C: 13th Sun of OrdTime (30 June 2019) - OUTGROUP BIASES (Lk 9:51-62)

Our gospel today exposes the blatant prejudice of Jesus’ disciples on the Samaritan people. They, with Zebedee’s sons as spokespersons, asked Jesus’ permission to allow them to send fire from heaven to the Samaritan villagers as a retaliation on the latter’s rudeness for having refused them passage as they travel to Jerusalem (Lk 9:53-54). This behavior of the Samaritans validates what is described in Jn 4:9b that the Jews and the Samaritans do not socially relate with each other well. Additionally, the Jewish leaders, in their systematic attempt of discrediting Jesus, accused him of being a Samaritan and at the same time possessed by the devil (Jn 8:48). This act of equating Samaritans with demon-possession clearly manifested the Jews’ low regard on this ethnic group.

The Jews actually based their bias on what transpired several centuries ago. In 2 Kings 17, the Samaritans were identified as a mixed race of Israelites and pagan emigrants that inhabited the region of Samaria right after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE. Having originated from a heathen culture, they were regarded by those of the Southern Kingdom as a people who had polluted Yahwism with their occult practices and dissolute way of living. This perception had continued to be at the back of the Jews’ minds at the time of Jesus in the first century CE, stereotyping even concurrent Samaritans as a people of irreligion and immorality. In effect, the Jewish disciples of Jesus displayed a certain kind of animosity on them, treating them as social outsiders and even as their ethno-ethnic rivals.

Sometime in the 70’s, Henri Tajfel, working with his protégé John Turner, developed the Social Identity Approaches, arguing that outgroup biases are innate in any ingroup. They reasoned accordingly as a result of their several psychological experiments that arrived into a conclusion that the mere classification of an individual into an ingroup makes him/her bear a hostile attitude toward his/her outgroups. Along these similar lines, we can understand why the Jewish disciples of Jesus were prejudiced against the Samaritans, and vice-versa, because both belong to separate ingroups. In asserting their individual group identities, they would need to put into bad light their outgroups in order that they may further underline their own group superiority and greatness.

Ethnocentricity is clearly deplored by Jesus himself. He actually rebuked his disciples for thinking badly of the Samaritans (Lk 9:55). Additionally, he led them away from a potential hostile confrontation between the two ethnic groups by leading his company through a different separate road (v. 56). Here, Jesus taught his disciples not only sobriety but more importantly peace-building beginning with the respect of human dignity and group differences. This attitude of Jesus is in fact corroborated by several Gospel stories. In John, he agreed to stay in the village of the Samaritans for two days (Jn 4:40). In Luke, Jesus spoke positively of the Good Samaritan (10:30-37) and the Samaritan leper (17:11-19) as quintessential models of true witnessing of charity and faith. What Jesus was actually doing in these verses is transcending innate biases and negative stereotypes against outgroups. Even if he has been identified as a Jew by the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:9), Jesus did not look down on the Samaritan people nor dissociate from his own Jewish provenance (cf. Jn 4:22). Concretely, what he did is to bracket any human constructed categories and sentiments, while extending the call of discipleship to everyone.

Nowadays, we are normally swayed into the divisive mentality of tribalism. We view that subgroups would need to compete with one another. Instead of patronizing further splitting that only perpetuates marginalization and social disparity, we should resolve to propagate unity and healthy interrelationship among various groups, since we are all children of one God. Groupings may be necessary at some point, but let our primary mission be is to create that one grouping of God’s kingdom here on earth, being all neighbors to one another. We then have to live what the Second Reading informs us: “the whole of the Law is summarized in a single command: Love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal 5:14).

- Rex Fortes, CM