I wasn’t taking a church service on the Sunday in July when the Good Samaritan was the lectionary reading but I remember seeing a headline in the media that week about a particular Good Samaritan and what he had done to help another person. That headline got me wondering why the media uses that title and if there is any understanding of where it comes from.

A quick search on Stuff, putting ‘Good Samaritan’ into the search function, pulled up 2390 results in a matter of seconds.

Headings like:
Good Samaritan saves 11 cars from floods
Shock guilty plea in ‘Good Samaritan’ murder trial

Good Samaritan savaged by dog

Woman and Good Samaritan reconnect

Hunt on for Good Samaritan …

A search on the NZ Herald website finds only 618 results (and at least two of them are about the Good Samaritan acting badly). The Otago Daily Times shows 408 results. And this morning as I write this, another heading appears in the media: “Good Samaritans bitten, punched by suspected drink-driver after Dunedin crash”.

As New Zealand becomes increasingly secular in its outlook, and the message “Be kind” has been well and truly lost since the first Covid-19 lockdown, it seems strange to me that we have these headlines. We know that the Good Samaritan is a person of compassion and mercy, someone who shows care and kindness - especially in times of need - but what does the average New Zealander think of when they see the term Good Samaritan? Does it inspire them to go out and do good? Does it scare them off? Or does it mean nothing at all to them?

In America in the 1970s an experiment was undertaken to see how individuals would react to seeing someone in distress. The participants were given the story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible, and were then told they would need to give a short speech on this story and were sent off to another building a short walk away to give their speech. What they didn’t know was that on the way they would have to pass by an actor acting out being in distress. So, with the story of the Good Samaritan fresh in their minds, how many of these people would stop to help a person in distress or would the thought of a chance to give a talk be more important to them? Many of those people rushed right on past the person in distress, going straight to the studio and giving their speech on the Good Samaritan, yet didn’t think of how their actions were in direct contrast to their words. Near the end of the write-up we are advised the participants were seminary students!

What would we do today? If we were to pass someone in distress, would we rush to help or rush away, hoping someone else would go to their rescue?