Sunday, March 19, 2006

The Good Samaritan

Today, Nettes and I were teaching Sunday School. We were looking at the story of the Good Samaritan. Rather than taking the angle about helping people, we focussed on prejudice. An important point of the story is that a Samaritan helped a Jew when Jews were prejudiced against Samaritans. Jesus was showing that loving your ‘neighbour’ doesn’t mean just loving those whom you are close to. It also means loving those who are different from you. So rather than judging someone because they belong to a different group, we should help them.

This may involve changing our attitudes towards that group of people. It starts with changing how we think, but it also means changing what we say and what we do, despite how we feel – a good lesson in itself. Last night, we had been looking at this video about how one teacher taught her class about prejudice. But in our class we simply role played how we can act differently to people. Finally, we draw pictures of different sorts of people – different races, people from different countries, old people, young people, disabled people – on a piece of paper with the verse ‘love your neighbour’ on it as a way of celebrating diversity.

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