Passing By

The Priest and the Levite

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Perhaps Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan resonates with us so deeply because all of us have been wounded. Who among us, after all, does not identify with the nameless man who is beaten and left by the side of the road to die? He is the ultimate everyman of scripture, a symbol within whom all of us can see ourselves.

In that sense, the story's most appealing initial interpretation is as a promise of hope and respite, healing and recovery. When we read in Luke 10:34, “and the man went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him,” we intuitively understand an implicit promise: that each of us, no matter the manner or degree of our injury, will one day find hope and healing. 

Like most parables, however, the tale of the Good Samaritan contains a multitude of meanings. At this phase of my life, the most personal, worrisome, and potentially transformational meaning involves neither the thieves, nor the injured man, nor the Samaritan, nor the innkeeper, but, instead, the priest and the levite. The words we get about these two characters are few: “and by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a levite, when he was at that place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.” I will confess that most often when I have read this story I have pictured these two characters as cardboard cutouts: officious, self-important, arrogant, and condescending. 

The text, though, does not dictate any of those characterizations. The only things we really know are that both men saw the victimized man and that neither stopped to help him. As I have contemplated further on the parable, I am taken with a different meaning for this part of the story. What if, instead of attempting to emphasize their apparent hypocrisy, Jesus instead mentions the religious occupations of the two passers-by precisely as a way of emphasizing their good intentions. What if his point is not to say: these hypocrites, in spite of their professed religiosity, had hard hearts and calloused feelings. What if, instead, he is saying: here are two men who believe themselves to be about God's business, who are, in fact, hurrying toward what they understand to be important and right, and yet, for all of this, they pass by the person in greatest need.

I suppose I am brought to this reading at least in part because I believe everyone, even characters in a parable, deserves the benefit of the doubt. 

This altered interpretation may also be a form of spiritual self-preservation. I wish I could say that I had chosen the right way every time life has presented me with my own Jericho Road: when I am asked to choose between what is expedient and what is right, or between what will actually ease suffering and what will appear most righteous, or between helping an outcast and arriving on time to be with my friends. In spite of my own best intentions, however, I recognize that on my own road between Jericho and Jerusalem, I have often passed by on the other side.

But there is a further nuance that may be even more important. What if we posit that the priest and the levite were actually hurrying off to do something genuinely important—even good? Maybe each of them had sick family members languishing and suffering at home. What if they saw the man, but did not really see the man, not because they were callous or unfeeling but because their minds were elsewhere, swallowed up in the midst of sorrow and trouble? Perhaps one powerful principle in the parable of the Good Samaritan is not that some people are callous and don't care about those who suffer, but that even our own genuine best intentions can make us blind to others’ sorrow. That is, sometimes while we are hurrying off to be about what we consider to be important and good business, we can unknowingly pass by those who need our balm and salve.

I may be especially sensitive to this interpretation of the parable because I am an oncologist. As a doctor who cares for people with cancer, I am confronted with a similar paradox. Cancer is perhaps the ultimate biological representation of good intentions gone awry. After all, cancer is an excess of success—biology seeks to grow life by replicating cells, and yet cancer is an unrestrained form of cellular growth that threatens to kill the very body that birthed it. Biological organisms can grow only because nearly every cell in your body contains the entire genetic library needed to build any cell line in any organ. The body accomplishes this feat by copying that library with staggering fidelity tens of trillions of times during a lifetime.

Yet it is precisely this process of cellular replication that also leads to cancer. Very rarely, the process of cellular replication introduces mistakes into the genome. The large majority of those mistakes are of no consequence because the resulting cells do not function, become inert, quickly die, and are discarded. Once in a while, though, one of those mutations makes the resulting cell better at replicating than its cellular progenitors or its cellular siblings. If that new cell begins replicating out of control, and if it copies itself billions and billions of times, the resulting mass is what we call cancer. 

The inescapable paradox at the heart of the job of an oncologist is that the stunningly elegant, efficient, and beautiful process that underlies the existence of life is the same process that produces ravaging cancers.

Because cancer is an effect of essential cellular processes gone awry, curing it most often harms the healthy body. Indeed, the defining characteristic of most traditional chemotherapy drugs is that they interrupt the very processes that allow cells to grow and replicate. And even our best and newest treatments still work by interfering with the body's normal functioning in a way that can be toxic and even fatal.

For example, a number of years ago, I treated a young man who had been diagnosed with colon cancer in his early thirties. He initially underwent surgery and the cancer was successfully removed. When examined under the microscope, however, cancer cells were found in the surrounding lymph nodes. We know that patients with colon cancer that has spread to the lymph nodes benefit substantially from receiving chemotherapy after their surgery. Therefore, I strongly recommended a routine chemotherapy regimen that would likely have a few annoying side effects but no significant untoward health outcomes.

What neither of us could have known was that, because of a very rare genetic difference, this patient lacked an enzyme needed to metabolize one of the prescribed chemotherapy drugs. Because of this broken enzyme, when the patient received a dose of chemotherapy, his body entirely fell apart. He spent months in the intensive care unit, grappling with complications that affected nearly every part of his body. More than a year was required—much of it in a convalescent center—to return to something like his prior baseline of health. Sadly, there is no reliable test to look for this genetic defect; if I were to see such a patient again, my recommendation would be the same. Even though this rare side effect is a recognized risk, the likely benefits of the treatment greatly outweigh the rare possibility of harm. His harrowing time in the hospital came not because anyone overlooked anything but because this is simply the way things sometimes happen. Even our best intentions—undergirded by a deep desire to help and heal and decades spent preparing to care for people with cancer—can sometimes result in great harm.

In spite of that reality, I maintain faith that our heavenly parents mean us to live in a world where broken things are mended. I resonate with the last lines from a poem that Elder Holland once quoted in conference: 

And by His kind and ready hand,
His own sweet life is woven through
Our broken lives, until they stand
A New Creation—“all things new.”

“The shattered [substance] of [the] heart,
Desire, ambition, hope, and faith,
Mould Thou into the perfect part,
O, Carpenter of Nazareth!

At the same time, I have also seen enough as an oncologist to know that the very process that begets life also yields cancer. The drugs we use to restore hope and bring healing can also ravage every organ, threatening lives even as the doctors who prescribe them want very much to mend what is broken. So it is in life. By both disposition and decision, I encounter the world buoyed by the belief that almost everyone has good intentions, and that almost everyone is doing their best. To my mind, the most powerful and potentially transformational message of the parable of the Good Samaritan is not that some of us are Samaritans and some of us are priests and levites, but that they each dwell simultaneously within each of our hearts.

If cancer can offer us a moral “lesson,” perhaps it is this: the space between thriving biology and deadly growth without bounds is often shadowy, just as the space between attending to the injured stranger and passing him by may be but the width of a thought or the flicker of a feeling. The otherwise meaningless incorrect substitution of a single base in the replication of DNA forever alters the destiny of a cell, its progeny, and the life that gave rise to it; the choice to attend to the imploring beggar may come to constitute the most meaningful of spiritual acts.

My belief is that when we choose to follow Christ, that first means a foundational choice to try to do good. But even once that choice is made—and most especially because of the zeal that often attends the desire to do what is right—we must be forever on our guard that we do not neglect those who are suffering while pursuing what matters. As I begin this column, the invitation I extend to all of us, most principally to myself, is to recognize that all of us are travelers, that all of us, probably every day, pass injured strangers, and that the most fateful decisions that will determine the course of our individual lives and the shape of the societies we build together will be the ones that we make On The Road to Jericho.

Tyler Johnson is a Wayfare Senior Editor and Stanford medical oncologist. He podcasts at The Doctors Art.

Artwork by John August Swanson.

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