The Parable Of The Good Samaritan
THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN
LUKE 10:30-37
Jesus showed that our neighbor is anyone we happen to come across who is in trouble and who needs our help.
The parables in Luke’s Gospel are not parables in the strictest sense of the word. They are stories which could be true, pieces of life. This story bears all the marks of truth. From Jerusalem, 2,600 feet above the sea, to Jericho is the great rift valley. Even today the long sweeps of sealed highway curve and bend through howling wilderness. It was a place for bandit and highwayman, with boulders on the barren hillsides to hide the waiting thief, and deep desert to contain and to conceal his flight.
It was human enough for the priest and Levite to pass furtively by. The inert figure in the roadside dust might have been a decoy. The high priest at Jerusalem might have counselled caution and non-involvement. How many good people in some sombre modern slum would care to repeat the scene of the Samaritan’s act of mercy with danger lurking in every corner of the sinister environment? To pass by, to shirk responsibility, to avoid a compromising entanglement in a situation of unknown difficulty, is a natural enough instinct.
The Samaritan was a compassionate man. He was also an uncommonly brave man. He belonged to a race despised by the Jews. Assyria overran and depopulated the northern kingdom of Israel, and by their cruel policy of population-transfer denuded the land of its inhabitants. To keep the province from complete social and economic collapse, the Assyrian king repopulated Samaria with aliens (2 Kings 17:24-41). Instead of regarding the newcomers as objects of Jewish evangelism, the people of Judah, which survived in independence till Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem a century later, turned away in contempt, and the racial division between Samaritan and Jew began its bitter course.
In answering the lawyer, the Lord struck racial prejudice a stinging side-long blow. He also defined a “neighbor” as one who helps when and where he is needed, and who helps wherever he has opportunity to help, irrespective of rank, race or religion. And neighborhood is co-extensive with humanity.
Notes 10:31: “by chance”—the usual Greek word is avoided in the New Testament; for the duty of mercy see Deuteronomy 22:4; Isaiah 58:7. 10:34: “oil and wine”—Isaiah 1:6; Mark 6:13; James 5:14. 10:35: “penny”—denarion, a laborer’s normal daily wage. 10:37: the lawyer cannot bring himself to utter the loathed word “Samaritan.”