The Parable of the Good Samaritan

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A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. The word describes an expert in the Mosaic Law, a man whose life was given to the interpretation of the commandments, and his question was the largest a man can ask: "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"¹ Jesus turned the question back to the ground the lawyer knew best. "What is written in the law? how readest thou?" The answer came without hesitation, and it was correct: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself."² Jesus replied, "Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live."³

The exchange should have ended there. It did not, because the lawyer understood that a command he had answered correctly was a command he had not kept. Luke records the motive plainly. "But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?"⁴ The question was not a request for instruction. It was a request for a boundary.

The Question Behind the Question

The scope of the neighbor was a settled subject of rabbinic debate, and the debate ran in one direction. Leviticus 19:18 commands love of neighbor, and the discussion that grew around it concerned who could be excluded: the Gentile, the Samaritan, the notorious sinner, the ritually unclean. A definition that narrows is a definition that comforts. If the circle of obligation can be drawn tightly enough, a man may stand inside it and consider himself obedient.

This is the instinct the parable exists to break. Conviction widens a sense of duty. Self-justification contracts it. The lawyer wanted a line drawn somewhere short of the whole world, and Jesus refused to draw one. Instead of defining the neighbor, He told a story in which the question itself is exposed as the wrong question.

The Road to Jericho

"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead."⁵

The road was real and the danger was proverbial. It descended roughly three thousand four hundred feet across seventeen miles of rock and ravine, terrain that gave cover to men who waited for travelers moving alone. The route had a grim popular name, the Way of Blood, and prudent travelers went in company.

Two details in the description carry the weight of the parable. The man is stripped and he is half dead. Clothing in that world announced a man's nation, his standing, and his trade. Stripped of it, and unconscious, he cannot be identified and he cannot speak for himself. Jesus tells us nothing about him: not his people, not his religion, not his character, not whether his misfortune was deserved. He is simply a human being in extremity. Every category by which the listeners might have calculated their obligation has been removed from the scene before the first traveler arrives.

He is also helpless. He did not walk to safety and he could not. Whatever is done for him must be done entirely by another.

Those Who Passed By

"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 the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side."⁶

Jesus chose the two figures His hearers would have expected to act. The priest served at the altar and the Levite assisted in the temple, and both had spent their lives in the service of the Law that commands mercy. Luke does not say that either man failed to notice. The priest saw him. The Levite came, looked at him, and then moved to the far side of the road. The avoidance was deliberate.

Reasons were available to them. The Law forbade a priest to defile himself by contact with the dead¹⁴, and a body lying motionless at the roadside raised exactly that danger. A man could tell himself that he was protecting his fitness to serve. The Law, however, made room for the neglected dead and for the near kin, and no reading of it required a priest to leave a living man to die in a ditch. Hosea had already stated the principle that governs such a choice: "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice."⁷

The irony is severe, and it falls on the religious. The men who taught the Law walked past the place where the Law was to be obeyed. Ritual observance that will not stop for a wounded man has misplaced the thing it was given to express. James states the same test: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction."⁸

The One Who Stopped

"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him."⁹

The word Samaritan lands on the story like a blow. The hostility between Jew and Samaritan was centuries old and mutual, reaching back to the settlement of the northern territory after the fall of Samaria in 722 BC, and hardened by a rival temple on Mount Gerizim and a rival claim to the covenant. John records the plain social fact in a single line: "for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans."¹⁰ Every reason that the priest and the Levite might have offered for passing by, the Samaritan possessed in greater measure, and he possessed the further reason that the man in the ditch belonged to a people who despised him.

The verb Luke uses for his response describes compassion felt in the body, the movement of the inward parts, and in this parable it never stops at feeling. What follows is a list of actions. He went to him. He bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, which was the ordinary medicine of the time and which came out of his own supplies. He set the man on his own beast, which means that the Samaritan walked. He brought him to an inn and took care of him through the night. In the morning he paid the host two pence, about two days of a laborer's wages, and left an open commitment behind him: "whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."¹¹

The care is exhaustive because compassion that is real is expensive. It cost him his medicine, his animal, his time, his money, his safety on a road where robbers were still at work, and his standing among people who would have asked him why he troubled himself for a Jew. He did not ask whether the man deserved it. The question does not arise in the story, because it is not a question mercy asks.

The Question Reversed

"Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?"¹²

The reversal is the point of the parable. The lawyer asked Jesus to identify the neighbor as an object: who qualifies for my love. Jesus asks the lawyer to identify the neighbor as an agent: who behaved as a neighbor. The first question sorts humanity into those who are owed something and those who are not. The second asks what kind of man is standing on the road. The definition the lawyer wanted would have told him where his duty ended. The question Jesus asks tells him what he is.

The lawyer answered accurately and could not say the word. "He that shewed mercy on him."¹³ The prejudice held even as the argument defeated it. He gave the right answer while refusing the name, which is its own commentary on how deeply such divisions run and how little a correct answer proves.

"Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise." The command closes off the discussion the lawyer had hoped to open. There is no definition to be refined and no boundary to be negotiated. There is a road, and there are people lying on it, and there is a man who will either stop or keep walking.

Go, and Do Thou Likewise

Everyone in need is a neighbor. The lawyer wanted to know where his obligation ended, and the parable answers that it does not end short of the man lying in front of him, whoever he may be. The priest and the Levite had religious reasons to pass by, and religion without compassion is empty. The Samaritan had every cultural reason to leave a wounded Jew where he lay, and he stopped and bore the cost himself. The command that closes the account is the practical outworking of the two commandments the lawyer recited at the beginning, the love of God and the love of neighbor.

The parable therefore leaves one question standing, and it is not the lawyer's. The question is not who deserves our love. It is whether we will be the ones who show mercy.