A parable that has suffered from being known too well

C15 | 13 JULY 2025 | THE GOOD SAMARITAN | LUKE 10:25-37

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not primarily about social concern and compassion, but about the barriers and boundaries we all-too-unthinkingly interpose between ourselves and others that result in a failure of compassion.

The boundaries in this parable are perhaps the most powerful and, potentially, the most toxic of all, namely, religious boundaries. In the parable itself, the boundary was one that Israel had used to keep at arms length a people it despised, namely the heretical and schismatic Samaritans. The twist in the parable is that Jesus doesn’t simply re-locate those boundaries, but removes them altogether, by redefining not only who our neighbour is, but what it means to be a neighbour.

The conclusion of the parable is the reverse of how it is usually read: it is not the man in need who is the Samaritan’s neighbour, but the Samaritan who is his. And the challenge to all who hear the parable is not only to “Go and do likewise”, but to acknowledge that virtue and goodness are very often found where we least expect them. Those on the outside – those who are not, for whatever reason “one of us” – often have more to teach us than we find it comfortable to admit. Here, Jesus drives the point home by suggesting that, unlike many of his own people, the Jews, the Samaritan is acting in the spirit of the Law, precisely because he wasn’t encumbered by the letter of the law.

The historical background to the parable is important. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans stretched back centuries, beyond anybody’s living memory. Jews despised Samaritans not only because they had intermarried with their Assyrian conquerors in the eighth century BC and thus polluted the Davidic line, but because they had also set up a rival Temple in entirely the wrong place. (Even then, location was key, especially in Temple real estate.) So, from a Jewish point of view, the Samaritans were not “one of us”.

But, of course, most of what the Jews said about the Samaritans was false. The Judeans had adopted this historically dubious account to justify retrospectively their intractable hostility towards the Samaritans. By the time of Jesus, contact with Samaritans was strictly forbidden to Jews, an apartheid as strict as any in our own time. It is easy to see why this was one of Jesus’ most daring and dangerous parables, one of the blackest marks his enemies would hold against him.

A particularly dark side of the parable is the fact that for the priest and the Levite, both “men of the cloth”, compassion for their neighbour took second place to their own ritual purity. By “crossing to the other side”, they were doing what they considered to be required to preserve themselves for the performance of their duties: they couldn’t afford to incur ritual impurity. This was, of course, a perfect illustration of one of Jesus’ recurring themes in the gospels, namely, the wrongheadedness of allowing the letter of the law to trump the spirit.

Remember that, for the purposes of the parable, the suggestion isn’t that their preservation of ritual purity was merely a “good” reason, as opposed to their “real” reason, for passing by on the other side: they are not accused of insincerity or hypocrisy. On the contrary, it’s acknowledged that they were being genuinely observant. But the parable most definitely is attacking a system that could, according to its own flawed understanding of the Law, prevent people from doing good, even to the point of failing to save life, all for the sake of respecting its own legal and ritual integrity.

Jesus, in other words, isn’t clarifying a point of law, as the lawyer seems to request, but rather overturning an understanding of the Law that would grant priority over compassionate care to the outward rituals of religion. The parable illustrates that, properly understood, the Law’s purpose and fulfilment are precisely love and compassion. The parable describes in concrete terms, in other words, what it is to be and to act as a neighbour. The despised, apostate Samaritan in this remarkably vivid parable is the hero of the story, the exemplar of compassionate neighbourliness. Unlike the priest and the Levite, he genuinely fulfils the Law, even at risk to himself – remember he was in Jewish territory and therefore in danger – by acting as a true neighbour to a Jew, who it’s implied, had he known who it was who was helping him, would have held the Samaritan in contempt.

Now Jesus told this parable on his way to Jerusalem, and it was precisely such talk that would guarantee he was also on his way to the Cross. And that implies one more possible layer to this parable. Could it be that this is a parable of Jesus’ own Passion, told in anticipation of what was to befall him? He is identifying Himself with the Samaritan. He, too, is an outsider, the object of hostility on the part of the establishment, but in truth, the unrecognised but best friend and neighbour of us all, prepared, even at the cost of his own life, to save our lives. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, then, Jesus is pointing to himself as the neighbour whom we, injured and wounded on the roadside of life, all need.