Parables and Their Social Contexts: Douglas Oakman and the Good Samaritan Parable

 

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? This one is about Doug Oakman's contributions to our understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Oakman argues that in the face of the exploitative urban elite, the concentration of land holdings in the hands of a few, rising debt, and other destabilizing forces, Jesus responded by calling for a reversal of the centralization of political power and economic goods. In addition, Jesus advocated exchanges built on “general reciprocity”—giving without expecting anything in return (e.g., the remission of debts). Such general reciprocity fosters unity and propitiates potential enemies, but for Jesus it also fosters the reestablishment of kinship among all peoples. Love for enemies is a corollary of this general reciprocity, which profoundly expresses human dependence on God’s graciousness and willingness to provide for material human needs. 

Oakman also explores how the parable of the Good Samaritan epitomizes this love for one’s enemies. Because peasants were compelled to give up a precious amount of their hard-earned sustenance to outsiders, the common orientation of peasants was to distrust strangers—especially those who dealt in commerce. Outsiders were seen as possible threats to their existence or livelihood, and a cultural chasm existed between city dwellers (where landowners tended to live) and peasant villagers. 

The parable presupposes typical peasant valuations of the characters but does not simply identify with their interests. Peasant sympathies, Oakman argues, would have been with the bandits of this parable. Yet Jesus abhors the violence of the bandits while accepting some of the basic goals of banditry—justice and securing subsistence for the poor. In addition, most modern interpreters ignore the indications in the parable that the Samaritan was a trader—a profession despised by peasants. For Jewish peasants, the Samaritan is a cultural enemy (Samaritan), an evil man (a trader), and a fool. The Samaritan was foolish because he treated the injured man graciously as if he were a family member and was naive about the situation at the inn: Because inns were notoriously synonymous with crime and evil deeds, for this gullible Samaritan to trust the injured man to the care of such an evil place—and to give the innkeeper a blank check—was a folly that could prove deadly to the injured person. 

Oakman concludes that Jesus fully expected peasants to laugh all the way through this story. But Jesus compares the enormity of God’s generosity to the actions of a hated foreigner of despised social occupation, and, in fact, God’s mercy even reaches the point of danger and folly. God’s kingdom is found in the most unlikely, even immoral, places. And God, like the Samaritan, is indebted to pay whatever may be required. As Oakman reiterates in another work, the parable subverts traditional village morality and opens new possibilities: general reciprocity as characteristic of the kingdom of God and as a radical protest against the exploitative agrarian situation in early Roman Palestine. 

These arguments can be found in: Douglas E. Oakman, “Was Jesus a Peasant?: Implications for Reading the Samaritan Story (Luke 10:30–35),” BTB 22 (1992): 117–25.