The Parable of the Good Samaritan #1

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best-known stories Jesus told, and it appears only in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 10:25-37). Jesus tells it in answer to a lawyer’s question about who counts as his neighbor, and the story has since made the phrase “good Samaritan” a common expression for anyone who helps a stranger in need.

The Parable

A man was traveling down from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers stripped him, beat him, and left him half dead by the road (Luke 10:30). A priest came along and passed by on the other side, and so did a Levite. Then a Samaritan on the road saw the man and was moved with compassion. He bandaged the wounds, poured on oil and wine, set the man on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and cared for him there. The next day he paid the innkeeper two denarii and promised to cover any further expense on his return (Luke 10:33-35).

Context

A lawyer, an expert in the Law of Moses, stood up to test Jesus by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turned the question back to him, and the man answered with the two commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18). Wanting to justify himself, he then asked who his neighbor was (Luke 10:29).

The setting matters. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho descends roughly 3,300 feet over about seventeen miles through rocky wilderness and had a reputation for banditry. Priests and Levites served in the Temple, and Jericho was a city where a number of them are known to have lived, so the two who passed by were plausibly religious professionals traveling home. Jews and Samaritans, meanwhile, shared a long history of mutual hostility, and John’s Gospel notes that Jews did not associate with Samaritans (John 4:9). Making the Samaritan the hero would have been jarring for Jesus’s listeners.

Meaning

Jesus closes by reversing the lawyer’s question. Instead of asking whom he must count as a neighbor, he asks which of the three proved to be a neighbor to the victim. The lawyer answers that it was the one who showed mercy, and Jesus tells him to go and do likewise (Luke 10:36-37). The point is that love of neighbor is defined by the practice of mercy, not by ethnic, religious, or social lines.

Christian tradition has read the story in more than one way. Most modern teachers and preachers emphasize its plain moral example of compassion across boundaries. Many early church writers, including Origen and Augustine, also read it allegorically, seeing the wounded traveler as fallen humanity and the Samaritan as Christ, who heals and pays the cost. Many Protestant and Catholic interpreters today regard the direct ethical reading as primary while still valuing the allegory as a devotional tradition. Either way, the parable presses the same challenge: the question is less who deserves help than whether one will become a neighbor to whoever is in need.