The Parable of the Good Samaritan

At first reading, this parable seems to be easy to understand, although that may be at least partially because it has entered the culture at such a deep level. In a cultural context, the good Samaritan is the person who responds to the need of others, binding up their wounds. It is the individual who does good deeds, who is compassionate, and behaves as a good neighbor within the community as a whole. The good Samaritan is a valuable person within the community.

However, in the form in which it is embedded in the culture, the parable of the good Samaritan has lost some of its rougher edges. It retains some sense that it is not always the professed religious person who behaves in the most loving way, but it does not retain the association of marginality that the original contained. In addition, there is little attention given to the original question that begins the parable: And who is my neighbor?

There are several questions that occur upon reading the passage. These include:

1. Was Jesus making the Samaritan an example of the kind of person who would inherit eternal life?

2. Was Jesus telling the lawyer to behave like the Samaritan?

3. Was Jesus implying that the Samaritan was the lawyer's neighbor whom he needed to love as himself?

In thinking about the context, as well as the passage itself, it seems as though Jesus is attempting to open up the lawyer's understanding to a more inclusive concept of community and neighbo

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was a physician and a gentile convert to Christianity. He was influenced strongly by Greek culture and wrote in excellent Greek, in a classical style. He was much less likely to quote from Old Testament sources or to attempt to draw the reader back to consideration of those sources (Johnson, 1986). In other words, Luke had an interest in expanding the community beyond its original parameters. He was not Jewish and, consequently, would be considered to be on a par with the Samaritans by traditional Jews. Luke was concerned with history, but also with theology and ecclesiology in the developing church (Marshall, 1978; Wright et al, 1988; Tenney, 1975). Theologically, Luke focused on the role of Jesus as the eschatological prophet whose preaching represented an eschatological reversal. This is apparent in the parable of the Good Samaritan in which the Samaritan becomes the neighbor, while the priest and the Levite are not. He was concerned with providing a history of Jesus' ministry, along with a history of the spread of the word throughout the Mediterranean world. Main Body The parables of Jesus are like metaphors. They represent breaks with the conventional world of the Jews of that era which are designed to make them th

Category: Philosophy - T