(The Nationalist, 9 July 2004)
Some time ago, I was in conversation with a Chinese woman who told me of an experience she had while walking along a street in Belfast. In broad daylight a man came up to her, began to insult her about her appearance and her race, then went behind her and kicked her to the ground. She described how her attacker then went off, and she picked herself up, feeling angry and humiliated, and began to try to compose herself.
I asked her what she thought of the experience. She said what hurt her most was not the attack itself, because you could find an ignorant person anywhere. What hurt was that people walked by while it was happening, said nothing and did nothing. No one even helped her up. They didn’t want to get involved.
Recently, too, a person was attacked and robbed in daylight on a Dublin street. No one intervened – until an Englishman, a tourist, came and drove off the attacker.
‘I keep myself to myself’, ‘I don’t want to get involved’, ‘I mind my own business’ – have we made these into absolutes that take priority over decency and humanity? Is our individualism gone so far that you and I simply don’t care, but walk by as if an attack on a fellow human being was not our concern? Are we becoming an uncaring and unfeeling society?
In Germany they responded to their failings in Hitler’s time by a law which is popularly known as “the Good Samaritan law”; under it you can be prosecuted for failing to help a person in need. Interesting.
In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus responded to a lawyer’s question about who his neighbour was. The lawyer wanted to define the limits of neighbourliness; Jesus wanted to push back the horizons. He turned the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ around to ‘Who proved to be neighbour?’ It was a shift from the abstract to the practical, from an academic discussion about a point of law to a demand for commitment: ‘Go, and do the same yourself’.
Among other things, the parable is about moving from a religion based on observances to one based on relationships, from one that was safe and predictable to one that was risky. Love is a venture into uncharted territory.