The Good Samaritan

Of all the things Jesus said, the Good Samaritan may be the most fully absorbed into modern English. The phrase has its own legal category — Good Samaritan laws — covering people who stop to help strangers in trouble. Hospitals are named for the parable. The story has been on Sunday school felt boards for two centuries. Most people who wouldn’t consider themselves religious can still tell you, roughly, what the parable is about. Be nice to people. Help strangers. Don’t walk past someone who needs help.

This isn’t wrong. But it’s so domesticated that almost nothing of the original sharpness remains. When Jesus told this parable in first-century Galilee, it landed on his audience the way few of his sayings ever did. It was scandalous. It exposed the lawyer who had asked the setup question. It chose a hero that no one in the original audience would have chosen. And it ended with a question that flipped the entire conversation on its head.

The work of this chapter is to walk the passage slowly, putting back the edges that two thousand years of familiarity have worn smooth.

the setup

The parable begins not as a parable but as a debate. Luke 10:25 opens with what looks like a sincere theological question — but Luke’s narrator gives us a tell:

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25, NIV)

To test him. The Greek verb is ekpeirazō — the same root we sat with in Chapter 15. It means to put to the test, to try. The lawyer isn’t asking out of genuine curiosity. He’s trying to corner Jesus on a fine point of law. This was a common move in rabbinic debate, and a lawyer — someone whose entire training was in the interpretation of the Mosaic law — was the natural person to do it.

Jesus does what good rabbis do. He throws the question back:

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” (Luke 10:26, NIV)

The lawyer answers correctly. He quotes the Shema — the Deuteronomy 6 command to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind — and pairs it with Leviticus 19:18, love your neighbor as yourself. He has named the two great commandments. Jesus’s response is short: “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. Luke tells us why. Verse 29:

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29, NIV)

This is the question that produces the parable. And it’s a legal question. The lawyer wants to know the boundaries of the commandment. Who counts as my neighbor? If you can define neighbor narrowly enough — your fellow Jews, your fellow townspeople, your fellow members of the religious party — then you can be confident you’ve fulfilled the law. Loving your neighbor is manageable if your neighbor is the person living next door. It’s much less manageable if everyone is your neighbor.

The lawyer is looking for a definition that lets him off the hook. And Jesus, instead of answering, tells a story.

the road

In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.” (Luke 10:30, NIV)

This is a real place. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is about seventeen miles long, descending through harsh and dangerous country from Jerusalem (about 2,500 feet above sea level) to Jericho (about 825 feet below sea level). That’s more than 3,300 feet of descent in seventeen miles — a steep, winding, isolated route through the Judean wilderness. In the first century it was notorious for bandits. There were sentry posts along the way. A section of the road was known by an Arabic name that translates as the Ascent of Blood, and Jerome — the fourth-century translator we’ve met before — wrote that a castle had been built there specifically to protect travelers from the gangs who used the surrounding wilderness as a hideout.

So when Jesus says a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, his audience doesn’t have to imagine the scene. They know the road. They know the danger. The setup is realistic from the first sentence.

the priest and the Levite

A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. (Luke 10:31-32, NIV)

Two religious figures. A priest first — the highest religious rank in Israel. Then a Levite — the priestly assistant, the one whose tribe had been set apart for temple service since the time of Moses. Both see the half-dead man. Both pass by on the other side.

For centuries, the standard Christian reading has been that the priest and the Levite were worried about ritual purity. The Mosaic law had rules about contact with corpses — touching a dead body would have rendered them ritually unclean and unable to perform temple service. The reading goes: these religious figures cared more about ceremonial law than about a dying man.

But the Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, who teaches at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and who taught for decades at Vanderbilt Divinity School, has pushed back hard on this reading. Her book Short Stories by Jesus (HarperOne, 2014) is one of the most accessible recent treatments of Jesus’s parables, and she brings a Jewish-scholar lens that catches things Christian readers have often missed. On this parable, she makes two points worth hearing.

First, Jewish law actually commanded care for the wounded and the dead. Burying the dead was a religious duty, and helping the injured was an obligation under the same Torah the priest and Levite would have known by heart. The picture of Jewish religious leaders rigidly clinging to purity laws while a man dies is, Levine argues, a Christian caricature of first-century Judaism that we ought to be more careful with.

Second, the priest in the parable is going down from Jerusalem — that is, away from the temple. Whatever temple duties he had, they were already finished. Ritual purity concerns would have been less pressing on the homeward leg of the journey. So even on the traditional reading, the timing of the encounter doesn’t quite fit.

What, then, were the priest and the Levite doing? Jesus doesn’t tell us. He just tells us they saw and passed by. Levine has suggested that maybe they were afraid — the road was dangerous, the man might be bait for an ambush, helping a stranger in that country was risky. The same insight had been preached decades earlier in one of the most famous American sermons of the twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr., the night before his death, preached on this parable in Memphis. The priest and the Levite, King argued, asked themselves the wrong question: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? And the Samaritan, who came along next, asked the opposite question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him? That, King said, is the question the parable is teaching us to ask.

Whatever their motivations, the priest and the Levite aren’t the heroes of the story. They’re the people we expect to do the right thing, and they don’t. Jesus’s first audience would have heard the setup and waited for the third character — the one who would, surely, get this right.

the third man

In Jewish stories of this era, things often came in threes. A priest, a Levite, and — almost certainly — an Israelite. That is, an ordinary Jewish layman. The pattern would have been: the religious establishment fails, and the regular person, the ordinary observant Jew, does what is right. That’s what the audience would have been expecting.

That’s not what Jesus gives them.

But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. (Luke 10:33, NIV)

In the original telling, this single word lands like a slap. A Samaritan.

To understand why, you have to know who Samaritans were in the world of first-century Jewish-Galilean ears. The Samaritans were the descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel — the kingdom that had been conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BC and partially repopulated by foreign settlers. By the time of Jesus, they’d been a distinct ethnic and religious community for about seven centuries. They had their own version of the Torah (the Samaritan Pentateuch). They worshiped on Mount Gerizim instead of in Jerusalem. They weren’t pagans — they were close cousins in the family of Israelite religion. Which, of course, made them all the more loathsome to Jews in Judea and Galilee. The Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus had destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim around 128 BC, an act of religious-political violence the Samaritans had never forgiven. The hatred ran both ways and ran deep. Just a couple of chapters earlier in Luke, James and John had asked Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village that refused to host him (Luke 9:51-55). The exchange tells you everything about how the Samaritan-Jewish relationship was experienced.

Levine puts this in language modern readers can feel. The idea of a “good Samaritan,” she writes, would have made “no more sense than the idea of a ‘good rapist’ or a ‘good murderer.’“ The phrase, in its original setting, was an oxymoron. The Samaritan wasn’t the marginalized stranger we sometimes picture. The Samaritan was the enemy. The category we have, two thousand years later, of the good Samaritan as the helpful stranger — that category has been built by two thousand years of the parable being so beloved that the word Samaritan came to mean helpful. But to Jesus’s first audience, that meaning was unimaginable. They were waiting for an Israelite. They got a Samaritan.

what the Samaritan does

What Jesus says next is detailed in a way the rest of the parable isn’t. The priest and the Levite get one sentence each — he saw and passed by. The Samaritan gets three verses of careful action.

He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.” (Luke 10:34-35, NIV)

Look at how much is going on here. He bandaged the man’s wounds, using his own supplies. He poured on oil and wine — both first-century medicinal substances, and both items the Samaritan was carrying for his own use. He set the man on his own donkey — which means the Samaritan himself walked the rest of the way. He brought the man to an inn — at his own time and trouble. He stayed with him overnight, taking care of him personally. And then, the next morning, before he had to continue his own journey, he gave the innkeeper two denarii. That was two days’ wages for an ordinary day laborer. In the cost-of-living calculations of first-century Palestine, two denarii would cover the wounded man’s room and board at the inn for several weeks. And the Samaritan promised to come back and pay any additional costs.

This isn’t a quick gesture. This isn’t what we now call a Good Samaritan moment — pulling someone out of a ditch and going on with your day. This is sustained, costly, ongoing care. The Samaritan stops his journey. He uses his own supplies. He pays his own money. He stays the night. He promises to come back. He isn’t just kind. He’s committed.

There’s something else worth noticing — a point commentators on this parable often raise. In the world of the first century, an unpaid debt could land a person in bondage; debt slavery was a real feature of the era. An innkeeper left with a guest who couldn’t pay might well have recovered the costs by selling that guest into slavery. So by prepaying two denarii and promising to cover any further expenses, the Samaritan wasn’t just being generous. He may also have been protecting the wounded man from being enslaved by the very innkeeper he was being left with. The Samaritan understood the legal vulnerability of the man he had rescued, and he closed off that vulnerability with his own money and his own word.

This level of detail in the parable is doing work. Jesus isn’t just saying a Samaritan helped. He’s showing what neighbor-love actually looks like when it’s taken seriously. It looks like a man going hours out of his way, spending money he had earned, walking instead of riding, and pledging to come back. Real neighbor-love is expensive. The parable refuses to let you think it’s cheap.

the flip

Then comes the question that turns the whole conversation around.

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” (Luke 10:36, NIV)

Read that question carefully. The lawyer had asked, who is my neighbor? — meaning, who qualifies as the object of my obligation? Who do I owe love to? Jesus doesn’t answer that question. He asks a different one. Which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man? — meaning, which of them acted as the subject of love? Who did the loving?

The shift is enormous. The lawyer’s question assumed a fixed circle of neighbors. He wanted to know where the line was — who was in, who was out, who was his responsibility. Jesus’s question dissolves the circle entirely. Being a neighbor isn’t a category you check before deciding whether to act. Being a neighbor is what you do. You become someone’s neighbor by acting as their neighbor. The Samaritan wasn’t the wounded man’s neighbor in any pre-existing sense — they didn’t share an ethnicity, a religion, a village, a category of any kind. The Samaritan became the man’s neighbor by stopping, by binding, by lifting, by paying, by promising to return. Neighbor wasn’t a noun. Neighbor was a verb.

The lawyer, asked to name the neighbor in the story, can’t bring himself to say the Samaritan. He says “the one who had mercy on him.” Even at the end of the parable, the word is too unpleasant to put in his mouth. And then Jesus says the final line:

“Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:37, NIV)

Four words. The whole sermon. Go and act the way the Samaritan acted. Be the kind of person who becomes the neighbor of whoever is in front of you, whatever your relationship to them looks like on paper.

The lawyer had asked for a definition. Jesus had given him a mandate. The lawyer had asked who counts as my neighbor? Jesus had answered anyone you are willing to act as a neighbor to. And go do that.

Reading this yourself

Read the parable slowly once more, with all of this in mind. Hear it the way the first audience would have heard it. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho — yes, a real road, a real danger. A priest passed by — and the people we expect to do the right thing don’t. A Levite passed by — and the second chance is also missed. But a Samaritan came where the man was — and now picture, in your own mental landscape, whoever the most uncomfortable possible category is. The person from the country your country has been at war with. The person from the religious group your community has demonized. The person from the political faction you instinctively distrust. That is who Jesus put into the parable. And that is the one who stops, who pays, who carries the wounded man on his own back. And the question Jesus asks at the end — who was a neighbor to the man? — is the only question that matters. Not who am I obligated to love? but whom am I willing to become the neighbor of?

Then read the closing line one more time. Go and do likewise. Slowly. The first audience was a lawyer who came to test Jesus and went home with something he hadn’t expected. The next audience is you. The parable is still asking the same question.

What Jesus did, in the answer he gave a lawyer who came to him with a legal question, was to redefine love of neighbor from the ground up. The lawyer had wanted a boundary. Jesus dissolved the boundary. The lawyer had wanted to know who qualified for his love. Jesus told him to be the kind of person who qualifies — by acting — to be anyone’s neighbor. The parable’s hero was, in the original telling, an enemy — the very last person the audience would have placed at the center of a story about righteousness. The hero’s actions were detailed, costly, and sustained — not a quick gesture but a real commitment of time, money, and care. And the closing line wasn’t understand likewise or believe likewise or agree likewise. It was go and do likewise. The Good Samaritan is one of the most familiar stories in the world. Heard the way Jesus told it, the feel-good polish of the modern telling gives way to a small, sharp summons to act like the Samaritan in the world we actually live in. There is no one too foreign to be the neighbor we are called to become. There is no cost too high to be the cost we are called to pay. The lawyer asked a question and got a story. The story is still being told. And it’s still asking everyone who hears it the same final thing. Go and do likewise.