Luke 10:27 → Deuteronomy 6:5

In Luke's distinctive setting, it is the lawyer, not Jesus, who recites the Shema — "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind" — paired with Leviticus 19:18. Luke's version preserves the fourfold expansion most explicitly (heart, soul, strength, mind), matching Mark 12:30, and Jesus affirms it: "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live" (10:28). The lawyer knows the Shema perfectly; what he lacks surfaces in his evasive follow-up, "And who is my neighbor?" — which provokes the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Shema's love-command is thus shown to be self-evident in recitation yet evaded in practice: the man who can quote "love your neighbor" wants to draw a boundary around neighbor. Jesus's parable refuses the boundary, redefining neighbor-love as costly mercy crossing every barrier of race and religion. The telos: the Shema is not kept by flawless recitation or by narrowing its demand to manageable size, but by a love for God that overflows in mercy to the broken stranger — a love embodied first by Christ Himself, the true neighbor who crossed the greatest distance to bind up our wounds, and only then commanded of us: "Go and do likewise."