NT Text: Luke 10:25-37
OT Source(s):
Source: G.K. Beale & D.A. Carson, Commentary on the NT Use of the OT (Luke 10:25-37); Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Promise-Fulfillment + Longitudinal Theme (Law and Righteousness)
Anchor Text: Lev 19:18 — Love Your Neighbor
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.
Related Trajectory Tables: (none yet — see Anchor Text §7 on the "Love Commandment" TT gap)