THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN -- THE PART THEY DIDN'T TEACH YOU IN SUNDAY SCHOOL

Jesus’ parable was not about Samaritans vs Jews, although the two groups were at loggerheads over many things. It was, in the broadest sense, about all downtrodden peoples rejected irrationally by self-righteous religious people with a sense of superiority and entitlement but with hatred in their hearts.
 
Applied to today’s world, it is about Israel vs Palestine.
 
In the context of the question of eternal life, Jesus, in response to a question by a legal scholar, declared that the commandment to love God was a corollary to the commandment to love one’s neighbour and together, these constituted the greatest commandment.
 
When the scholar pressed Jesus to define “neighbour,” Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan who saved the life of a Jew who had been beaten to within an inch of his life and robbed. The Samaritan took the Jew to a hostel and paid for his keep and care, thus saving his life. The legal scholar admitted that this Samaritan was the essence of the neighbour in the Levitican sense.
 
When the scholar thus agreed with Jesus that the commandment to love one’s neighbour, as a corollary to the commandment to love God with all one’s heart, soul and might (Deuteronomy 6:5), is the greatest commandment of all. Jesus said “do this and you will live.” He was in fact saying that eternal life is accessible within Judaism – but a targeted Judaism stripped of all the legalistic rigamarole.
 
By choosing a Samaritan to be the hero of his parable, Jesus was hitting a sore point of the Jewish scholar since Samaritans had for nearly 7 centuries been hated by the Jews for their intermarriage with non-Jews and divergent religious views. Thus the reason for the hate was religious. But Jesus did not respect religion per se. His focus was on love, and hence more universal, unlike the Judaism of the Pharisees, which was essentially reserved for the sons of Abraham, and hence ethnocentric and not universally applicable.
 
Most Samaritans believed in Jehovah (Yahweh) like the Jews, just as the Muslims today worship the God of Abraham and evoke Old Testament history, though with a different slant, claiming a different son of Abraham, Ishmael, rather than Isaac, as their spiritual ancestor. But that’s religion, something rejected by Jesus. The word Allah is a cognate of the Hebrew el(o)ah, ie, God. Thus, like the Samaritans, they were believers in the God of Abraham but with different doctrines that didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
 
This religious distinction has no bearing on the Torah’s teaching of love found in Leviticus 19:18, which clearly commands: love your neighbour as yourself, the commandment discussed by Jesus and the legal scholar.
 
This commandment, in Jesus’ teaching, even transcends the Judaic religion. Indeed the Chinese philosopher Mozi (墨子, 5th-4th centuries BC) taught the theory of universal love, or love without distinction (jianai, 兼愛).
 
The Israeli policies of apartheid, land seizures, shooting of unarmed Palestinians on the flimsy pretext that anyone who opposes Israeli policies is a “terrorist” are incompatible with Christianity, Judaism and universally accepted principles of human conduct and relations and are the reason for the constant wars in the Middle East. Yet US Evangelicals support these inhumane practices without question. It is they, not just the “Deep State” or US officialdom, who are responsible for the death and destruction in the Middle East. Take away the Evangelical perversion of the Gospel and its impact on the US government – as clearly illustrated by the current administration and its 2 rigidly "Christian" Zionist officials Pompeo and Pence – and you have peace in that region. One nation understands this and the moral principles involved, and that is Russia, whose foreign policy reflects the teachings of the Old and New Testament regarding human relations.
 
There can be no such thing as “Christian” Zionism. In fact, there can be no such thing as Judaic Zionism.
 
Israeli scholars like Gideon Levy and Ilan Pappe would agree.