The Good Samaritan

For my New Testament class, we were asked to follow the example of the Good Samaritan for two weeks and then write an essay on how it affected us and how it changed our reading of the story.
Here's my essay:

I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't know the story of the Good Samaritan. As a kid, I watched movies about it, heard it as a bedtime story, read it in simplified scriptures, and eventually read it in the actual text of the Bible. I've always tried to incorporate it into my life. In fact, my life motto is a quote from President Monson which states, “Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.” I thought I was pretty good at that motto. When I received the assignment to emulate the Good Samaritan for two weeks, I didn't worry that I wouldn't be able to help others when the situation arose, but I did struggle with how I would make those two weeks different than any other two weeks, and how I would be able to take off the thick lenses through which I've read the parable in the past, allowing myself to read the text in a new light. The difficulty with this injunction to “go and do likewise” lay in the fact that the assignment wasn't just to be more like the Samaritan than the Levite or the priest, but to make a change in my life to be more like the Samaritan than I had before and to change my perception of a story I've heard and read many times. Despite my disbelief in this assignment's power to change my outlook and my actions, both were transformed by it. However, it was the week of pondering that followed the two weeks and writing this paper that did most of the teaching, not the two weeks in themselves. As I write and erase, argue with myself and make resolution, ponder and allow myself to be taken away from my musings when I am needed by others, I am learning more than I learned during the whole two weeks of experiment what it means to be like the Good Samaritan. Through this experience, I've learned that being the Good Samaritan isn't about service; it's about love, of which service is a demonstration. Because of this subtle change in thought thinking about this parable, I was able to change my actions more than I thought possible from just a mere school assignment.
“Go and do thou likewise” were the words that marked the beginning of my two week assignment. I left the classroom door determined to help every old widow cross the street and stop at every distressed car on the side of the road. There were two obvious problems with this plan—one: I didn't see any old widows wanting to cross the street, and two: not having a car makes it very difficult to find troubled cars. After a few days of looking for opportunities, I began to be disheartened. Nobody seemed to need my help. I didn't feel like I was completing my assignment, and I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I was praying for chances to help people, I was reading my scriptures, and I was doing everything I thought I should be doing, so I just waited around for some situation to come up where I would feel like the Samaritan in the story, but nothing happened. I did a few little things for people, and asked people if they needed help in places where I normally wouldn't, but I didn't feel like the Good Samaritan. I could see Good Samaritans all around me, but I didn't feel like one myself. Sometimes I'd be too slow, so people would get to the Jew who “fell among the thieves” before I could, and other times, I was the Jew, encountering the Good Samaritan as he helped me through my own trials. That was a learning experience about gratitude and seeing the good in others. I was happy that I was starting to have something that I might be able to write a paper on, but I still hadn't followed the command to be like the Good Samaritan. The two weeks ended without gaining much to show for it. I felt useless. I was a failure.
Ironically, as soon as the two weeks were up, I began to see situations where I could be a Good Samaritan all over the place. I was surprised to learn that they were right under my nose, and not by the side of the road where I'd been looking for them. It was not strangers and enemies who needed my help, but my roommates, the co-leader for my FHE family, and others very close to me. God makes us stewards over certain people—friends, roommates, visiting teachees—to teach us what it means to love a neighbor. We mustn't be too busy looking for distant service opportunities that we forget to look more immediately. When chances for service came to me, I took them, whether I was completely free or finally very close to falling asleep after trying to unsuccessfully for over an hour, and it wasn't because of an assignment, though that made the choice a little easier, that I helped them, but because I truly loved the people I served.
When I prepared to write my paper, I reread the story carefully, trying to look at it as if it were brand new. I started by looking at the question, “who is my neighbor?” and then tried to figure out Jesus' answer from the text, not just recall what I had been taught and what I had assumed. I was surprised to realize that while the words were the same, the answer wasn't what I was expecting. Jesus doesn't answer the question! He doesn't even have the lawyer answer his own question as I had always taken for granted. As I read this story from another angle, I realized that the question that Jesus answered was not “Who is my neighbor?” but a more important question: “Who was a neighbor”. I saw the story in a whole new light, which I was not expecting. I'd read it enough times that I thought I had learned all it had to offer, but I was wrong. What does this subtle difference mean to us? It means that the injunction by the Savior of “Go and do thou likewise” no longer reads to me as “serve your neighbor, which, by the story, is clearly everyone, even enemies”, and now reads as, “make everyone your neighbor, which, by the story, means loving them, showing that love through service.” This parable isn't about finding ways to make yourself busier—patrolling I-15 until you find someone with a flat tire who you could help, therefore checking off your assignment. It's about developing charity within yourself to the point that you want the best for even your enemies, to the point that even those who should be your enemies, according to others' standards, become your neighbors. The two greatest commandments, on which hang all the law and the prophets are not “do good things for God and for your neighbor”, but “love God and love your neighbor”. It was when I realized this truth that I learned what I was doing wrong in my assignment. I shouldn't have prayed for experiences to happen where people would need my help; that's like praying for bad things to happen to other people, which doesn't sound like a prayer that will quickly be answered. What I should have prayed for is a change in my heart to love those around me more deeply and to make those around me into true neighbors.
Our life's journey is often as perilous as the treacherous Wadi Qelt which runs from Jericho to Jerusalem. We all play different roles at different times in our lives. Sometimes we act the part of the Samaritan, sometimes the Jew that “fell among the thieves”, and at our worst moments, as little as we want to admit it, we play the Priests, the Levites, and even the robbers. In the few weeks since I started this assignment, I've played, to some extent, each role. What I've learned from all of these roles and about writing about the experience afterward, is that the defining characteristic that sorts the Levites from the Samaritans or robbers is not necessarily individual actions, but charity—what's in their hearts. The Levite and the priest were likely going to or coming from service in the temple, yet they were not held up as good examples. Unlike the Priest and the Levite, the Samaritan wasn't looking for something nice to do to check off an assignment. The text says that when he saw the Jew, “he had compassion on him”. The character with compassion is the one we are told to emulate. I had been reading this story like the Law of Moses, a command to perform an outward action, when it is truly an example of Jesus teaching the higher, more internal law.