Thursday, 7th Week of Easter

Luke 10:25-37

Today we have the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s interesting to note that this parable follows Jesus’s famous “summary of the law” – to love God and neighbor. But in Matthew and Marr, that summary comes during Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem, and is part of his confrontation with the Jewish leaders just before his crucifixion. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus puts some very specific flesh on the command to love your neighbor as yourself.

You can read the background of the hatred between Jews and Samaritans here. To summarize: the Samaritans had been settled in the former land of Israel, adopted the God of Israel for their own, but continued some practices which the Jews rightly abhorred. In other words, both peoples claimed the promises of God’s chosen people, and looked upon the other with contempt – not all that different, I suppose, than the current dispute in that area.

When the lawyer asks Jesus, “who is my neighbor,” he is trying to find out if Jesus knows the “right” answer, which would have been one’s fellow Jew. The irony of Jesus’s parable is neither of the Jews, concerned with becoming ritually “unclean” by contact with a dead body, were a neighbor to the “half-dead” Jew lying on the road. Who turned out to be a neighbor to the dying Jew, Jesus asks the lawyer, to which the lawyer must admit that it was the hated Samaritan.

The unspoken question with which Jesus leaves the lawyer – and us – is: can you recognize the Samaritan as your neighbor?