Jesus taught by telling stories, or “parables”. One of the most well-known is the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The term “Good Samaritan” is part of our language today, referring to someone who helps another person. There are Good Samaritan Hospitals and medical centers. There’s even a law, colloquially called the Good Samaritan Law, which limits liability to someone who provides assistance to another. Let’s look at the parable that Jesus told and see where this term comes from.
The passage in Luke chapter 10 starts with a lawyer (an “expert in the law”) asking Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Although it sounds like an earnest question, the passage says the lawyer was testing Jesus. Jesus turned the question back on the man, saying, “You’ve read the law. What does it say?” The lawyer quoted the law, including the commandment to “Love your neighbor.” Jesus told him “Then follow the law,” but the lawyer kept pushing, asking “But who is my neighbor?” So, Jesus told this story:
A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho when robbers attacked him, stole his belongings, and left him lying half dead in the road. A priest came down the road, crossed to the other side and kept walking, avoiding the beaten man. Then a Levite (a highly respected leader in the temple) did the same, ignoring the man and walking on. Next, a man from Samaria (a Samaritan) came down the road. He saw the wounded man and stopped to help him. He cleaned and bandaged his wounds, put him on his donkey and brought him to an inn, and paid the innkeeper to take care of him, promising to reimburse him for any further care. Jesus ended the story by asking, “Which of these three was a neighbor to the wounded man?”
The lawyer rightly answered, “The one who showed him mercy.” So, Jesus told him again, “Then you know what to do. Do it!”
One of the things I love about this parable is that it is not just simple story. In Sunday School, we tell it on a basic level to teach that Jesus wants us to help others. It’s a good lesson, but not the only one. There is way more to this than meets the eye.
Jesus was very intentional in how he told this story. The traveler was just “a man”; he could be anyone. But notice how specific Jesus was in identifying the three characters who encountered him. The first was a priest, a respected man of God, someone who would be expected to be compassionate. But he ignored the beaten man. The second was a Levite, also a man of power, and a leader in the temple. But he walked on by. The third was a Samaritan, someone whom the Jews considered an enemy.
There was long-standing hatred between Jews and Samaritans, rooted in centuries of political, cultural, and theological differences dating to when the Kingdom of Israel split into northern and southern regions, with Samaria in the north. In plain terms, the Jews hated Samaritans, and vice versa.
Yet, here, Jesus completely flips the narrative, making the hated Samaritan the “good guy” and the respected priest and Levite the ones who acted callously and uncaringly. What’s Jesus saying here, and what does it mean for us today?
In Jesus’ time and ours, it’s easiest to like people who are like us. The people we are closest to, proximally and socially, are usually similar in age, race, social class, religion, and culture. These are who we are most likely to call our “neighbors.” If this were the case, though, wouldn’t Jesus have told the story with either the priest or Levite helping the traveler? Wouldn’t we expect his friends and neighbors to help him?
That’s exactly the point. Jesus didn’t tell this story to say we should be “nice” to our friends. He told it to say that the people we don’t like, the people we disagree with, the people we want to keep out, are our neighbors. I imagine the lawyer didn’t like what he heard. Maybe we don’t either.
If there is one recurring theme in all of Jesus’ teachings, it is that we are to love one another. That means loving the outcasts, the foreigners, the long-standing enemies, the people on the opposite side of our politics. Everyone. Who are the Samaritans in our lives? And can we love them as our neighbors? It’s a tough lesson, but it’s what Jesus wanted the lawyer, and us, to hear.