One day an expert in the law stood up to test Him. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?” He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “You have answered correctly,” Jesus said. “Do this and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus took up this question and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down the same road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So too, when a Levite came to that spot and saw him, he passed by on the other side. But when a Samaritan on a journey came upon him, he looked at him and had compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my return I will repay you for any additional expense.’ Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” “The one who showed him mercy,” replied the expert in the law. Then Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
Significance
The parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus's parabolic exposition of Lev 19:18 in answer to the lawyer's self-justifying question, "And who is my neighbor?" (10:29). The lawyer wants to draw a boundary around neighbor so that the command becomes manageable; Jesus refuses the boundary and inverts the question — not "who qualifies as my neighbor?" but "which of these proved to be a neighbor?" (10:36). This is exegetically faithful to the Holiness Code's own logic: Lev 19:18 (love the fellow Israelite) and Lev 19:34 (love the sojourner "as yourself," same verb, same comparison, same chapter, same divine signature) already democratize neighbor-love across ethnic lines, and Jesus harvests that seed by making a despised Samaritan — the ethnic and religious enemy — the embodiment of the command. The parable is the Lukan equivalent of Matthew's enemy-love extension (Matt 5:43-48): both press Lev 19:18 to its widest OT-warranted scope. The Samaritan's love is concrete and costly — compassion, bandaging, oil and wine, his own animal, two denarii, an open-ended pledge to return — exposing the priest and Levite who knew the law but "passed by on the other side." The telos forbids reading this as a mere moral exemplar to imitate by willpower. The deepest reading hears in the Samaritan a figure of Christ Himself: the rejected outsider who alone has compassion on humanity left half-dead by sin, who pays the full debt and pledges to return. "Go and do likewise" (10:37) is not a return to self-justification but the calling of those first rescued by the true Neighbor — love for the stranger flows from having been loved as the stranger, so that mercy becomes our gladness and not our burden.
Found via
Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type
Allusion
Connection Method(s)
Promise-Fulfillment + Longitudinal Theme (Law and Righteousness)
