The Samaritan Was Busy
In the early 1970s two psychologists at Princeton, John Darley and Daniel Batson, ran an experiment with forty students from the town’s theological seminary, who were told they were taking part in a study of the vocational careers of seminary students. Each was briefed in one building and sent to another to record a short talk. Some were to speak on the jobs a seminary graduate might do besides ministry. Others were given the parable of the Good Samaritan. Some were told they had time to spare, some that they should go now, and some that they were already late. In an alley between the two buildings, each of them passed a man slumped in a doorway, head down, coughing and groaning.
Of those with time to spare, 63 per cent stopped to offer help. Of those told to go now, 45 per cent. Of those who were already late, 10 per cent. What they were about to preach on made no significant difference, and neither did how they described their own religion. The paper, published in 1973 as “From Jerusalem to Jericho”, contains a sentence that has been quoted in lecture halls and pulpits ever since: “Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!”
It is a hard sentence to hear in church. Most of us believe that goodness is a matter of who you are: that a person formed by Scripture, who prays and thinks about mercy, will be merciful when mercy is called for. The experiment suggests that goodness is a matter of what time it is. The students who were thinking about the parable were no more likely to live it than the students who were thinking about careers. Their watches decided. Darley and Batson drew the moral themselves, carefully: the familiar complaint that “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases” was, they wrote, “at least an accurate description.”
Before accepting that, it is worth reading the parable for what it says rather than for what we have made of it. A lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, gives the right answer himself, and then, “willing to justify himself”, asks a narrower question: “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29; this and the quotations below are from the Douay-Rheims). The story that follows does not answer it. It changes it. “Which of these three, in thy opinion, was neighbour to him that fell among the robbers?” (10:36). The lawyer wanted to know whom he was obliged to help. He is asked instead what kind of person he will be when someone needs help.
About the priest and the Levite, Luke says almost nothing. The priest “went down the same way: and seeing him, passed by” (10:31). The Levite does the same (10:32). No motive is given. Readers have always supplied one. Commentators point to the law in Leviticus 21 that kept a priest from touching the dead, except his nearest kin, and a man left “half dead” in a ditch can look like a corpse. Martin Luther King, in Memphis on 3 April 1968, the night before he was killed, ran through the guesses for his audience: perhaps they were going to a church meeting and could not be late; perhaps a religious law forbade them to touch a body before a ceremony; perhaps they were on their way to found a “Jericho Road Improvement Association”, to deal with the problem at its root. Then he gave his own reading, and it was the most generous of all: “It’s possible that those men were afraid.” The question they asked, he said, was “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” The Samaritan reversed it: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
Read that way, the parable and the experiment agree. Neither the priest nor the hurried seminarian needs to be wicked. Each needs only to be on his way somewhere.
But the experiment has a second finding, and it is usually left out of the sermon. Darley and Batson asked why the hurried students hurried, and their answer was not vanity. The experimenter had told each student that someone was waiting for him, and the student was keeping his word. He was helping one person at the expense of another. “Conflict, rather than callousness,” they wrote, “can explain their failure to stop.” That is not the scandal of a busy man ignoring the needy. It is the ordinary arithmetic of a person with obligations: the patient waiting at the clinic, the class waiting for the teacher, the child waiting at the school gate, the employer waiting for the report. Much of the hurrying on any city morning is a promise being kept to someone else.
So the tempting conclusion, that goodness is a matter of schedule and the cure is a slower life, does not survive its own evidence. The seminarians were not short of goodness. They had too many claims on it at once, and they settled the conflict in favour of the person who was expecting them.
Which sends us back to the Samaritan, and to a detail the pulpit tends to skip. He was not idle. Luke says he was “on his journey” (10:33). He had a beast, oil and wine, and money: a man travelling on business, perhaps, and as busy as anyone else on that road. What he did with his schedule is the instructive part. He bound the man’s wounds, put him on his own animal and took him to an inn. Then, the next day, he left. He did not abandon his journey. He paid two pence to the innkeeper and said, “Take care of him; and whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above, I, at my return, will repay thee” (10:35). His mercy cost him one night and some money, and it came with a plan: someone else to continue the care, and a promise to settle the bill on the way back.
That is not the goodness of a man with nothing to do. It is the goodness of a man whose plans had room for an interruption: enough margin, in time and in coins, to be a day late. The difference between him and the priest is not that one was busy and the other was not.
This Sunday the Church begins Advent, and the Gospel is a single instruction repeated: “Take ye heed, watch and pray. For ye know not when the time is” (Mark 13:33). The master has gone on a journey; the doorkeeper is told to keep awake; “what I say to you, I say to all: Watch” (13:37). In Mark the warning is about readiness for the master’s return. In Matthew’s longer version of the same discourse, the parable of the ten virgins ends “Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour” (Matthew 25:13), and the final scene shows what failing to watch looked like, and it is not sleep. Those who are condemned are astonished: “Lord, when did we see thee hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” (25:44). My reading, not the text’s: they were watching the road for a master, and the master was in the ditch.
The seminarians were thinking about a parable when they passed a man who needed one. Thinking about mercy and seeing a person are different acts of attention, and the first can crowd out the second as easily as a deadline can.
Luke never says whether the Samaritan came back. Somewhere on the road down to Jericho there is an innkeeper holding two pence and a promise, keeping watch.