Polarised

Since 2003, the American dictionary publishing company, Merriam-Webster, chooses a ‘Word of the Year’ which reflects key events or global preoccupations and is being widely used in the media. In 2020, you might be able to guess, it was pandemic; 2021 – vaccination; 2022 – gaslighting; 2023 – authentic, perhaps as people increasingly began to mistrust what they were seeing or hearing.

2024’s Word of the Year was ‘polarization’, defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

Recently, in church, we read the Good Samaritan, one of Jesus’ most famous parables, which has been told and retold thousands of times through the centuries. It struck me how sad it is that its theme is still so pertinent.

Jesus himself was speaking to a polarised society, suppressed under Roman rule but also fiercely divided between Samaritans and Jews, each deeply resenting the others and unable to see anything they hold in common.

Many of Jesus’ listeners will have been scandalised by his parable, as a response to that key question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ His Jewish listeners would find it hard to imagine that a Samaritan would stop to help a Jew on the side of the road, but Jesus invites his listeners to realize that a bitter enemy had the capacity to be merciful and generous, while some of their own people showed callous disregard. Jesus specifically says the Samaritan was ‘moved with pity’ at the sight of the wounded man; he is able to look beyond the man as ‘enemy’, a nameless representative of a group who hated his own people. He sees another human being and treats him as ‘he would want to have been treated’. That sounds so glib, but it is radical and revolutionary – to step beyond the wider history, personal experiences and deep prejudices of our own group and truly see another human being as our neighbour; and even, to realise that we might learn something from our enemies about kindness and generosity.

This may be an old, old tale we have heard many times before but it’s profoundly and urgently relevant. In our polarised world, to step across a divide takes courage, self-awareness, and above all compassion – the willingness to ease the sufferings of those with whom we have nothing in common except, of course, our humanity!

Revd Kate McFarlane