Luke 10:25-37 (NRSV)
25 Just
then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to
inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the
law? What do you read there?” 27 He answered, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And
he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Luke 10:25-37 (Year C July 10-16) is a controversy dialogue concerning love of God and neighbor and the parable of the God Samaritan that illustrates love of neighbor.
Verses 25-28 (Mark 12:28-34; Matt 23: 34-41) is a scholastic dialogue concerning the greatest commandment. [1]In context, this dialogue is part of the next segment so that they construct one controversy dialogue. It shows Jesus as a teacher engaging other teachers in a controversy dialogue.[2] It shows his respect for the Torah.[3]
According to the spiritual master, human beings are here to be happy and to learn.[4] I like the simplicity of it. We tend to make religion complex. We also have a responsibility to get to the point where we can identify the heart of a religion. In these too long remarks, I am concerned with the heart of Christianity. We often think we must produce something new and creative. Sometimes, however, the answer to what appears to be a puzzling question is the time-tested answer of the tradition. The new is not always better. Fred Craddock once put it that “There is power in the familiar.” Yes, laugh often and much. Win the respect of the intelligent and the affection of children. Earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends. Appreciate beauty. Find the best in others. Leave the world a better place, even in small ways. Make sure that at least one person has breathed easier because you lived. Such simple things mean success in life.[5] Karl Barth has a long section of his theological work dealing with the life of the children of God. Where does he go? Right here, to these verses. We are not to look for anything more impressive than to find our being in the love of God and our doing in the love of neighbor. Pretty simple.[6]
A lawyer approaches Jesus by addressing him as teacher (Διδάσκαλε), testing him with the question of what he must do to inherit eternal life, a question that receives much attention in Jewish literature of the late Second Temple period. The answer to the question in Judaism was that observance of Torah was essential.[7] Jesus responds[8] with asking in verse 26 What is written in the law? How do you read? This may mean how he recites, which presupposes recitation of the creed in a ritual manner, which both Jesus and the scribe did.[9] The lawyer responds with the distillation of the 613 points of Torah, quoting first from Deut 6:5 that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. That most basic, essential confession of an observant Jew is a prayer and confession at both morning and evening prayer. The Shema of Israel identified the uniqueness of the Lord and the requirement of total commitment to the Lord.[10] The uniqueness of the God who comes to rule excludes all competing concerns. To those who open themselves to this summons, God already comes to rule. The rule of God is imminent, but it also emerges from its future nature as present. The basis is that oneness of God is the content of this future. The divine rule is the outworking of the divine claim to the present life of the creature.[11] In reciting the Shema, we learn that the God of Jesus is none other than the God of Jewish faith, in according to the witness of the Old Testament, the God whom Israel confesses in the Shema.[12] First, it confesses a profound personal response on the part of each who would confess this truth — to love this God. The Shema confesses a profound personal response on the part of each who would confess this truth — to love this God. The original Hebrew had no need to designate both “heart” and “mind.” “Soul” is spirit, self, will, need, desire. “Strength” is physical. The separation of the faculties is not the key, but a complete response to God. To love God is to obey God in Deut 13:3-4, 30:16-20, Josh 22:5, I John 2:4-6, and 5:3a. Loving God with all the heart and soul receives emphasis in Deut 4:29 (=Jer 29:13), 10:12, 11:13, 30:6, 10, and Josh 22:5. The point of loving God is to honor God by the way we live in harmony with the will of God. One is to love God with the whole self and being. The demands of this command take on life in every aspect of human life ‑‑ heart, soul, mind and strength ‑‑ and are to permeate "all" (repeated each time) corners of that part of human existence. Along with the Jews of his day, Jesus undoubtedly recited the Shema. According to the Mishnah, every Israelite male should recite this verse twice daily.[13]
The New Testament is uncompromising in its monotheism. When Christians hear the accusation from both Jews and Muslims that they are tri-theists, to put it bluntly, they show they have not even tried to appreciate the Christian notion of God, for whom the Trinity is precious in its affirmation of both the transcendence and immanence of God. God is Father of us all, who has communicated to humanity what God is like in the Son, and who remains among us through the energy of the Spirit.
The love of God summarizes the being of the children of God. [14] This commandment is given to the people in covenant with God. It presupposes that God is one, and thus the commandment is for humanity. Love alone corresponds to the uniqueness in which god is the Lord. Love is the one choice in which a human being chooses God as Lord. It is a command that moves against legalism. Jesus is not reducing the number of commandments to this, but inviting us beyond a legal approach to being the people of God. Yes, love is a command, which may feel strange to us until we realize that only love can make a meaningful demand of us. This command invites into partnership with God, for as we love God, we partner with a God who love us. To love God is to choose God as our Lord. Love embraces the future, for God is for us and this God who loves us and whom we love is our future. Even in our love for God, we are conscious of sinfulness and inability to offer anything to God. Such love of God means that our being and activity are directed toward seeking God. We need to be careful of the deception of the way we seek God. We do so through spiritual discipline, through the practice of the means of grace. We pray, meditate, study, give generously of time, talent, and treasure, open ourselves sin worship privately and corporately, and witness in the world. We need to exercise great care that we not become good at practicing spirituality as an art. The flowering of such piety will be brief. Our best thoughts and actions can be deceptive in that they become a mask of who we are. Our seeking of God in the practice of such disciplines could be another form of rejecting the genuine experience of God. The point is not how well we practice such disciplines but the God whom we seek. Our seeking of God needs to be total, of our mind, heart, soul, and strength. Such seeking will result in finding, but never fully, so we must keep seeking. Even such finding will lead us to feel, touch, and taste of the world differently than before. In finding God we find the grace of God, the unmerited love of God. This grace reminds us of the rebel and imperfect person we always are. Grace does not allow arrogance. Grace reveals our slothful approach to life. Grace points us away from self and toward God, who has shown us what we can become in Christ through the power of the Spirit. By this grace we find true life. In seeking God with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength, we seek God without reservation, without division, and voluntarily, in a way that touches every part of who we are. Such love of God is the only praise we can offer to God.
The lawyer then quotes from Lev 19:18, to love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, “Love your neighbor, who is a human being just like you are.”[15] As long as one broadly interprets “neighbor,” it means a tender regard for them. Genuine fulfillment of the mandates of the Shema will issue in genuine love of neighbor. The parable of the Good Samaritan, from the source unique to Luke, becomes an answer to the scribes' question that Luke received from Mark. Within the parable itself, the description of the Samaritan, being compassionate and binding up the traveler’s wounds, echoes the words of the prophets of God’s care for Israel (Exod 34:6-7; Isa 30:26; 61:1 and elsewhere). Many scholars note that Jesus might have affirmed the interpretation of the law given by Hillel the Elder, a famous rabbi who was a contemporary of Jesus:
“A proselyte approached Hillel with the request Hillel teach him the whole of the Torah while the student stood on one foot. Hillel responded, “What you find hateful (or, What you yourself hate), do not do to another (or, your neighbor). This is the whole of the Law. Everything else is commentary. Now go learn that!”
The first few verses of Lev 19 insist on Israel’s honoring their holy God with proper respect; verses 9-18a require that they show justice and respect to their fellow human beings as well. Offering one’s best to God is not sufficient to fulfill the heart of God’s commandments; one must also offer one’s best to others. Historically, the "neighbor" referred to in Leviticus 19:18 specifically meant "the sons of your own people." However, Jesus had expanded the definition of "neighbor" far beyond those borders in the parable of the Good Samaritan), erasing national and ethnic self‑centeredness as well as excuses for limits on loving one's "neighbor."
Jesus responds in verse 28, You have answered right; do this, live by these two commandments, and you will live, and you have the answer to your question about eternal life. By affirming his answer, Jesus agrees that Torah observance is indeed the way to eternal life.
If we want to make a difference in the world, we must be different. The greatest danger we face in life is the loss of self. Yet, we can pass it off quietly, as if its loss were nothing.[16] Jesus is talking about those things that will help us truly live. Are we ready to be alive to God and to one another?
Neither Hillel nor Jesus was by any means the first to tie together the poetic demands of Deuteronomy 6:5, known in the tradition as the Shema, and the compassionate command of Leviticus 19:18.
[Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, around 137-107 BC)
Love the Lord and your neighbor;
Be compassionate toward poverty and sickness. (Testament of Isaacher 5:2)
I acted in piety and truth all my days,
The Lord I loved with all my strength,
Likewise, I loved every human being as I love my children. (Testament of Isaacher 7:6)
They (what distances you from the Law) do not permit people to show mercy to their neighbors. (Testament of Judah 18:3)
Have mercy in your inner being, my children, because whatever anyone does to his neighbor, the Lord will do to him. (Testament of Zebulun 5:3)
Throughout all your life love the Lord,
And one another with a true heart. (Testament of Dan 5:3)
Now, my children, each of you love his brother. Drive hatred out of your hearts. Love one another in deed and word and inward thoughts. (Testament of Gad 6:2)
Of course, the New Testament shares this emphasis on the love of neighbor in Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14, and James 2:8.
How do you love your neighbor? Just as love for God is not primarily a matter of affection for God, we express our love for neighbor more by caring/thoughtful actions than by whatever warm inner sentiments we might (or might not) have toward your neighbor. If you have learned to love/respect yourself (an often-overlooked matter for renewed appropriate attention), you are to love neighbor in the same manner. (This roughly parallels another of Jesus’ summary statements, Matthew 7:12 —”The Golden Rule”: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”)
Jesus grounds the command for love of neighbor, not in the authority of tradition, but in the goodness of the Creator and in the love of God shown to them in the coming kingdom. We can have a part in such love only as we are ready to respond to it and to pass it on. The twofold command of love is not so much a summary of the main content of the Law, but stands against it as a critical principle, which is why Jesus can say the scribe is not far from the kingdom of God.[17]
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as oneself. It can be hard spiritual work to encounter another human being who needs to spring from the prison they may have built for themselves. We find it far easier to use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince, or control.[18] The capacity to love the neighbor depends upon our capacity to love ourselves. We need to learn to be as tolerant of the shortcomings of the neighbor, even as we tolerant of our own.[19] Granted, human beings are undeserving of such love. We may well find it easier to imagine love for humanity rather than love for the individual who stands before us.[20] Yet, the command of Jesus does not carry with it an exception clause. The reality of a human life is complex. Yet, theologically, we are to think of their creation in the image of God. Since we owe honor and love to God, we also owe such honor and love to that which God has made.[21]
We misunderstand the creative nature of love if we think of Jesus as abrogating the Old Testament law by a new Christian law. All law seeks to make a form of life that achieves permanence, and may even declare a regulation to be normative, so that it must deal with new situations by casuistic extensions or expositions. Freedom characterizes the work of love. Love does not despise orientation to given rules. Yet, agreement with them is always a free act because one does not accept them in every situation. For love, each new situation is an appeal to its inventive powers. In this fact, we find the contrast to the mere following of a law.[22]
The love of neighbor summarizes what the children of God are to do.[23] Our praise of God is serious when we take the command to love the neighbor seriously. If we are to love God we are to love the world God has made. We honor and love God as we honor and love the world God has created. The one God who love us and commands us to love God with the whole person is the same one who commands love of the neighbor in the time and world that now is and is passing away. It is a command to love amid the finitude and transitory character of our lives. Such love of the neighbor is the way we maintain our faith in God. The neighbor is the person within the circle of significant relationships. The neighbor is the stranger within the gates, the ignored by our circle of significant relationships. In the context of Luke’s version of the two great commandments in Luke 10 and 11, we have the example of the love to neighbor in the story of the Good Samaritan. My neighbor is an event that takes place in the existence of a definite person marked off from all other people. My neighbor is my fellow human being acting towards me as a benefactor. Every human being can act towards me in this way in virtue of the fact that he or she can have commission and authority to do so. However, not everyone acts towards me in this way. Therefore, not everyone is a neighbor to me. My neighbor is the one who emerges from among all human beings as this one person. I must hear a summons from Jesus Christ. I must be ready to obey the summons to go and do likewise. I have a decisive part in the event by which a human being is my neighbor. That suffering human being in need of help directs the children of God to the task that God has appointed for them. God does not will the many griefs, sufferings, and burdens under which we people must sigh. God wills their removal. God wills a better world. Therefore, we will this better world, and a true worship of God consists in our cooperation in the removal of these sufferings. Therefore, our neighbor in his or her distress is a reminder to us and the occasion and object of our proper worship of God. To love the neighbor is to enter the future God has determined for us in and with our neighbor. God gives us the neighbor so that we are not alone. We reconcile ourselves to the presence of the neighbor and to being children of God in the manner of those who love the neighbor. We accept what the neighbor gives, and we accept the limitation the neighbor places upon us. We discover ourselves in relation to the neighbor. Only to great harm to our being children of God do we use love of neighbor to flee from love of God. We need both. The fulfillment of the life of the children of God is in a rhythm of this twofold love, and there is nothing more senseless and impossible than to play off the one against the other. The children of God abide in love. We live out our faith by our witness to the neighbor who has a claim upon us. Witness is the greeting with which I must greet my neighbor, the declaration of my fellowship with my own brother or sister. I simply live the life of my faith in the specific encounter with the neighbor. In my testimony I cannot follow out the plan of trying to invade and alter the life of my neighbor. A witness is neither a guardian nor a teacher. A witness will not intrude on the neighbor. A witness will not handle the neighbor. The witness will not make the neighbor the object of activity, even with the freedom of the grace of God. The witness will respect the other person who can expect nothing from me but everything from God. The witness shares the faith one has in Jesus Christ and that the witness does not meet a stranger, but rather, meets the brother or sister, even though the other may not live with such a recognition. A true witness directs the neighbor to the source of help in God. Thus, our personal story risks making the focus of the witness us rather than God. We offer what assistance we can as a sign of the promised help from the God who has helped us. In such ways my witness displays my mood or disposition toward the neighbor in word and deed. Our subjection to Jesus Christ will permeant such words and deeds toward the neighbor, especially as I live in the comfort of the forgiveness I have received from God. Finally, to love the neighbor as oneself acknowledges that love of self is natural.
Since fellowship with God along the lines of the love of God commanded in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 is possible only in connection with personal participation in the movement of love of God toward the world, Jesus could directly link the command to love our neighbor in Leviticus 19:18 with the love for God that is the supreme commandment.[24] We find here two commands, but primarily, love is not commanded, but living reality, an impulse proceeding from the love of God for the world that lays hold of us and catches us p into its movement. Participation in the kindness of God as Creator ought to be the natural consequence of thankful acceptance of this kindness. To command love and to practice it as the fulfillment of a command is thus self-contradictory because free spontaneity is a constituent of all turning to others in love. With Augustine, love is a motivating force that differs in nature from a command and its observance. Love is a gift of grace that enables us for the first time to respond in our own conduct to the kindness of God as Creator and to the redeeming love of God to participate in them. Yet, if Christian love is participation in the love of God for the world, then we must ask whether we can distinguish at all between love of God love of neighbor. Does not true love consist of sharing in the love of God for the world? In the depth of turning to the co-human Thou do we not also love God?[25] The Scholastic thesis concerned the unity of the act of love in such a way that one primarily sees love of God as an implication and transcendental basis of love of neighbor. Categorically explicit love of neighbor is the primary act of love of God, which in love of neighbor God in supernatural transendentality always has truly if nonthematically in view, and even explicit love of God is still carried by that trusting and loving opening up to the totality of reality that takes place in love of neighbor. This does not mean reduction of love of God to love of neighbor. Instead, we free explicit love of God from falsely seeming to represent an exceptional phenomenon of only marginal importance. Because God as silent incomprehensibility is at work in all the relations of humanity, however secular, we can see thematically in the explicit act of love of God what is always already the concern in all human life in co-humanity. The question remains, why this reference must become thematic in and for itself.[26]
Yet, in this command to love God, is faith implicit already, the emphasis that Paul would bring to light? Ritschl thinks so based on the idea that faith is itself a form of love. He did so because he moved critically against Pietism and the medieval Catholic theology that had defined the relation of faith and love. Yet, in doing so, he did not want in the least to say that love of God must merge into love neighbor. His point was to make a careful distinction between our religious relation to God in faith on the one said and love as the essence of moral action on the other. Yet, the act of trust does not contain all aspects of love, for love does not just link up with the object of trust as trust itself does but is also the power of recognizing what is different. In this way, it makes fellowship possible.[27]
In any case, many voices in Protestant theology have tended to answer affirmatively that one can identify love of neighbor with love of God. The problem with this is that equating love of God and love of neighbor can easily lead to a moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The relation to God can fade out as a distinct theme and be entirely lost in co-humanity. With Jesus in this statement, one can find no support for absorbing love of God into love neighbor.[28]
Jesus is speaking of his own harmonious orientation. The commands are not identical, but Jesus does join them together. He stresses the dynamic interrelationship operating them. Accountability to one is meaningless without accountability to the other. The second is like the first. The passage has reference to God, but also to the neighbor. It has the one dimension, but also the other. It finds in the Creator the One who points to this creature, the neighbor.[29] God expects one love but expressed in two spheres of life. Such love finds in the Creator One who points the creator to the neighbor, and in the neighbor, the one who points the individual to the Creator.[30] One cannot withdraw from the neighbor to some special religious sphere. Nor can we allow love of neighbor to absorb love of God, thereby taking away its independent quality.[31] Love to others cannot exhaust itself in love to God. Nor can love to God exhaust itself in love of others. One cannot replace the other. Love to God evokes love to neighbor. One cannot have Christ and not have the neighbor. Therefore, one cannot have God without also having the neighbor. Such love is obedience to the direction God wants to take you.[32]
Jesus says that these two commandments are the lens through which we are to read the law and the prophets. They provide a coherent principle for appreciating and observing the other commandments.[33] They provide us a lens through which we read Scripture. Jesus understood the prophetic tradition and ethical demands considering these two commands.
John Wesley connected happiness, holiness, and love, based on the text before us. What is the source of unhappiness? It may well come from setting our love of creation above our love the creator, our love of self above our love of neighbor.[34] If so, the source of unhappiness is misdirected love. Thus, genuinely following Jesus is neither more nor less than love, for love fulfills the law and is the end of the commandments. Genuine religion is the love of God and the neighbor, by which we mean, every person under heaven.[35] If we can properly understand Christian perfection, love will sum up such a life. Of course, love to God with all that we are, and then love of neighbor in inseparable connection with the first. [36]
10:29-35 Parable of the Good Samaritan (L)
Luke has structured 10:29 - 11:13 as an exposition of the command to love, in chiastic order. The parallels in Matthew and Mark to the dialogues are set amid stories of the controversy between Jesus and the Scribes, both set in the temple in Jerusalem (Mark 12 and Matthew 22). In contrast, Luke’s account takes place during the long travel narrative, extending from Luke 9:51 to 19:28. In this section of the gospel, Jesus instructs his disciples about the rule of God: what it means and how to enact it. It has a sense of urgency. The urgency is not so much to arrive at his destination, but of proclaiming the nearness of God's presence and of responding to that presence. So when one would-be follower rushed up to Jesus as he was on the way and said, "I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home" (Lk 9:61), Jesus answered very abruptly, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Lk 9:62). That is rough. Uncompromising. Urgent. No excuses. The kingdom is near. Something is at stake. No second thoughts. Thus, the overall placement of the interchange between the lawyer and Jesus is in a different context than its synoptic parallels. In the latter part of Chapter 10, then, we find two encounters between Jesus and people who are slow to grasp what he is about. The first is with a lawyer (10:29). The second is with two sisters, Martha and Mary (10:38-42). It is fascinating that Luke puts these two stories right up against one another. They have such different messages, such different words to speak. To the lawyer, who wants to turn the kingdom of God into a discussion group, Jesus says, "Go and do." However, to Martha, who is a doer and gets upset that Mary is not, Jesus says, "Sit and listen." We wonder, "Which is it, Jesus?" We thought the message was "go and do." Is that not the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan? Go and do likewise? Yet, a few verses later, the message seems to be different. "Sit and listen." There is more to this than a superficial reading of the text will reveal.
Luke 10: 29-35 (unique to Luke) is the parable concerning the Good Samaritan. There are two helpful ways to approach this parable. One is to focus upon the obvious point of the parable. However, a second way is to focus upon the context in which Luke uses the scholastic dialogue with the lawyer in 10:25-28 to frame the account of the parable.[37]We return to the lawyer, to whom Jesus has already said that if he lives the two great commandments he will live, wants to justify his role and reputation as a learned student, so he asks a central question of who the neighbor is. The context of the parable provided by Luke has the parable answering the question of which the neighbor is, the second commandment identified in 10:27. Instead of a definition, we hear a parable.
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers,[38] who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. This was a common concern among travelers in Israel and throughout what we know as north Africa and the middle east. 10.31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 10.32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. They see the man, note that he may die if they do not help. . They had no excuse in Jewish law to leave him, since saving a life overrides any other mandate of the Jewish law (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 82a). These people believed all the right things. They obeyed all the ethical laws. Yet, they refuse to help. They had the chance to help face-to-face. Instead of taking the time to trouble themselves about the other fellow’s troubles, they gave him a quick glance and a wide berth and walked on. We know that the robbed and wounded man was Jewish. So was the priest; likewise, the Levite. This means they were of the same community. The priest and the Levite both have the chance to do what the situation demands, but they do not. Their misunderstanding of what is important, of what matters, gets in the way of their compassion, their humanity, and their faith. 10.33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, 10.34 and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. Jesus has reframed the question from who the neighbor is to who is nearest to me in need of help. The heart makes the final decision, as the heart detects the distress of the other, leading the Samaritan to act in a neighborly way. Out of the readiness to help, the Samaritan does in al sobriety what the moment demands.[39] 10.35 And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.' Here is the point of the parable, as it contrasts the lack of compassion showed by Jewish leaders and the compassion shown by the Samaritan.[40] It has a similarity with II Chronicles 28:5-15, where Samaritans showed mercy toward Jews who were imprisoned by Israelites.
The imagery in the parable draws on the long-standing animosity between Judeans and Samaritans. Historically, Samaritans were the remnants of Israel’s northern tribes that remained after all the tribal leaders were exiled when Israel fell to Assyria in 722 BC. Samaria was the capital of the 10 tribes who broke away from the tyranny of the Judean king Rehoboam, son of Solomon. Jewish accounts emphasize the victors’ resettlement of several peoples from around their empire into Samaria, and the new settlers’ establishment of their own gods and rituals. When the Assyrian settlers moved in, these remaining Israelites eventually intermarried with the Assyrians, "diluting" their Jewishness. 109 BC, John Hyrcanus, then the Judean king, destroyed the Samaritan's temple.
The biblical history of relations between Samaritans and Judeans is not completely one of bad feeling. II Chronicles 28:8-15 recounts the story of the Samaritans freeing Judean prisoners of war captured by Israelite and Syrian forces.
8 The people of Israel took captive two hundred thousand of their kin, women, sons, and daughters; they also took much booty from them and brought the booty to Samaria. 9 But a prophet of the LORD was there, whose name was Oded; he went out to meet the army that came to Samaria, and said to them, "Because the LORD, the God of your ancestors, was angry with Judah, he gave them into your hand, but you have killed them in a rage that has reached up to heaven. 10 Now you intend to subjugate the people of Judah and Jerusalem, male and female, as your slaves. But what have you except sins against the LORD your God? 11 Now hear me, and send back the captives whom you have taken from your kindred, for the fierce wrath of the LORD is upon you." 12 Moreover, certain chiefs of the Ephraimites, Azariah son of Johanan, Berechiah son of Meshillemoth, Jehizkiah son of Shallum, and Amasa son of Hadlai, stood up against those who were coming from the war, 13 and said to them, "You shall not bring the captives in here, for you propose to bring on us guilt against the LORD in addition to our present sins and guilt. For our guilt is already great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel." 14 So the warriors left the captives and the booty before the officials and all the assembly. 15 Then those who were mentioned by name got up and took the captives, and with the booty they clothed all that were naked among them; they clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kindred at Jericho, the city of palm trees. Then they returned to Samaria.
In verse 15b, the chronicler recounts their ministrations: “and with the booty they [the Samaritans] clothed all that were naked among them [the Judeans]; they clothed them, gave them sandals, provided them with food and drink, and anointed them; and carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys they brought them to their kindred at Jericho . . . .” Notice what the Samaritan did 800 years later: “He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him” (Luke 10:34). Beyond the general similarity, particularly noteworthy are the specific mentions of anointings, and carrying of the injured on their own beasts to a place of shelter.
The story has a powerful element in the attempt to overcome the historic hatred between Judeans and Samaritans. In other words, help may come from a quarter you least expect. Ethnic controversies underlie this parable.[41] Given the history of how Jews viewed Samaritans, the intent is to open Judaism to the humanity and possibilities of relating to the Samaritan in a positive way. It must have been a surprise to his hearers that instead of the expected triad of priest, Levite, and Israelite layperson, which would have made a palpable anti-clerical point, Jesus replaced Israelite with Samaritan, one of the hated enemies of the people whom they regarded as of mixed origin. Although it remains a story against Jewish leadership, this ending of the parable emphasizes the unlimited nature of the duty of love by followers of Jesus.[42] He used the Samaritan as a model for the practice of compassion, a blow in the face for any Jew with self-awareness. This selfless exhibited by the Samaritan to the helpless demonstrates that anyone can participate in such love, even one who does not follow the orthodoxy of Jewish leadership and of official Judaism.[43] Issues of ethnic identity were critical to Luke’s community. This parable emphasizes and indeed engineers the reversal of attitudes that Jesus demands. The parable calls upon the Jewish people to love the reviled but compassionate enemy, the Samaritan.[44]
Without doubt, Jesus urges the lawyer to assist the stricken, as did the Samaritan. At the same time, Jesus also forced the lawyer to make a revolutionary admission and to change his perspective on Samaritans. The admission is that a Samaritan can be good. Not just “good,” but in ways emulating God delivering from Egypt and Babylon. Such an admission would nearly choke a first-century Judean, since for the previous nine centuries Jews and Samaritans had been at enmity with one another. Both Samaritans and Judeans revered the Torah, but among the differences in their versions, the Samaritan version substituted Mt. Gerazim, in Samaria, for Mt. Ebal as the place God commands Moses to build an altar: perhaps an earlier version of Deuteronomy 27:4 than the canonical version.[45] John 4:20 remembers this difference. The Judeans therefore looked upon Samaritans as born of rebels, now of mixed ancestry, and practicing an unacceptably mixed and misguided religion. As a final indictment, note that in Luke 9:51-56, the Samaritans refuse hospitality to Jesus and his disciples as they journey to Jerusalem. Now this is the person, known only by his ethnicity, whom the lawyer must call “good.”
Jesus asks even for more than admission of the goodness of the Samaritan. This parable draws the lawyer, those hearing the story with the lawyer and readers of the story two millennia later, into its world, luring the listener to identify with the characters involved. With whom would the lawyer identify? Certainly, he would not identify with the robbers, nor, probably, with the innkeeper. As a lawyer, the brigands would not be suitably conventional, and the innkeeper simply has an insufficient role to attract sympathy. Nor, one would think, could the lawyer identify with the priest and Levite who “pass on the other side” of the wounded traveler. They are too unfeeling and, again, only sketchily drawn characters. That leaves the Samaritan and the victim. It is very doubtful that at the inception of the story the Jewish lawyer could identify with any Samaritan, for all the reasons outlined above. Then is it possible that the lawyer, and the listeners to this story, would identify with the victim? For the lawyer it is well assured that he was meant to do so. Travelers in first-century Palestine rightly feared attacks by highway robbers.[46] The lawyer himself was involved in such a situation. Luke’s audience, too, might identify most with the victim, presumed to be a religiously observant Jew on his way home from a festival celebration in Jerusalem.
The parable subverts the negative stereotype of the Samaritan and puts into question the conventional distinction between "us" and "them." The Samaritan who aids a Judean after being left for dead by two representatives of established religion has stepped across a social and religious boundary. Jesus' audience would have viewed the story through the eyes of the victim. It prompts them to think of the identification of their neighbor as a different ethnic group. The possibility of another kind of social world has come into view. This is a good example of the provocative public speech of Jesus, redrawing the social and the sacred map.
In our post-modern setting, we might think of the tribe with which we identify ourselves, and then think of another tribe, the one that falls under condemnation from the perspective of our tribe, and it is a person from that tribe who performs an extraordinary act of kindness, even though one from our tribe did not act.
However, in the context, the parable responds to the issue of who the neighbor is. Luke provides a conclusion that ties the parable to the context. 10.36 Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? The lawyer responds by saying the one who showed mercy to the robbed and beaten man. In verse 37, Jesus responds again, Go and do likewise. Jesus and the scribe are after the same thing, the extent of the conception of neighbor. The scribe is looking at the issue from a theoretical perspective while Jesus illuminates the question with a practical question. His concern is with action. No human being is beyond the range of the love required in the love of the neighbor. The law of love called him to be ready at any time to give his life when the other is in need.[47] The priest and Levite had an abstract love of God that did not show itself toward the neighbor when the moment arose to do so. To behave as a neighbor is to show mercy, a notion closely related the goodness of God in creating and sustaining the world. The merciful turning of God to the needy, the suffering, and the helpless is one we must see as a specific expression of divine goodness and its practice.[48] It brings us out of our comfort zones; it crosses social lines and it crosses cultural divides. The Samaritan takes seriously the question of what happens to this man if I do not stop to help. The story stresses he had compassion. It suggests that the life of a follower of Jesus is about acting with compassion when the moment calls for it. Compassion causes us to invest in the lives of people until they come to health and strength on their own. It opens the heart to meet suffering with the deep wish for its removal. It offers time, words, thoughtfulness, right actions, a warm embrace, and generosity of resources. The Samaritan does all this for a man he does not know. The unknown man may be of high moral standing, but he might morally lax. We do not know. That unknown man was not the neighbor of the Samaritan until the moment revealed him to be his neighbor.
Such a parable explains an aspect of the message of Jesus concerning the nearness of the divine rule. In this case, it focuses on the right answer to its summons. Love has imagination that can create new forms that aptly meet new situations in their uniqueness, even if as a rule they must move within given forms of social life. The law binds one to a specific form of conduct. Love has the power to give new life to what is right by developing in extraordinary circumstances, and without disrupting the nexus of social life, fresh solutions and modes of action that do better justice to the situation. Love with its many creative possibilities thus stands in contrast to a legal form of life that is regulated in the same way for each case. Love is at work where the law leaves gaps and where those who are oriented to law ignore situations that they do not find in the precepts of the law. As an example, the priest and Levite passed by the one who had fallen victim to robbers, whereas the Samaritan, even though he had not known the man before, became a neighbor to him in this situation. Love is flexible and can bring fresh solutions to new situations.[49]
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5] Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[6]
[7] (See Sylvia C. Keesmaat, “Strange Neighbors and Risky Care (Matthew 8:21-35; Luke 14:7-14; Luke 10:25-37)” in
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15] Amy-Jill Levine. If she is right, then we do not need to go down an explanation I have often heard, where people will say that the second half of Jesus' dual commandment meets us where we stand ‑‑ as self‑absorbed sinners. To "love your neighbor as yourself" means extending to one's neighbor the same self‑centered love and concern we all harbor.
[16] Soren Kierkegaard puts it this way: The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, can pass off as quietly as if it were nothing. Every other loss - that of an arm, a leg, a spouse, five dollars, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
[17]
[18] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (HarperOne, 2010), 113.
[19] Eric Hoffer
[20] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
[21] John Calvin, Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life.
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
[26] Rahner, Theological Investigations, VI, 264ff.
[27] Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, II, 103ff, 116ff.
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
[32]
[33] Daniel J. Harrington, "The Gospel of Matthew", from the Sacra Pagina Series (The Liturgical Press, 1991),316.
[34] Albert Outler, Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit
[35] John Wesley, “Wandering Thoughts.”.
[36] John Wesley, “On Perfection” and “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.”
[37]
[38] Rengstorf, TDNT, IV, 261, considers the possibility that the man resisted Zealots who sustained themselves by support extracted from fellow Jews, explaining why his property is taken but his life is spared.
[39] Stauffer, TDNT, I, 46.
[40]
[41] (“The Language of Community: Metaphors, Systems of Convictions, Ethnic and Gender Issues in Luke 10:25-37 and 10:38-42,” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, no. 30 (1991), 698-713).
[42]
[43]
[44] Pamela Thimmes
[45] (Robert T. Anderson, “Samaritans,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 5 ed. David Noel Freedman [New York: Doubleday, 1992], 940-947.)
[46] (Keesmaat, 278).
[47]
[48]
[49]
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