Julia Kristeva describes birth as a bearing of the other. In the arrival of the child, birth could be imagined to be the end (both as purpose and conclusion) of the maternal pain of labour. But, drawing on Simeon’s words to the Lukan Mary, Kristeva represents the birth of the other not as the end but as a promise of maternal pain (1986: 167; Luke 2:35). Moreover, in this bearing of the other, the birth-giving woman is transformed; she, too, is born as other (see Atwood 1982 and Spivak 1993: 151).

At the intersections of feminisms and ethics, there is no single discourse of the other. Recognition of women’s differences on the basis of, for example, race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality indicates the necessity to account for the multiple othernesses of women. This multiplicity unsettles an easy construction of woman as the other of man. In another way, attention to the materiality of women’s bodies and their embodied relationships to others, for example children and lovers, also disturbs the construction of woman as "the man-consolidating other" (Spivak 1993: 148). French feminist Luce Irigaray (1993b), describing the "fecundity of the caress", makes a critical feminist intervention in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who has become the philosopher of the other. Where for Levinas the claim of the other comes to me by way of the sight of a face or the call of a voice, Irigaray portrays the other as lover (and the lover as other) who claims me and is claimed by me through the touch of the body. For Irigaray touch is the first sense, "a mediation that is continually forgotten" (1993a: 59), a mediation which recalls "being-in-the-mother as the impossible threshold of ethics" (Spivak 1993: 168). Levinas’ emphasis on the claim of the other appeals to a "forgotten sociality" that is beyond being (Hart 1999: 57). I am always marked by my prior responsibility for the other. But the embodied interconnectedness of "being-in-the-mother" describes another "forgotten sociality" that gives space to any claim of the other. Moreover, as Kevin Hart indicates, there is a further "forgotten sociality" that is the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human nature - the interrelationship of all Earth beings (1999: 60-61).

From an ecological perspective, the otherness of Earth is uncanny. Environmental ethical claims draw our attention to Earth as other. But this other is in practice a plurality of others of which we as humans are already part. The claim of this other is thus already a responsibility to experience ourselves otherwise, to bear ourselves as other. In addressing the Gospel of Luke from a combined ecological and feminist perspective, I am interested in multiple intersecting modes of relationship to the other. This draws me to revisit a familiar text - one with which Levinas is in conversation - namely the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) - to consider once more from an ecological feminist perspective an ethics of relationship to the other.

Both Levinas and Irigaray draw on the senses to describe relationship to the other as mediated by sight, hearing or touch. From an ecological perspective, the senses function as mediators between human and other-than-human Earth beings. The act of smelling a rose, for example, is an embodied experience through which I am connected, or reminded of my connection, with that flower and more generally with the species of roses and the other-than-human which these roses represent for me. Not only do my senses express my embodiedness but they both remind me of and affect my interrelationships with Earth others.

Drawing on the ethical sensibilities of both Levinas and Irigaray as well as an ecological attentiveness to the material, one strategy for an ecological feminist reading is to attend to the sensual within the text. What is seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelt? In their textual contexts what do these sensory mediations signify? With respect to an androcentric text such as the parable of the good Samaritan, this attentiveness needs to be subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion which asks: what does the absence of women from the text signify? What might the forgotten presences of the other-than-human imply? The application of an ecological feminist hermeneutic to a text in which women and Earth are effectively absent poses difficulties. One might wonder: why bother? But as Dorothy Lee has argued, there is value in engaging with theologies (and I would add ethics) which are not specifically feminist (or ecological) in themselves but which, read in conversation with feminisms (and ecophilosophies or ecotheologies), are mutually informing (1997: 126). The claim of this paper is that such an ecological feminist reading of the parable of the good Samaritan contributes to a description of compassion in relation to Earth others.

At three moments in the Gospel of Luke, the verb splangchnizomai describes a movement of compassion in response to a seeing of an other (7:13-15; 10:33-35; 15:20-24). In both Hebrew and Greek, there is an etymological link between the maternal and the sharing of pain which is compassion. In Hebrew the root rhm refers both to ‘compassion’ and ‘womb’ (Brown, Driver, Briggs 1951: 993). 1 In Greek the stem of the verb splangchnizomai to ‘have compassion’ or ‘feel sympathy for’ is related to the noun splangchnon, meaning ‘inward parts’ or ‘entrails’ sometimes also ‘womb’, and referring figuratively to the seat of the emotions (Bauer 1979: 762-3). In a reading of the parable of the good Samaritan, this compassion emerges as passionate. But in each case in the Gospel of Luke, the compassionate subject is male. Nevertheless, this compassion not only echoes a maternal relationship suggested by the etymology of rhm and splangchnizomai but it also describes an eros for the other which might have material effects in our relationships to Earth others.

In the setting for the parable of the good Samaritan, a lawyer stands up to test Jesus (10:25). With respect to the Lukan divine necessity, which describes the inevitable and sometimes hegemonic unfolding of the divine purpose in the narrative of Luke-Acts, lawyers and Pharisees are constructed as other (7:30).² When the lawyer stands, the "other" breaks the intimacy of Jesus’ private moment with the disciples (10:23-24). His standing up before Jesus as well as the address "Teacher", however, suggest an attitude of respect for but challenge to Jesus’ teaching authority in relation to his own as lawyer (see Green 1997: 427-8). He asks literally: "doing what shall I inherit eternal life?" (10:25).

In the current context, the lawyer’s concern with eternal life is in harmony with a displacement of human relationship to earth in favour of a desire for heaven. In Luke 10 the emphasis on earth place, signified by dust and cities and land (10:10-14), and the nearness, both in time and space, of the basileia (10:9, 11), turns to a focus on heaven (10:17-20). This change of emphasis coincides with an appeal to divine fatherhood (10:21). While the narrative subordinates connection with an earth place to desire for a place in heaven, it also binds these two places as jointly under the dominion of a Father g-d (10:21). The maternal/feminine is elided, in a focus on a relationship between Father and Son (10:22), indebted to the sense of sight. The Father/Son relationship is not exclusive, but includes in its ambit of revelation, those whom the Son chooses (10:22). The disciples, to whom Jesus turns, become emblems of these chosen ones. What they have seen and heard is evidence of their election (10:23-24). In Luke seeing and hearing are senses of reception. Seeing is associated with receiving revealed knowledge or illumination (11:34). Seeing is also associated with desire (2:25-26). But for Simeon, the fulfilment of such desire is the harbinger of maternal pain (2:35).

In Luke hearing is partnered by doing the word of g-d, the mark of true kinship with Jesus (8:20). But in the story of Martha and Mary, which immediately follows the parable of the good Samaritan (10:25-37), there is a split between doing, represented by Martha’s service, diakonia (10:40), and hearing, represented by Mary’s sitting at the feet of Jesus (10:39) (see Reid 1996: 147-8).³ Martha’s hospitality which might have been a proper response to the divine visitation in Jesus, is subordinated to Mary’s hearing (but perhaps not doing?) the word. The two modes of receptivity are subordinated to the implicit "only-one-ness" of Mary’s having chosen the better part (10:42).

Considering the myth of monotheism as a dominant thread in the Hebrew Bible, Regina Schwartz (1997) describes the effects of such an "only-one-ness" as part of "the violent legacy of monotheism". The practices of Western colonisation of lands, indigenous peoples, and women, are indebted to a principle of scarcity. The hegemony of the monotheistic myth which requires only one people, only one land, only one g-d relies on a logic of "choice between". This, prototypically, is the "curse of Cain": only one sacrifice is acceptable. For Martha and Mary only one response is acceptable.⁴ More generally in Luke 10 some are chosen by Jesus to enter into the patriarchal relationship of seeing which he in the role of Son enjoys with the Father, others are not so chosen (10:22); some women are affirmed for their manner of receptivity to the divine visitation, others are not (10:42).

But when the lawyer approaches with a desire to inherit eternal life, the logic of "only-one-ness" is not extended to what he must do in order that his desire be fulfilled. The dual command, which for Luke is one command, pre-empts a choice between g-d and neighbour (10:27; cf. Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31). Love of the one is love of the other (Green 1997: 428). Here "to love" is rendered by the Greek agapao and the reference to heart, soul, and mind (10:27) sums up "the totality of personal life" (Fitzmyer 1985: 880). In the lawyer’s juxtapositioning of Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18, the Lukan narrative again brings together hearing (exemplified in Deut. 6:4-5) and doing (operative in Lev. 19; see Green 1997: 428). Given, however, the logic of "choice between", which infects the surrounding narrative, the lawyer’s question, "But who is my neighbour?" (10:29), is hardly surprising. The question, which is, according to the narrator, motivated by the lawyer’s desire to justify himself, signifies a want of assurance or perhaps rather, as Kenneth Bailey (1983) suggests, a desire to be reassured, that his familiarity with the law is sufficient to ensure his inheritance of eternal life. The persistence of the lawyer - characterised in Luke as other - invites a response which will inevitably challenge even the Lukan distinctions between same and other. Moreover, the command of love that challenges an "only-one-ness" which might imply a choice between g-d and neighbour is interpreted within the parable of the good Samaritan in such a way as to unsettle distinctions between eros and agape.

When the lawyer asks, "who is my neighbour?" (10:29), the Lukan Jesus relates a parable. Where the lawyer desires assurance, Luke’s Jesus takes his listener onto a dangerous road, a specific earth place which leads from Jerusalem to Jericho, a road "well suited for brigands" (Marshall 1978: 447). As Jane Schaberg (1992) points out, women readers, particularly ancient women readers, would find it hard to place themselves alone here, as each of the four main characters in the parable appears to have done. In a sense this situates the parable as other with respect to the socio-cultural space of many women. Many, if not most, contemporary Western women might, however, recognise the apprehension of walking - if not actually then imaginatively - a dangerous road alone, especially if it is also night. From the moment of Jesus’ turning toward Jerusalem (9:51) to his arrival there (19:45), the metaphor of the journey permeates this section of the Lukan narrative. The journey toward Jerusalem is haunted by death, the death of Jesus and the death of the city. But this journey which culminates not only in death but in resurrection and ascension is also a journey toward g-d; a journey which mimics a journey from earth to heaven; a journey in which hospitality toward or refusal of the visitation of g-d affect place with blessing or curse respectively (10:5-16).

Within the parable, however, the journey is away from Jerusalem toward Jericho. A person, anthropos, making this journey, is set upon by robbers, stripped, beaten and left half-dead (10:30). The nationality of the person is not stated. Two characters, representative of the religious ruling class, and like the lawyer representative of the inscribed other in Luke, a priest and a Levite happen upon the place where the person lies half-dead (10:31-32). Commentators differ on whether or not either were strictly bound in the situation by considerations of maintaining cultic purity (see, for example, Fitzmyer 1985: 887, Green 1997: 430 and Marshall 1978: 448-9). Whatever the case, the text emphasises that each sees. The implication is that in seeing each knows what might be required. But seeing prompts each to create a distance between himself and the wounded person whose proximity has called them into question. Levinas (1996) has described this effect of seeing as an encounter in which ‘the I’ sees the face of the other and receives a call, a vocation to the other in which the I is put into question. In the parable, seeing also effects a judgement; that is, "their seeing the man renders them culpable" (Culpepper 1994: 435).⁵

The description of their seeing and then physically eschewing the half-dead body, is a foil against which to set the action of the Samaritan. It was common, Bailey (1983) explains, for such exemplary stories to have a threefold structure describing the action or reaction of first a priest, then a Levite, then an ordinary Jew. But instead of the Jew, here is a Samaritan. Samaritans and Jews were in the time of Jesus long standing enemies (see Marshall 1978: 449, Jeremias 1972: 204, Fitzmyer 1985: 883, Nickelsburg and Stone 1983: 13-19, and Ford 1984: 79-83). In dispute over many things, they held in common the sacredness of the Pentateuch and both were bound by the law recited by the lawyer (10:27; Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18). While within some first-century Judaisms, Gentiles, that is non-Jews, were properly the other, Samaritans occupied a special place of repudiation as other, precisely because of their nearness. But this otherness exists within the logic of the parable and is not necessarily an otherness with respect to the divine purpose as represented in the Lukan narrative. Prior to this the only mention of Samaritans in the Gospel of Luke has been in the context of a Samaritan village refusing to receive Jesus (9:52). Later, of ten lepers cured by Jesus, the only one who returns thanks to Jesus is a Samaritan (17:16). In this second instance, as here, a Samaritan’s behaviour shows him to be anything but other with respect to the divine purpose.⁶

In contrast to the Levite, the Samaritan comes upon not the place but the person (10:33). His seeing prompts a different response. He is moved with compassion (esplangchnisthe; 10:33). As noted earlier, the root of the verb, splangchn-, is related to the body, the inner organs of heart and guts (Bauer 1979: 762-3). The same word is used of Jesus’ response to the widow whose only son has died (7:13) and of the father when he discerns his returning son (15:20) in the parable of the prodigal son. In all three cases, a sequence - of seeing, followed by compassion, followed by movement toward, followed by touch of the other (risking uncleanness), followed by action directed toward the restoration to life of the other - describes a pattern of compassionate responsiveness (see Table 1). This compassion - exemplified in the male subject be that Jesus, the Samaritan or the (prodigal) father - is also the instrument or channel of the divine visitation (see 1:78).

For the Samaritan, his movement of the hearts/guts prompts his careful attention to the physical needs of the other. As he pours oil, applies bandages and lifts the person onto his pack animal, he touches the other (10:34). In addition he commits himself financially and over time to the work of care for this other (10:35). Bailey comments that the threefold action of the Samaritan - rendering first aid; transporting to the inn and hence providing safety; paying for care and so providing with means for survival - redresses the violences and neglect in the first half of the story, in reverse order - the Levite’s failure to render assistance; the (riding) priest’s failure to transport the person to safety; the robbers’ rendering the person destitute and half-dead (1983: II, 41).

The question, "who is my neighbour?" (10:29) which has prompted the parable assumes a biblical understanding common to both Jews and Samaritans that the neighbour or near one is someone of one’s own kin or people (see, for example, Karris 1990: 702; Fitzmyer 1985: 880-1). The relationship with the neighbour is a relationship of mutuality. The compassion of the Samaritan for the other, a compassion which is situated in the body and which is directed toward the materiality of the other, interrupts the pattern of bypassing and hence distancing set up by the priest and the Levite. A pattern of objectification signified by a violence toward the other is replaced by a pattern of compassionate responsiveness prompted by the sight and mediated by the touch of the other. This pattern will suggest also an eros for the other that might provide a pattern for "loving nature".

Considering the ethical motivation for "loving nature", Susan Bratton expresses both surprise and caution regarding what she reads as a tendency among theologians to emphasise the value of eros when considering "the implications of Christian love for environmental ethics" (1992: 4). Given the inclusion of a desire to possess in her description of eros, Bratton’s concern is understandable (1992: 4). The desire to possess constructs the desired as object, as other to be brought into the ambit of the same. Therefore Bratton argues for an eros transformed and dominated by agape (1992: 25). In contrast, when Elizabeth Johnson (1993) writes of our need to fall in love with nature, she implicitly invokes a kind of eros, the intent of which is, I think, precisely the opposite of possession. The "falling-in-loveness" of eros involves an embodied orientation, which is also an orientation of spirit, toward the other.

Sally Purvis (1991) brings her experience of and reflection on the maternal to a reconsideration of agape as evoked by the behaviour of the Samaritan. She writes that "mother-love can provide an excellent model for the content of agape" (Purvis 1991: 32).⁷ The relationship between mother and child is, she argues, a particularly intense example of relationship between self and other. For Purvis agape is distinguished by a "caring intensity" rather than a "universal indifference". In Kristeva’s (1986) poetic meditations on the maternal, this "caring intensity" bears something of the eros of the "fecundity of the caress" of which Irigaray (1993) writes.

When Purvis (1991) considers the actions of the Samaritan, she suggests that these surpass what would be expected even in regard to one’s neighbour. They surprise "not by unfulfillment but by overfulfillment" (Purvis 1991: 30). Although the command cited by the lawyer refers to love as agape, Purvis makes the point: "The Samaritan was not behaving like a neighbor in incurring unlimited liability for the expenses and needs of the wounded person; he was behaving like a lover" (1991: 30). Perhaps when it comes to compassionate responsiveness, the distinction between eros and agape is not as clear as Bratton (1992) suggests. As if to underscore this uncertainty, within the Lukan text the lawyer’s question "who is my neighbour?" is turned around.

Where the lawyer has asked, "who is my neighbour?", at the close of the parable the Lukan Jesus asks, "who acted as neighbour?" (10:36). Commentators have regarded the first question as a question of who are my people (see, for example, Karris 1990: 702). The question becomes one of boundaries: how far must love extend? (Green 1997: 429). For some the reversal of the question matters only to the extent that it reinforces the mutual nature of being neighbour: the emphasis is on the relationship rather than the object of "neighbour-love" (Ellis 1981: 160). If asked at the end of the passage "who is my neighbour?", one would expect, however, to answer: the person who fell among thieves. But the question "who becomes as neighbour to this person?" is rightly answered by the lawyer: "the one", he does not name the person as Samaritan, "who showed mercy, eleos" (10:37), a word used elsewhere in Luke to refer to divine mercy (see 1:78). So the near one is the other, whose passionate compassion prompts him to do mercy, a divine activity, for his other.

From the sequence of aorists describing the actions of robbers, priest, Levite, and Samaritan, to the two commands to the lawyer to do (10:28, 37), the emphasis is on action. The lawyer is directed emphatically: you go and do likewise (10:37), to take as example the Samaritan who treated as near one the other. There is a movement from the beginning of the episode, in which hearing and doing the word (of the law) concur, to the end, where hearing and doing the law are re-interpreted as seeing and doing what is required and, it would seem, more than what is required for the stranger. As Levinas (1996) would have it, the debt to the other is infinite. But rather than putting eros under the sobering influence of agape, as Bratton (1992) suggests, the excessive and compassionate responsiveness of the Samaritan submits the command of agape to the passion of eros.

This eros stands in tension with an eros of sight invoked in 10:21-22 to describe the relationship between Father and Son and those whom the Son chooses. As argued above seeing is implicated in desire for heaven and so with the lawyer’s seeking assurance concerning eternal life. But in the parable another eros of seeing intervenes: the sight of the other prompts a compassion, which is a desire for the other and a fear for the (well-being of the) other (cf. Levinas 1998: 51) which manifests in an excess of care. The attention to the corporeal, which the Samaritan enacts for the wounded stranger and which a woman enacted for Jesus (7:36-38), signifies an eros of divine visitation. But in the episode which follows (10:38-42) the eros of divine visitation is displaced in a narratorial splitting between hearing and doing which signifies a division between women.

While in the world of the Lukan narrative, women are not specifically constructed as other with respect to the divine purpose, as Turid Seim (1994) argues, there is a "double message" in Luke-Acts, especially with respect to women. But the dangerous ambiguity of Luke which affects not only the characterisations of women, but also of Jews and of other-than-human nature, opens a space for reading Luke otherwise and so allowing the narrative to bear its own other. In terms of the Lukan narrative, the reader might guess that where the one seeking assurance, namely the lawyer, is already constructed as other with respect to the divine purpose, no assurance is possible. So the narrative works to destabilise assurances. Where told to a predominantly first-century Jewish or Palestinian audience the parable might upset the assurances of its hearers with the surprise arrival of the Samaritan. In the Greek-speaking world of the Lukan community, situated outside of Palestine, its effect might be less potent.⁸ Would the Samaritan be seen as other? Or as he has come down to us, is he simply the doer of good deeds, which the Lukan others, such as the lawyer, as might be expected, were not? The Lukan characterisation of the lawyer does little to suggest that the text acts as neighbour to him. Of the human characters, only the stranger on the side of the road, who may or may not be a Jew, may be constructed as neither near one (of one’s own kind) nor other (in opposition to one’s own kind), and becomes in this sense completely other. But the focus is not on the absolutely other, rather because of his responsiveness to the other the Samaritan takes centre stage. While the text assures that the pattern of compassionate responsiveness to the other is the pattern of divine visitation, it fails to respond to the alterity of its own other, namely the lawyer. At the same time, however, in the parable of the good Samaritan, the text keeps a challenge to its own construction of the other and it is this other, namely the lawyer, who has prompted the challenge in the first place.

In the parable of the good Samaritan, the question of the other is complex. Layers of tradition intersect with a Lukan construction of the Pharisees and lawyers as other with respect to the divine purpose, so that the text proffers a world view, in which the other is celebrated as near one to be attended with a divine compassion, while simultaneously keeping its other, namely the lawyer, as an outsider within the larger narrative. But as Patricia Hill Collins (1986) suggests in her consideration of "Black Feminist Thought", the position of the "outsider within" is such as to disturb creatively and perhaps to regenerate existing discourses. This in fact is the function of the lawyer’s question (10:29) within the Lukan text (cf. Kilgallen 1996).

But in another way the alterity of the other is elided in the text, not by constituting the other as an outsider within, but by backgrounding. In the narrative of the prodigal son (15:11-32), for example, the servants function as background, their mediation on behalf of the main characters, even their role in sustaining the narrative is generally unremarked (see Ringe 1995: 8-9). This taking for granted of the roles of servants and slaves functions in such a way that readers may be drawn to accept a world in the parable that they otherwise might not (Ringe 1995: 9). Like the servants in the parable of the prodigal son, the ktenos (domesticated animal, pet, or pack-animal) in the parable of the good Samaritan is backgrounded. Other than to note parallels with other biblical texts or to signify the status of the Samaritan - as one who has the means to "possess" such an animal - the presence of the animal in the narrative goes largely unremarked. The focus is on what the Samaritan does; the animal as his possession serves as a prop in the story so that the Samaritan does not have to bear the wounded person entirely by himself. Rather than being a case of the animal construed as other with respect to the human, what is at issue is a forgetting of a more-than-human natural world in which animals might figure as agents.

Unlike the human characters in the drama of the parable, the animal is not expected to see what is required nor in the wider context of the Lukan narrative to choose to respond, by refusing or welcoming, the divine visitation. It is not that the animal is outside the story, rather that it is part of the assumed inside. Nor is it that the text would preclude a response from the animal. Indeed, in bearing the other, the animal does precisely what is necessary. As later a similar animal bears Jesus toward Jerusalem (19:28-40), Jesus claims that even stones might respond to the divine visitation (19:40). Yet it is only with reference to the human that the non-human in nature might be called forth by the divine visitation. Non-human nature as independently responsive to the divine is forgotten in the text or where remembered it is as a violent homogenisation which is counter to the plural otherness of Earth (3:4-5).

Within a sociality which remembers the material interconnectedness of human and other-than-human nature, Earth cannot be construed primarily as (wounded) other nor as a plurality of others which humans on seeing will be moved by compassion to tend. If there is to be an ecological bearing of the other, a passionate compassion must first submit to the prior claim that humanity is borne by Earth and Earth others, just as the wounded person was borne mutually by the backgrounded pack-animal and the Samaritan. The "fecundity of the caress" might then be felt not only in the eros of the maternal or of lovers, but in getting one’s hands into the dirt of the back garden. We might see, as does Yves Bonnefoy (1991: 12-13), the "compassion" of the sun stretching out toward the trees. Although after a heat wave in Melbourne, one more readily responds to the compassion of the rain. Such a recognition of the compassion of Earth might contribute to a transformation like that of the birth-giving woman who encounters not only the other whom she has borne but also her own otherness.