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| Rembrandt's The Good Samaritan |
In preparing to preach on the Good Samaritan I came across a strange piece of information. The word used for 'compassion' in the New Testament has its roots in the 'wet bits' pulled out of the corpse of a victim of human sacrifice. So, if your heart was plucked out during a sacrifice in ancient Greece it would no longer be referred to as a heart but splanga-something-or-other, and it is this word that the Jewish tradition used to refer to compassion. (You can read its history in Kittel's TDNT) That's strange.
But to turn to the parable itself. It has struck me for a while now the clever way that Jesus pushes beyond compassion in this parable and undercuts the kind of moral superiority that leads to rivalry, conflict and 'sacrifice'.
