Parable of the Good Samaritan
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible, but it also may be one of the least understood. The parable is so familiar that the term “good Samaritan” has become synonymous with helping those in need. However, our familiarity with the parable can be a barrier to our taking the time to interpret the parable before jumping to application.
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It is easy to make the mistake of taking lessons from the parable based on how we feel when we read the parable, but to understand a parable, we must ask ourselves, “What did the original hearers feel when they heard the parable?” While we might be indignant that the Priest and the Levite passed by on the far side of the road, the original hearers would have nodded in approval, understanding that touching a corpse would make the Priest and Levite unclean.
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And while we rejoice when we hear that the hero stops to help, the original hearers would have been indignant that Jesus made the hero of the story a Samaritan, someone of a despised ethnic group. When put in this context, we see that the Samaritan was intentionally inserted into the parable to convict his audience of their ethnic animosity and their unwillingness to make those outside of their ethnic tribe their neighbors.
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The second question we must ask is what initiates Jesus telling the parable. We see that Jesus tells the parable to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” After telling the parable, Jesus does say, “Go and do likewise.” Still, in the context of what the original hearers are feeling and the question that prompts the telling of the parable, the primary action the original hearers were to do likewise was to make those that are outside of our ethnic tribe their neighbors.
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To be sure we are interpreting a parable correctly, we must look at the previous chapter to see what thoughts are being continued. In Luke 9:54, just one chapter earlier, we see the disciples not considering Samaritans as their neighbor and even asking Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven on them.
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No interpretation of a Bible passage is complete without asking how the passage fits into the fact that the Bible is one book, one story about God establishing His multiethnic Church, with the story beginning in Genesis 12:1-3 and concluding in Revelation 7.
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Jesus tells this parable to confront the ethnic animosity of His followers, which today equates to racism. Jesus then provides us a first step toward confronting our racism. It isn’t believing that everyone is our neighbor. It is to be deliberate about making someone of another ethnic group our neighbor.
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After we adopted two girls from China, we made the conscious decision to deliberately seek out two Chinese families that had daughters the age of our own and invite them over for dinner. We invested in developing a relationship with these two families over the next 20 years. Why? We realized it was important for our daughters to see that we valued Chinese people, not just Chinese girls who were now Americans. Our relationship with these two families is now a tremendous blessing to our daughters as young adults.
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While serving on of my church’s nominating committee (just after the transformational experience I share in our About Video), I proposed raising up elders and deacons of color. However, we soon realized that the nominations were primarily white. We didn’t know the black congregants that had been coming for five years or less as well as our friends of five decades. I felt convicted to become more deliberate about making congregants of color my neighbor. I started by inviting a young black man who just joined our church as the Youth Pastor over for Sunday lunch. Two years later, he became my son-in-law. Not only has this young man become a blessing to my family, but our relationship has contributed to the process of my racial bias being transformed.