TOKENS PODCAST: S1E9
How anti-Semitism on the school bus helped launch the career of a renowned New Testament scholar who is, in fact, Jewish.
Jewish Vanderbilt Divinity school Professor of New Testament Amy-Jill “AJ” Levine, self-described as a Yankee Feminist, joins Tokens to talk about two of her books; but more, how she once wanted to be the pope, what she does not like about liberal Christians, and a marvelous telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan.
AJ LEVINE ON THE TOKENS SHOW
In a 6-minute lecture, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine ponders one of Jesus' subversive parables.
Amy-Jill Levine Interview
LINKS TO LISTEN:
EPISODE LINKS:
Amy-Jill’s Books:
The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
https://amzn.to/38mDY3dShort Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi https://amzn.to/3dP2gEm
ABOUT AMY-JILL “AJ” LEVINE
Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt (Divinity and A&S); she is also Affiliated Professor, Woolf Institute: Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge.
Her books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of 2007; audio books); Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (Catholic Book Club; translations: Spanish, Italian; audio books); The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (with Douglas Knight); The New Testament, Methods and Meanings (with Warren Carter); and The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III (the first full-length biblical commentary co-authored by a Jew and an Evangelical).
Her children’s books (with Sandy Sasso) include Who Counts? 100 Sheep, 10 Coins and 2 Sons (2017 Junior Library Guild List; translations: Spanish, Korean); The Marvelous Mustard Seed (2018 Junior Library Guild List), and Who Is My Neighbor? With Marc Brettler she edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament; she also edited the 13-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings, and The Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton Readings in Religion; translation: Japanese); she is the New Testament editor of the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series.
Her adult education programs and tapes include the Teaching Company Great Lectures: "Introduction to the Old Testament," "Great Figures of the Old Testament," and "Great Figures of the New Testament"; Abingdon adult education: Short Stories by Jesus Study Guide; Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week; and Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent. She has given over 500 lectures on the Bible, Christian-Jewish relations, and Religion, Gender, and Sexuality across the globe.
Professor Levine has held grants from the Mellon Foundation, NEH, and ACLS, and she has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature, Catholic Biblical Association, and Association for Jewish Studies. She served as Alexander Robertson Fellow (University of Glasgow), and the Catholic Biblical Association Scholar to the Philippines. In Spring 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute.
At Vanderbilt, she chaired the Faculty Senate (1997-98).
Holding the B.A. from Smith College, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, she has honorary doctorates from the University of Richmond, the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, the University of South Carolina-Upstate, Drury University, Christian Theological Seminary, and Franklin College. A self-described Yankee Jewish feminist, Professor Levine is a member of Congregation Sherith Israel, an Orthodox Synagogue in Nashville, although she is often quite unorthodox.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University,1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999)
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I’m Lee C. Camp.
Amy-Jill Levine: When I was seven years old, a girl on the school bus said to me, “You killed our Lord.”
Lee: That's Amy-Jill Levine, an Orthodox Jew.
Amy-Jill Levine: … because she had been told that the Jews - all Jews at all times and all places - were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn't figure out how this absolutely magnificent tradition could say such hateful things about Jews. So I started asking questions.
Lee: Those questions contributed, in turn, to Amy-Jill Levine becoming, of all things, a world renowned New Testament scholar and professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. An apparent dichotomy, of course: an Orthodox Jew teaching about Jesus.
Amy-Jill Levine: Why would not anyone want to teach about Jesus? He's absolutely fascinating. He is inspirational, he's clever, he's extraordinarily smart…
Lee: And more, there's this.
Amy-Jill Levine: Wishy-washy Christians annoy me. I don't know where they stand.
Lee: Our interview with professor A.J. Levine on her book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, in just a moment.
Very grateful tonight to have professor Amy-Jill Levine with us tonight. She is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Self-described Yankee Jewish feminist. You're not from around here. Are you?
[Laughter]
Amy-Jill Levine: It's been 15 years. I’m trying!
Lee: Let me finish the self description. A Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school... though some of us could argue that.
[Laughter]
But I shouldn't have said that. That was tacky. But we do get tacky here on occasion. But teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt. And a member of a local Orthodox Jewish synagogue. Here tonight talking about her book, The Misunderstood, will you please welcome professor Levine.
[Applause]
I think one obvious question that would come to the minds of many is, Why does an Orthodox Jew teach New Testament studies? So tell us a little bit about that.
Amy-Jill Levine: That's fair. Although I should say the level of my Orthodoxy is under some discussion, even in my own synagogue, but that may be the case with some of you as well.
[Laughter]
Lee: It all depends upon the definition, I suppose.
Amy-Jill Levine: Indeed, it does. Why would not anyone want to teach about Jesus? He's absolutely fascinating. He is inspirational, he's clever, he's extraordinarily smart. And I think even if one cannot, for reasons of faith... and faith, by the way, is not something you choose to have. Faith comes by grace. It's like love: you can't compel it. You can't get rid of it once you've got it. Even though I don't have faith in Jesus as Lord and savior, although you're welcome to pray for me and many are, I find that I can appreciate much of the message of the kingdom of heaven without worshiping the messenger.
Lee: So, what was your experience like as a child growing up with Christianity being a Jew?
Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah, well, I met my first Protestant who registered as a Protestant when I went to college. I grew up in an area of Massachusetts that was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, so my introduction to Christianity was Portuguese Roman Catholicism, and I loved it. It was Christmas carols, which are, in silent nights, much better than I had: a little dreidel. You have better holiday music, I'll grant that. I like Christmas trees and Easter bunnies. and my parents explained to me that Christianity was very much like Judaism, that we had the same Bible, or at least the same first part of your Bible as our Bible, that Christians thought the 10 commandments were important, that we worshiped the same God - the God in Genesis, the God of the Psalms - and that Jesus was a Jewish man and Jesus was important for Christians. So my initial sense was Christianity was sort of like the synagogue we didn't go to. It was in the family, but just not ours. And then when I was seven years old, a girl on the school bus said to me, “You killed our Lord.” Because she had been told that the Jews - all Jews at all times and all places - were responsible for the death of Jesus. And I couldn't figure out how this absolutely magnificent tradition could say such hateful things about Jews. So I started asking questions.
Lee: You tell a story in the book that, if I remember correctly, you went home one day and told your mother you wanted to be the Pope.
Amy-Jill Levine: I did. I still think I'd make a fabulous Pope.
[Laughter]
My husband has some questions about it, and my Italian is getting better. When Pope John the 23rd died, and this was in the early 1960s, there wasn't anything on television, back when we just had three networks, but they were all the Pope's funeral. So I said to my mother, “Who was this fellow, who's interrupting my afternoon cartoons?” And she said, “He's the Pope,” which meant nothing to me. And then she said, “He was good for the Jews.” Which in our family, that was the big question, you know: Whatever it was, was it good for the Jews? So I started watching and what I learned was, if you were Pope, you get to stand up in a car and wave, kind of like you’re queen Elizabeth, and everybody loves you, and you live in Italy, which means you eat spaghetti, and it's good for the Jews. So I said to my mother, “I want to be Pope when I grow up.” And my mother looked at me and said, “You cannot be the Pope.” And when I responded with some indignation, “Why not?” she said, Because you're not Italian.
[Laughter]
Lee: So speaking of ethnicity, one of the undercurrents, and one of the theses of your book, is that Christians lose something by not realizing that Jesus was a Jew, that he was Jewish. And so talk to us a little bit about, What are some of the things that you believe that we miss by overlooking the Jewishness of Jesus?
Amy-Jill Levine: To be Jewish means to be firmly grounded in and practicing the commandments that God gave to Moses as one would interpret them in one’s own context. It's not as if you read Leviticus and you simply enact it. Laws are always interpreted. Which means if we take Jesus seriously, we have to take seriously the scripture that he took seriously. And I find in too many churches, the Old Testament means the antiquated or the not-so-good or the let's-put-it-up-on-the-shelf Testament rather than taking seriously, actually, what the new Testament says: all scripture is inspired. And that means Genesis and Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the Psalms and Esther. If you take Jesus the Jew seriously, it means you open up the Christian scripture. If you take Jesus, the Jew seriously, it means you're concerned about your body: what you eat and what you drink, what you wear, how you act on the Sabbath, as opposed to the rest of the workweek. The body itself, as Paul puts it, is the temple of the Holy Spirit. And that's something that's very Jewish. You pay attention to the body and you sanctify the body.
Lee: Speaking in that vein, one of the things I particularly liked [was] this passage. A passage, I think, is very helpful, myself, for Christians to hear. You say, “The kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate for the single saved soul. It is a communal vision of what could be and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debts are forgiven, when we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength.” Talk just a little bit more about this vision of the kingdom of heaven and how that gets played out in the New Testament, perhaps.
Amy-Jill Levine: I find, with a number of my students and with church groups with whom I work, that kingdom of heaven is “up there.” It's golden slippers and somehow a realm that we don't have. But the kingdom of heaven - as Jesus proclaims - it is not only something beyond, something transcendent, but it's something here in the midst of us and inside of us. And I think what he's done is he's managed to put one foot in it already, and encouraged his Jewish followers to do the same, which is simply enacting what God's will has always been as we can find in the shared scriptures. So when people talk about the kingdom of heaven, I don't want this, you know, “this is what I get when I die” or “if I believe a certain way, then I get rewarded by this.” The kingdom of heaven is something that we together, with divine help, can enact. We can bring it about in part. I think the kingdom of heaven is there when you see people struggling to mend the broken hearted. When Richard Goode visits people in prison, or when I go to Riverbend Prison and work with the male inmates, to see people forming community, recovering from sin, bringing conflicted interests together and saying, “I can enact what God wants. I can't do it perfectly, but I can come pretty close. And I am responsible to try to do that.”
Lee: You're very clear, not only in your book, but in some conversations that we have had at several points about how you insist that people of faith not hide who they are, or not somehow put on some sort of face for interfaith dialogue, but that we maintain who we are in such conversations. And yet, it's interesting to me that you count your book, The Misunderstood Jew, as an exercise in interfaith dialogue, while insisting, perhaps to some counter-intuitively, that you lay out there who you are and don't apologize.
Amy-Jill Levine: Well, why should I? I'm Jewish. I'm very happy to be. I love being Jewish. Now, not that I'm encouraging all of you to do this. We Jews, we don't do that, but I'm very happy with who I am. And what annoys me is people who say they're a member of a religious tradition, but don't say so proudly. Wishy-washy Christians annoy me. I don't know where they stand. And it bothers me if a Christian would want to pray in the name of Jesus and then said, “Well, no, there might be somebody who's not a Christian here, so I'm not going to do that.” I don't think you sacrifice the particulars of your own religion on the altar of interface sensitivity.
[Applause]
Because if you give up who you are, then I can’t have a dialogue with you, because you're not being honest. If I'm in a church - and I'm in churches a lot; I may be in one of your churches at some point, if you invite me - and I'm listening to a sermon or I'm listening to a prayer, if I'm in a church, I expect that to be in the name of Jesus, because I'm in a church. If you come to my synagogue, Jesus is unlikely to get mentioned, right? Because we should be true to who we are.
Lee: You interestingly mentioned to me in a conversation we had talking about your book that you've encountered more antisemitism, if I understood you correctly, in stereotypical Protestant, liberal circles, as opposed to stereotypical American Evangelical or Roman Catholic circles. How is that the case? That seems, again, rather counterintuitive.
Amy-Jill Levine: Because some of my best friends are Evangelical. What happens is, if you are a conservative Christian who holds to certain doctrinal views - Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is more than simply an interesting rabbi, Jesus is the savior of the world; that should sound vaguely familiar right? - if you believe that, then there's less necessity to divorce him from his own Jewish environment, because he's obviously unique, and he is obviously important. But if you're a liberal and you take all that stuff as metaphor or myth in the sense of not true - mom really not a virgin, really didn't walk on water, really didn't ascend, it's all a nice story - then why follow him? And what happens in liberal Protestantism is that Jesus, in order to be important and unique, then he winds up being the only Jew who was nice to women and the only Jew who cared about love of God and love of neighbor. He winds up getting divorced from his own environment. For the conservative he's already unique, so he can be fully a Jew, fully human, and for the liberal it's much harder.
Lee: Being familiar with some of the horrid relations between Jews and Christians and antisemitism that has occurred in very hard ways, and to very significant Christian figures in Luther, and some hard incidents in the crusades, of course, and obviously the 20th century, I've often wondered, how did you ever trust Christians? What do you do with that?
Amy-Jill Levine: It would be unfair of us to stereotype all Christians, just as it would be unfair for Christians, as Christians have done in the past, to stereotype all Jews. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. We're also called to love the stranger who dwells among us. If I did not see in the face of the Christian or the Muslim or the Buddhist or the atheist a spark of the image of God, because we're all created in the image of God, then I'm being unfaithful to my own tradition, and I'm denying the humanity of the other. Sometimes trust is hard to come, but I'd prefer to begin with a position of trust than force everyone to earn it from me. What I found abundantly, over and over again, is Christians who may not agree with me theologically, and I would not expect them to, welcoming me into their homes. The very fact that you welcomed me here this evening - ‘cause I suspect there aren't a whole lot of Jews here - that already, I think, is a sense of the kingdom of heaven. It's the openness to dialogue, the openness to learn from each other and still hold true to who we are. So as long as the Christian is holding true to what I believe Christianity to be, which means somebody who manifests love of God and love of neighbor, then I think Jews and Christians and everybody else can do just fine.
Lee: Thank you very much. Professor Amy-Jill Levine.
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We are most grateful to have you joining us. If you have not perused our podcast central on our website, then we say unto thee, “Why hast thou not surely done what is good?” Go down now to tokensshow.com/podcast, and there thou shalt find all manner of links, photos, books, and related videos, which thou shall surely find shall enrich thy life. Moreover, there is available on our website opportunities for online courses, to sign up for our email list, and other compelling and wonderful ways for you to join in the Tokens Show community. You are listening to our episode with professor A.J. Levine. Coming up, we share our interview with the professor on her book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. We are grateful for the response we have received thus far to our podcast, and for all the listeners far and wide outside of Nashville. The next biggest audiences in the U.S. have been Atlanta and Dallas, and then outside of the U.S., next biggest listener groups have been in Canada and New Zealand. Special shout-outs to you all, and grateful, wherever you're listening from, that you are joining us. A special update about our episode last week entitled “Dirty Cop, False Arrest, and Unexpected Consequences,” which entailed an interview with Andrew Collins and Jameel McGee, we learned the very morning of releasing that episode that Jameel McGee is currently awaiting trial for a new charge. We contacted Andrew Collins who remains in touch with Jameel. He expressed his dismay at what he believes to be a violation of civil rights yet again. To see that correspondence with Andrew, visit www.tokensshow.com/AC. Part two in just a moment.
You are listening to Tokens and our episode with professor A.J. Levine. Here in part two, we share our interview with the professor on her book, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, along with her standup segment on the good Samaritan.
Grateful to have you back.
Amy-Jill Levine: I was wondering when you were going to invite me back.
Lee: Yes. Well, I think, as we said before the show, that you're probably the first interviewee we've ever had back for a second time. Yeah. Yeah.
Amy-Jill Levine: Well good for the Jews.
[Laughter]
Lee: It's conventional wisdom that art and story and song have this kind of capacity to jar us into seeing the world in new ways, and your recent book, Short Stories by Jesus, suggests that parables work in a similar kind of fashion?
Amy-Jill Levine: Pretty much. What's happened today is parables get domesticated; they're banal, they're obvious, and therefore they're boring. But if we could hear the parables the way they were first heard to the people who first heard them, we could capture that punch and that provocation as to why anybody would have followed Jesus to begin with.
Lee: Wow do we end up taking provocative stories and turning them into banal and conventional wisdom?
Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah. ‘Cause we're scared. And because we want closure. We just heard in this wonderful story how God can't be boxed in. What we do with our interpretations, we try to box God in. We try to control. We try to prevent the parables from speaking in different ways to different people.
Lee: So give us an example of one parable that operates that way.
Amy-Jill Levine: Well, we've all heard of the Prodigal Son. Yes, yes?
[Crowd replies “yes”]
Good. Christians. And it's typically...
Lee: They could probably give you the Lord's Prayer as well.
[Laughter]
Amy-Jill Levine: Yes. Now I lay me down to sleep. So it's typically understood as “God loves us even if we mess up big time.” That's what it usually meant, and that's a lovely message, but Jews did not need a parable to do… we already knew God loves us, right? Golden calf, not one of our better moments. So we knew that God was there. What we miss is, it's the third of three parables. There's a guy who has a hundred sheep and loses one. And there's a woman who has ten coins and loses one. And I already know that they're not God, because God doesn't lose us. And then I have a story that begins, “There was a man who had two sons,” and all we do is focus on the younger one and whatever he did, but when he comes home and Dad throws him the party with the fatted calf, the very next line is “The older brother was out in the field, and he heard music and dancing, and he has to call someone to ask what’s going on, and he's told, ‘your brother has come back safe and sound.’” And he became angry and refused to go in. In other words, they had enough time to call the band and the caterer, and nobody called him, because there was a man who had two sons and he didn't count. So the parable says to us, whom have we not counted? Whom have we overlooked? Whom have we made to feel as if your voice doesn't count? And the parable, therefore, indicts us to make sure that we do the counting that's necessary so that we make sure we don't lose anybody.
[Applause]
Lee: I've never heard that. That's really very fine.
Amy-Jill Levine: And how many years have you been a Christian? I mean, really…
[Laughter]
Lee: Give us quickly one other parable.
Amy-Jill Levine: The parable of The Pearl of Great Price. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. On finding one pearl of enormous value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. And we come into the church, bless its heart, and the church says, “Oh, the pearl is the kingdom. The pearl is the Christ. The pearl is salvation. And the pearl is the church. Or, maybe Jesus is the merchant who gave it all for us, or maybe we’re…” We don't know. And all we try to do is tame this thing. But what we miss is the merchant actually knew what he wanted, and as soon as he bought that pearl, he's no longer a merchant anymore. He's a guy with a pearl. So, what it says to us is, “Do we know when enough is enough? Can we take what we really need? Can we even recognize it? And do we recognize our neighbor’s pearl of great price? What is the most important thing in our lives? And what is the most important thing in our neighbors’ lives? And how can we even say, ‘I love my neighbor as myself’ if I don't recognize my neighbors pearl?”
Lee: Thank you.
[Applause]
Tonight we're talking about songs. It's another kind of art form that sets up either provocative or conventional understandings of God. One of the common critiques of contemporary Christian music is that it's kind of like playing good romantic music and sticking Jesus in there.
Amy-Jill Levine: Instead of baby, baby.
Lee: Instead of baby, baby Jesus, or sweet baby Jesus, or, yeah. What do you make of that kind of critique? Too much personal Jesus stuff?
Amy-Jill Levine: Far be it from me to tell Christians how to sing. Right? You know, if it works for you, terrific. I'm happy. And it keeps you out of trouble. But what the Bible does is open up... it's an entire song, that right at the beginning, it's the spirit of God hovering. That hovering is noise, it's vibration. Israel is told, “Hear, oh Israel.” In other words, “Listen, use your ears.” The text tells us that nature sings the glory of God. The songs in the Bible range from lament, to celebration, to thanksgiving, to complete joy, to military victory, to politics, like bringing the mighty down from their thrones and raising up those of low degree. That's Mary’s song. So the entire text is one giant song. And although we're continually told, “Sing a new song, sing a new song,” what we really do is sing very, very old songs, but always in a new key, because each generation has to claim those songs for itself.
Lee: Professor Amy-Jill Levine. She'll be back the second half of our show.
Amy-Jill Levine: All right. I get to talk to you for six minutes about the Good Samaritan. We can do this. Here we go. Six minutes. Parables in general are not children's stories, and they are not banal statements of the obvious. There's an old line about religion that religion is supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. So if we hear a parable and we think, isn't that nice, or isn't that lovely, we may be hearing it through our ears, but we're not hearing it through first century Jewish ears, because those first century Jewish ears knew that parables were designed to provoke or to indict. Which brings us to the Good Samaritan. You know the story. A lawyer comes up to Jesus, they have a bit of a conversation, and the lawyer says to Jesus at one point, “So who is my neighbor?” I used to think that was a very snarky question. It turns out it's a very good question, because we ask that all the time. We need to know who the neighbors are. They are the people who have the same rights and the same responsibilities as we do. So neighbors are people who can vote in our elections. Canadians? They’re our neighbors, they can't vote in our elections, they have different rights and different responsibilities. So it's actually a very good legal question. But Jesus is not concerned about the minutiae of legality. Jesus is concerned about love, and he knows the Jewish law says not only, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but, “You shall also love the stranger who dwells among you, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” So the lawyer says, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus could have given him a discourse on what constitutes neighbor, but instead he hurls a parable at him, which means the lawyer is about to be indicted. And Jesus explains how a fellow was going down the Jerusalem-to-Jericho road. By the way, you always go up to Jerusalem and down from Jerusalem. You could be on the moon, you go up to Jerusalem. But this fellow's going down, and he's waylaid by bandits. He's beaten, robbed, stripped, and left half dead in a ditch. And he's wondering, Who's going to help me? So along the road comes a priest, and the priest sees him, and he walks by on the other side. And shortly thereafter comes a Levite. He sees him, and he walks by on the other side, too. And countless commentators who know nothing about Judaism explain that the reason the priest and the Levite walked by the fellow in the ditch is because they're afraid if he's dead and they touch him, or if he dies while they're attending him, then they will become ritually impure because of having touched a corpse. Does that sound vaguely familiar? Nonsense, nonsense. There is no law preventing a Levite from coming in touch with a corpse, and Luke gives them no excuse, and neither does Jesus, and no excuse would have mattered. The best explanation I heard for why they walked by came from the reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and here's what King said. King says, “I'm not sure what happened, but here's what my imagination tells me. It's possible,” said doctor King, “these men were afraid. The priest and the Levite asked themselves, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ Because there are bandits on the road. But the Samaritan asked a different question. The Samaritan asks, ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” And then King goes on to say, “If I don't stop to help the sanitation workers in Memphis, what will happen to them?” And we know what happened to King. Because there were bandits on the road. But the issue is here: how do we ask the right questions? So what do we do? We need to ask questions that first century Jews would ask. Every Jew knew, back then, if you had a priest and a Levite, the third one would be an Israelite because Jews divided into three groups. Priests descended from Moses' brother Aaron, Levites descended from Levi, Aaron's ancestor, one of Jacob's kids, and everybody else was an Israelite. This is sometimes called the Rule of Three. If you say two words, you should be able to know the third. So we're about to do token participation. I am going to give you two names. You are going to give me the third. I don't think you can get this wrong. We're going to try it twice. For people my age, Larry, Mo…
[Crowd replies “Curly”]
Jews, by the way.
[Laughter]
I've only got six minutes. Be quiet.
[Laughter]
Father, Son…
[Crowd replies “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost”]
Well, you can say Holy Ghost. It just dates you. It’s just fine. It’s Holy Spirit. So if you have the first two, you know the third. And all Jews knew back then that if you said, “Priest, Levite,” the third one would be Israelite. But instead you get priest, Levite, Samaritan. To go from priest to Levite to Samaritan is like going from Larry to Mo to Hitler, or Father to Son to Satan. It was unthinkable. Today we think of Samaritans as people who help you by the side of the road. We have good Samaritan hospitals and good Samaritan car services, but that's not who Samaritans were in antiquity. And they weren't the oppressed minority either. They were the enemy. One chapter before our parable, Jesus and the entourage are going to Jerusalem, and they stop off in a Samaritan village and ask for hospitality. And the Samaritans refuse them hospitality because they're Jews and their face is set towards Jerusalem. At this point, James and John, two of the apostles in their apostolic best, say to Jesus, “Lord, shall we call down fire from heaven and destroy this village?” And Jesus has to explain that dropping a bomb is not the appropriate response to lack of hospitality.
[Laughter]
So what do we do? Today, when we hear this parable, we think of ourselves as the Samaritan, but in antiquity, they actually referred to the parable as The Parable of the Man Who Fell Among the Robbers. We’re the person in the ditch. And we might think, with the Samaritan coming, I'd rather die than acknowledge one of that group helped me. And then it's even harder, because we have to realize the face of the enemy is also in the image and likeness of God. And the face of the person we think might kill us is the very person who might save our lives. Yes, there are bandits on the road and yes, it's dangerous. But what Jesus is saying here is, “Recognize that everyone is a human being. Recognize that the person who saves you might be the person you think is the enemy. You're not the Samaritan, you're the person in the ditch who will save you. And can you acknowledge that everyone has the possibility of doing that? If you can do that, the parable has worked on you.”
Lee: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Thank you for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? Email us text, or attach a voice memo and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg, Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producer, Leslie Thompson, Rogue Creative Marketing and Media. Associate producer, Ashley Bayne. Our engineer, Cariad Harmon. Our production assistant, Cara Fox. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios, both in Nashville, Tennessee.
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