Everyone knows the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus is being tested by a lawyer, who first asks, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus responds with a question and draws from him the answer that he must love God and "your neighbor as yourself." The lawyer persists: "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus then relates the story of the Good Samaritan: 

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half -dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to innkeeper, and said, "Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend." (Luke 10:25-37, NRSV) 

The passage concludes with another question: "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy.', Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

The Good Samaritan story can be taken at face value, and usually is; it is an "example" story. However, the respected if occasionally controversial New Testament scholar Robert W. Funk recently analyzed that passage in terms of metaphor rather than example. The reader (or hearer, to remember the context) could infer that the story provides an example of what it means to be a good neighbor. Considered as a parable, however, Funk argues that the point might be different.

First, Jesus is telling the story to people who know personally what things are like on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. His listeners can readily identify with what happened to the man. There are also people in the group who socially identify themselves with the priest and the Levite, and who feel uncomfortable because of the way those two avoid the unpleasantness. Funk assumes also that some of the other listeners were anticlerical, and found the priestly evasion of duty amusing. 

But neither group in the audience would have been prepared for what Jesus said next: that the Samaritan had compassion. The Samaritan was the mortal enemy of the Jew, and Jesus was a Jew speaking to an audience of Jews. The hero of the story is the Samaritan. The Samaritan was touched by grace and did the right thing while the Jews in the story did not. Harder for us to understand, perhaps but not for Jesus's audience, was the depth of animosity between Jews and Samaritans. "A Jew who was excessively proud of his blood line and a chauvinist about his tradition would not permit a Samaritan to touch him, much less minister to him." (Stories of such deep-seated ethnic animosity are common: in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake last December in Armenia, for example, some Azerbaijanis sent telegrams of congratulations to the Armenians; some Armenians, on the other hand, said they would refuse assistance of whatever kind offered by Azerbaijanis.) 

Funk argues that to understand the story of the Good Samaritan it is necessary to be drawn into the story in such a way that "one becomes the victim in the ditch who is helped by an enemy. The religious point to the story, then as Robert Funk reads it, is not simply an answer to the question "Who is my neighbor?" or even the mandate to "Go and do likewise," but that "Mercy always comes form the quarter from which one does not and cannot expect it." 

The listener to the parable of the Good Samaritan is invited into the story to explore the roles according to his own imaginative preferences; "the story is perpetually unfinished." I want to explore it that way, as a revealing source of contemporary philanthropic values, practices, and problems. My goal is to find some of the values that would mark "true" and "false" philanthropy as a guide to our own behavior. True philanthropy would be a form of behavior that we would admire and want to emulate -- a virtue. As John Dewey wrote in the early 1900s, a virtue is based on whole-heartedness, persistence, and sincerity. The absence of those qualities might also help us to know what false philanthropy might mean. Probing deep into the story of the Good Samaritan, or developing themes that lead out from it, may help us to find a firmer and subtler understanding of values and practices that we may take for granted.

Both as individuals and as organizations we have lost touch with the core values of true philanthropy. We have replaced those values with assumptions about human nature and society that leave no place for true philanthropy at all: the view of rationality that eliminates the spiritual and the transcendent; the view of psychology that reduces all human behavior to calculations of narrow self -interest; the view of economics and business that reduces all values to a "bottom line." Each of these assumptions has become so pervasive and so much a part of our way of looking at reality that phenomena such as the Good Samaritan are aberrations and make no "sense" at all.

The problem of reductionism is that we take a useful insight such as the notion of the bottom line and carry it too far, apply it too widely, interpret too much from it. Perhaps I will do that with the idea of the Good Samaritan; if so, I will have falsified what I believe to be true philanthropy. It is important to study philanthropy and to think about its practice critically if we are to be able to distinguish between he true and the false of it.