There are two important clues to show us what the parable of the Good Samaritan is about. First, the parable is preceded by a question from one of the scribes: He asks Jesus what he can do to inherit eternal life and Jesus responds by discussing the commandments with him. The man rightly identifies whole hearted love for God and love for your neighbour as the greatest commandments. To have eternal life, the man needs to keep the law, he needs righteousness.
Then “wanting to justify himself”, the man asks Jesus who his neighbour is. This leads Jesus to tell the story of a man who is attacked by bandits and left for dead, a priest and a scribe pass by but fail to stop. Eventually, a Samaritan passes by, sees the man, stops, treats his wounds and takes him to an inn to recover. Jesus asks who was the victim’s neighbour. The man grudgingly responds:
““The one who showed him mercy.”
Jesus commands the scribe to go and do the same. In other words, it was the Samaritan who had kept the law and proved to be righteous, not the very people who the scribe would identify with. Hearers may at this point have been reminded of the lines in the Psalm:
In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted,
but you have given me an open ear.[a]
Burnt offering and sin offering
you have not required.
7 Then I said, “Behold, I have come;
in the scroll of the book it is written of me:
8 I delight to do your will, O my God;
your law is within my heart.”[1]
Perhaps also they would think of Micah 6:8
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,[a]
and to walk humbly with your God?
However, I think there is also another connection we are meant to spot. In Genesis 38, there is the fascinating account of Judah and his daughter in law, Tamar. Judah’s eldest son dies and so Tamar is passed to his second born , Onan through a levirate marriage. Onan sins and is judged, also dying. Judah withholds Tamar from his third son out of fear and returns her to her people. Then Tamar entraps Judah, pretending to be a prostitute. When she is found to be pregnant through immorality, Judah demands she is brought out and burned but she identifies him as the father. Grudgingly he is forced to acknowledge that:
““She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah.” “
He had failed to make covenant provision for her whilst she had taken responsibility for ensuring descendants for him and the fulfilment of God’s promises. She is vindicated.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is often told as a helpful moral tale about loving your enemies. To be sure, it is that, just as it can also provide an allegory to the way that Jesus rescues us. However, primarily it is a response to the scribes attempt to justify himself. It’s about righteousness and justification.
Justification and righteousness are about that question, whether or not we are we have kept God’s law and are right with God. Have we loved him with our whole heart, have we have loved our neighbours with the kind of love we tend to reserve for ourselves? In the parable, the one who is found to be righteous, to be justified is an outsider to God’s people, perhaps a factor in Paul’s thinking as he penned the first couple of chapters of Romans.
The parable of course does point us to the way that we attempt too constrain and limit the expectations of God’s law to make it achievable but He will not allow that. Neighbour -love is not just about care for your own relatives, near neighbours or kinsmen. It extends to enemies. We find God’s Law impossible to keep. We fail to love God with our own hearts. We fail to love our neighbours.
That’s why we need Jesus, the one who kept God’s law perfectly so that I can be justified, his obedience is imputed to me so that it is just as if I too have kept God’s Law perfectly.
[1] Psalm 40:6-8
Faithroots 