“New Zealanders are proud of their universal healthcare services, with its founding roots in the Good Samaritan story, but they must be ever vigilant,” says Gerald Arbuckle. “Healthcare is not a commodity, to be available only to those who have money. It is a fundamental right. When people on the margins of our society begin to find it difficult to access our healthcare services, then we have grave reasons to be worried. We must relearn the fundamental message of the Good Samaritan story and insist it always be at the heart of our welfare and healthcare services.”
Read Gerald’s blog below:
The parable of the compassionate Samaritan is a classical example of the teaching of Jesus about our neighbour. Any one who is in need, no matter who they are, is our neighbour (Luke 10: 25-28). To make his point strongly, Jesus tells us that it is a Samaritan, a foreigner and one despised by the Jewish people, who goes to the aid of the dying Jew. Two pillars of Jewish society, the priest and the lawyer, ignore the plight of their fellow countryman.
Moreover, there is another reason why the listeners to the story would have been profoundly shocked that the Samaritan is the unexpected care-giver. He of all people was not expected to be generous and compassionate, simply because he belonged to a class of merchants, namely wine and oil sellers, considered in their business dealings to be shady, if not thoroughly dishonest. Also remarkable, the Samaritan spontaneously shared with the severely injured stranger not from his surplus, but as a trader he gave of his capital – oil, wine, and money. The reason? People in need have a right to share equitably in what God has created.
This parable, told two thousands of years ago, continues to influence people’s lives today, even if they profess no religion or know nothing about the story. The story, says Charles Taylor, a leading Canadian philosopher, is one of the original building blocks of our Western civilisation. Chris Marshall, Victoria University, repeats this insight. He writes that “it is hard to think of another story that has been more influential in moulding personal and political virtue.”
They are right. The parable became the original founding story of all healthcare services in the Western world. Inspired by the parable permanent charitable institutions first sprang up within a generation or two after the end of the persecution of the Christians in the 4th century. Christians formed a miniature welfare state in the Roman empire which for the most part lacked social services. Later the monasteries in particular continued to emphasize the fact that compassionate care and hospitality for the marginalized in society is at the very heart of the Christian message. Every stranger in need is a neighbour, the image of God, and to whom the love and compassion of God ought to be demonstrated.
So in recent times we find Barbara Castle, when Health Minister in Britain in the 1970s, stating in parliament that their universal healthcare system “is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samaritan story that we have in any aspect of our public policy.” And our own Michael Joseph Savage, as prime minister of New Zealand, when establishing in 1938 the beginnings of our own universal healthcare system, also recognized that its roots are to be found in the parable: “What is more valuable in our Christianity than to be our brother’s keepers in reality?”
Why does this story of compassion have such a lasting impact? Compassion is a value originally founded on kinship obligations, whether natural or symbolic. The Hebrew word is derived from the word for womb, implying the need to feel for others because they are born of the same mother. God is that mother, and we are all children of that womb and must accordingly feel with, and care for, each other as brothers and sisters. Thus the Samaritan feels the inner pain of marginalization that the victim – his brother – is experiencing.
Compassion asserts that there is nothing more urgent than the pain of another person because that other person is profoundly, intimately, deeply connected to us through our common origins as human beings. The more one feels the pain of the other person the more one is anxious to remove the injustices and oppressions that cause that pain. For this reason compassion is a powerfully subversive value, a value that can turn society upside-down. And this is why it had, and continues to have, a lasting impact on our cultures.
As New Zealanders we are proud of our universal healthcare services, with its founding roots in the Good Samaritan story, but we must be ever vigilant. Healthcare is not commodity, to be available only to those who have money. It is a fundamental right. When people on the margins of our society begin to find it difficult to access our healthcare services, then we have grave reasons to be worried. We must relearn the fundamental message of the Good Samaritan story and insist it always be at the heart of our welfare and healthcare services.
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Further information on this theme is available in Arbuckle’s book: Laughing with God: Humor, Culture, and Transformation (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2008).