor as yourself?
Jesus could have just said, “you’ll know that you’re gonna inherit eternal life if you’re the kind of guy who would help someone beat up on the side of the road whether or not you know them.” But then the lawyer probably would have been satisfied that he was one of the good guys, and went on his merry way…and probably would have kept on avoiding “uncleanness” like the priest and Levite of the real story, leaving beat-up folks on the margins of his community to fend for themselves.
And Jesus could have said, “You’re the hypocrite and the bad guy; Samaritans are entering the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of you,” and made this biblical scholar and the priest and Levite into the new “bad guys,” with the Samaritans the new “good guys” instead. That’s what I’ve often heard done with this story, but I don’t think that’s fair to Jesus’ way of responding at all–it’s playing the same game as the lawyer, and missing the point of Jesus’ actual story and message.
So let’s try to be as clear as possible: We are not the good guys. We’re not the bad guys either. There are no good guys and bad guys. There are children of God.
God is the creator and sustainer of all life, abundant life, eternal life. And although Jesus died on the cross, that was a temporary state of affairs; God is not going to die again and leave us an inheritance. So if we want to “inherit” that abundant, eternal life, it better be something we have already inherited, like all the wonderful potential that we inherited from parents in our DNA. We’re God’s children, and the potential to join in God’s life has always been part of who we all are. The scriptures have already made clear how we can do that, long before Jesus: Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love other children of God as we love ourselves.
And as we’re trying to do that, always learning more about what it really means to love God with everything we have and love others as we love ourselves, sometimes we’ll have to look around and even learn from the “Samaritans.” Because whoever that might be to us, the ones that we’ve been taught to think of as the bad guys, those are the people that Jesus would probably point out to us the one time that they do any truly good thing. They’re God’s children too; they’ve got the same inheritance in the image of God in their DNA.
There are no good guys or bad guys. But there are actions of love and actions that aren’t; actions that glorify God by pointing toward justice and life and the good of others, and actions that are purely self-centered with disregard for the impact on others. When we choose the actions of loving God with all that we have and loving each other as much as we love ourselves, we’ll be tapping into the inheritance shared in all humankind to have a rich, abundant, eternal life as we grow into the image of God, who has been most clearly made known in Jesus.
Caleb Kragt is a minister 2/3 time and 1/3 stay-at-home Dad. He and his wife Allie have just moved into their first house with kids age 3 and 6. Caleb and Irvin Heishman are co-pastors for the West Charleston Church of the Brethren in Tipp City, Ohio.
What does it mean to be a gathering space for thoughtful and creative reflections on the history, theology, and modern practices of the Church of the Brethren and related movements? Brethren Life & Thought has a long history of working to be such a space. We’re excited to bring our content online through DEVOTION: A Blog by Brethren Life & Thought. Here, you’ll find sermons and other writings from Brethren, Mennonite, and Quaker writers from a variety of theological and social contexts. Some weeks, you might read a piece that resonates with you. Some weeks, you might read a piece that challenges you. Some weeks, you might read a piece you think is heretical. For good or for ill, the Anabaptist and Peace Church movements are remarkably diverse in faith and practice. This blog attempts to expose our readers to the vastness of that diversity – even when it makes us uncomfortable. As you comment, which we highly encourage you to do back on our Facebook page, please remember to do so in light of our membership in the Body of Christ. Let us be different than the world for Jesus truly does invite us to another way of living.