Monday 21 February 2011

A Good Samaritan - or just a decent bloke?

2,000 years after Jesus first coined the expressions, we still speak of turning the other cheek and going the extra mile. So, does this mean that we taken onboard this teaching of Jesus?

I don’t think that it does, because the problem with these expressions having become proverbial is that they have also been watered down.

David Beckham was in the local news the other day because he was said to have been a Good Samaritan. This is how motorist Paul Long described his ordeal in the Daily Mail. ‘I was on my way to [take the children to] … school when the car packed up in the middle of a very busy roundabout in Hertfordshire, not far from the A10. I had two kids in the back. Some people were getting a bit angry. But no-one stopped [to help] for ten minutes. Then this car pulled over in lay-by and I saw this figure wearing a hoodie step out. As he came nearer, it became clear it was David Beckham. I was so shocked I just said: "You’re David Beckham." He nodded and then I said: "Can you give us a push over to the side? So he did." Afterwards, an indebted Mr Long said: ‘Thanks David – I love you.’ Mr Long also explained that he had telephoned his wife to ask her to come and help them. However, she only arrived after Beckham had left.

There are so many things that one could say about that story: I like the bit where he says, ‘you’re David Beckham’ as if Beckham is a confused old person in a nursing home, whose forgotten his own name. Then there’s that ‘Thanks David – I love you.’ And finally when the man’s wife turns up after Beckham has gone – he would be counting his good fortune that his wife hadn’t got to him first, bearing in mind that his man-crush on Becks would otherwise have been unfulfilled, but on the other hand, Mrs. Long would have been cursing her luck that she had missed him.

There is one bit of the story that first with the parable of the Good Samaritan, but most of it doesn’t. The bit that does is that when Mr Long saw a man in a hoodie coming towards him, he might have been expecting a car jacking, in the way that the Jew in the parable might have expected the Samaritan to pick up where the robbers had left off. We tend to forget that this story was intended to answer the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Mr Long’s neighbour was a man in a hoodie, but he found out that hoodies are people too.

The rest of the story rather undermines the point of the parable and diminishes the idea of what a Good Samaritan is. Now, the A10 is a busy road, but the dangers inherent in using it are not quite like travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man in the parable was mugged and left for dead, Mr Long was stuck – sorry, according to the Daily Mail that should be stricken – in a car that wouldn’t start for 10 minutes. David Beckham stopped to help – and I’m not mocking him for that, as others had passed by on the other side – and then pushed his car off the road. Had Becks towed Mr Long to a garage and paid to have the car repaired, then taken the kids to school and called back to collect them in the evening, there might have been a greater sense of a legitimate comparison. I’m really not criticising David Beckham, as I believe that there is much to admire in the man, but to call him a Good Samaritan, that’s a bit much.

Thursday 10 February 2011

The Way

I recently attended a preview showing of a film that comes out in a few months time. The film is called The Way and it stars Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez, who was also the director. Martin Sheen plays Tom Avery, a Californian ophthalmologist, whose son, Daniel, from whom he has become estranged, has gone off to travel the world. Tom receives a ‘phone call, while playing golf with some buddies and the caller, speaking in broken English, tells him his son has been killed in an accident in the French Pyrenees. Tom decides to go to France to collect his son’s body. After a spending the night in France, Tom changes his plan to have his son cremated. Having found that Daniel had died just as he was starting out on the Camino de Santiago, the 900km pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Tom decided that he would walk where his son had planned to walk and take his ashes with him. The rest of the film tells the story of this journey and of some of the people he meets along the way.


Martin Sheen is a committed Roman Catholic who raised his son in the faith, but the film is far from being just an advert for the Catholic Church. The Way is an unusual film in that it takes religious practice seriously. While it is not uncritical, it shows that the practice of religion can still have a place in the developed world in the 21st century.


Those of us who have been raised as Non-Conformist Christians do not have activities like pilgrimage as part of our tradition. However, there are some practices with which we are familiar. Regular prayer and Bible study times – probably daily and either in the morning or at night – have been part of the practice of Baptist Christians for much of our history, but we tend to shy away from the word religion, preferring the word ‘faith’. Religion seems to imply doing and saying things by rote, rather than out of a desire to worship. The derivation of the word ‘religion’ is disputed, but one suggestion is that it has to do with being bound to God. John Fawcett’s hymn, Blest be the tie that binds, is referring to the bonds of fellowship, but often we also need help in keeping up our relationship with God and at such times religious practice can help. A 900km pilgrimage might be beyond us, but surely a pattern of regular readings and prayers are not.