Mbengu Nyiawung and Masilamani Gnanavaram on the Good Samaritan Parable

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post is about the contributions to our understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan from Mbengu Nyiawung and Masilamani Gnanavaram. 

Mbengu Nyiawung builds upon Oakman’s arguments (see the previous post) about the “foolish Samaritan” by describing him as a risk-taking “Good Sama” who serves as a paradigm for socio-economic development in Africa. After placing the parable into its first-century Mediterranean perspective, Nyiawung delineates the avoidance of risk-taking by the priest and Levite in contrast to the “altruistic” risk-taking of the Samaritan in (a) time, (b) resources, (c) identity, (d) life, and (e) religious identity. Nyiawung then compares the robbed man to socio-economic development in contemporary Africa, whose “poverty, misery, and pain” to “external robbers” (“colonizers, superpowers, and other hostile powers,” 277) and “internal robbers” (e.g., some corrupt African elite). He concludes that the solution is not “sympathizers” but “doers”: African people who are proactive, altruistic, compassionate, and risk-taking (“Good Samas”; 280–87), people who ask, “To whom am I a neighbour?” (281–82). 

The parable of the Good Samaritan creates a reversal of expectations. In a similar way, once we read parables with (acquired) peasant eyes and hear them with peasant ears, our Western, post-enlightenment interpretations of them are often reversed. Thus it is no surprise that such “peasant readings” cohere with many biblical interpretations from a liberation perspective, as Masilamani Gnanavaram’s contextual interpretation of the Good Samaritan in light of “Dalit theology” in India illustrates. 

Gnanavaram reads the parable through the “hermeneutical key” that God is the God of the oppressed and has a preferential option for the poor (59). Traditional historical-critical methods are inadequate, and the common Western interpretations that limit the message of the Good Samaritan to “love your neighbor” in the contexts of charity and philanthropy are misreadings of the parable. Especially in light of the inequitable distribution of natural resources, economic wealth, and opportunities, interpreters have to recognize the socio-cultural aspects inherent in the parable: The Good Samaritan should be read as a challenge to existing systems of domination and oppression, including the repentance of the oppressors, and as a model for identifying with the oppressed, liberating compassion and life-giving actions, and the need for the marginalized and oppressed to struggle together for liberation (80–82).

Sources:

Mbengu D. Nyiawung, “In Search of a Samaritan: The Risk-Taking Motif in Luke 10:30–35 as a Paradigm for African Socio-Economic Development,” Neotestamentica 52:2 (2018): 267–87. The article uses the “African Biblical Interpretation” method to initiate dialogues “between the text, the original audience and the original context” and “the context of the present-day audience” (268). 

Masilamani Gnanavaram, “‘Dalit Theology’ and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, JSNT 50 (1993): 59–83.