And that brings us to the second strategy of moral evasion.
b. The 'charity begins at home' technique
This technique involves setting limits on the extent of the application of God's command to love. It restricts the operation of that command to a particular group of people who are regarded as the exclusive recipients of the love of which it speaks. 'Who is my neighbour?' our scribe asks, the implication being that some people are my neighbour and some people aren't. He would have taken it for granted that 'Love your neighbour' meant 'Love your fellow Jew'. No rabbi of the day would have suggested anything else. The question in his mind was probably, 'Does that include Gentile converts to Judaism?' because we know that the rabbis were divided on that issue in Jesus' day. Perhaps he thought that by getting Jesus' opinion on that controversy he could generate the academic debate he was seeking. But he can scarcely have been ready for the bombshell that would fall at the very centre of Jesus' story in reply to this technical query.
To understand the emotional impact of verses 33–34 on Jesus' original audience, one needs somehow to get inside the feelings of contempt which Jews entertained towards Samaritans in the first century. The reasons for that contempt we needn't go into. Like all ethnophobia, it was thoroughly irrational. But seldom in the history of the world, I suspect, has there been a racist prejudice that was quite so extreme in the intensity of its mutual loathing.
Unfortunately, this dimension of the story is lost on us. We are so familiar with this parable that the very word 'Samaritan' for us has connotations of benevolence. We all know Samaritans are good. They are those good people who sit on the end of telephones all night long, waiting to counsel potential suicides. But such philanthropic associations were quite foreign to the first-century Jewish
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