Parable of the Good Samaritan

“And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’”

— Luke 10:25 (ESV)

The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is Jesus’s answer to a lawyer who, having named love of God and neighbor as the sum of the law, asks “who is my neighbor?” to justify himself. A traveler is beaten, robbed, and left half dead; a priest and a Levite pass him by, but a Samaritan, from a people Jews then treated as outsiders, tends his wounds and pays for his care at an inn. Jesus closes by turning the question around, asking not who counts as a neighbor but who acted as one, and commanding, “Go, and do likewise.”

Biblical Basis

The parable appears only in Luke, inside an exchange that opens when a lawyer stands up “to put him to the test” and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life (Luke 10:25). Jesus turns the question back to the law: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” (Luke 10:26). The lawyer answers with what became known as the two great commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27; cf. Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), and Jesus affirms his answer: “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28).

Luke then supplies the motive behind the lawyer’s next question: “desiring to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Luke 10:29). Jesus answers with the parable itself. A man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho is stripped, beaten, and left half dead. A priest sees him and passes by on the other side; a Levite does the same. A traveling Samaritan, a member of a people with a long history of religious and ethnic hostility toward Jews, instead has compassion on him: he binds his wounds with oil and wine, carries him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to continue his care (Luke 10:30-35). Jesus then puts a different question to the lawyer than the one the lawyer had asked him: not “who is my neighbor” but “which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” (Luke 10:36). When the lawyer answers, “the one who showed him mercy,” Jesus tells him, “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).

Ethicist Ken Magnuson observes that the lawyer’s question was really about scope and obligation: he “wants to know what he owes to whom, that is, what is the obligation of the law concerning love for neighbor,” and likely expected Jesus to answer by “quantifying who is his neighbor.” Instead, Magnuson notes, Jesus “tells the story of one who loved even his enemy with extravagant love… demonstrating what it means to be a neighbor,” and directs the lawyer to do the same.¹ The parable belongs to the wider body of Jesus’s parabolic teaching treated at parables of Jesus.

Confessional Witness

The lawyer’s own summary of the law, love of God and love of neighbor, states in one sentence what the Westminster Shorter Catechism calls the “sum of the ten commandments”: “to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind; and our neighbour as ourselves.”² The Westminster Larger Catechism states the second half on its own terms, in language close to Jesus’s own closing question about who “proved to be a neighbor”: “The sum of the six commandments which contain our duty to man is, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to do to others what we would have them to do to us.”³

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith shares the wider Reformed family’s doctrine of the law standing behind both catechisms. The law God gave Adam bound him and his posterity “to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience,”⁴ and that same law continues to bind believers after conversion: “The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it; neither doth Christ in the Gospel any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.”⁵ Jesus’s own answer to the lawyer, “do this, and you will live,” is not an idle or rhetorical offer; the confession’s doctrine of the law is exactly why the demand is real. What the demand exposes about fallen sinners who stand under it is treated below.

Doctrinal Significance

The lawyer’s question, on this reading, is not innocent curiosity. Luke frames it as an attempt at self-justification, and Micah McCormick argues that Jesus’s whole exchange with him is built to expose that attempt rather than reward it. If the “do this, and you will live” of verse 28 sets perfect law-keeping as the actual condition of eternal life, then the parable’s own cast of characters supplies the proof that no one meets it: “in Jesus’ parable the priest and the Levi did not love,” even though “the priest and the Levi would have represented in some ways the best that the Jews could offer in terms of passionate law-keeping.” McCormick’s conclusion is blunt: “even the most religious people often fail to love from their heart, no one really loves his neighbor as himself all the time,” so “no one can gain eternal life by doing the things of the law.”⁶

Loraine Boettner draws the same lesson from the same lawyer for a wider doctrinal purpose. A command like “This do, and thou shalt live,” he argues, is not proof that the hearer has the ability to obey it; a parent can issue an instruction “when their very purpose is to show [children] their inability and to induce them to ask for the parents’ help.” Read without that recognition, Boettner writes, “men of the world… assume that they have sufficient power in themselves, and, like the self-conceited lawyer to whom Jesus said, ‘This do, and thou shalt live,’ they go away believing that they are able to earn salvation by good works.” The rightly humbled hearer draws the opposite conclusion: unable to “fulfill the commandment,” he “cries out to the Father to do the work for him.”⁷ On this reading, the parable’s real weight falls on total depravity and on the doctrine that a sinner’s standing before God rests on another’s obedience credited to him rather than his own, a doctrine treated at imputed righteousness and double imputation.

Historical Development

Calvin against the Scholastics on the scope of “neighbor”

In the Institutes, John Calvin cited this parable by name to settle a question the medieval Scholastics had gotten wrong: who counts as a neighbor. “Our Saviour having shown, in the parable of the Samaritan (Luke 10:36), that the term neighbour comprehends the most remote stranger, there is no reason for limiting the precept of love to our own connections,” Calvin wrote; “the whole human race, without exception, are to be embraced with one feeling of charity.”⁸ He then turned the same conclusion against a specific target: the Scholastic practice of downgrading Christ’s hardest commands, to love enemies and forgo revenge, from binding precepts into optional “counsels” that only monks were expected to keep. Calvin called this “nothing… more pestilential than the ignorance or wickedness of the Schoolmen,” since it effectively confined the status of true children of God to the cloister and left ordinary believers, and Scripture’s own plain commands, behind.⁹

Active obedience and the covenant of works, 2010

Writing within contemporary debate over the doctrine of Christ’s active obedience, Micah McCormick returned to this parable as evidence for a “do this and live” theology running from Leviticus 18:5 through Jesus’s own teaching to Paul. On his reading, the parable does not soften the demand of the law for the New Testament era; it sharpens it, using the lawyer’s own confident expectation that he might “just be able to ‘do it’” as the very thing Jesus’s story dismantles.⁶ The argument connects this one parable to the wider covenant-theology question of what kind of obedience a covenant of works requires, treated at covenant of works.

Objections and Responses

If Jesus tells the lawyer “do this, and you will live,” doesn’t the parable teach that a person can secure eternal life by keeping the law, against the doctrine of justification by faith alone? McCormick’s answer is that the demand is real but its outcome, given who is actually required to meet it, is not what a self-reliant reading expects. The priest and the Levite, representative of the most scrupulous law-keeping Judaism had to offer, fail to love; the lawyer himself is shown reaching for the question, “who is my neighbor,” precisely because he suspects he cannot fully answer the deeper one. The conclusion the parable is built to reach is that “no one can gain eternal life by doing the things of the law,” not that someone finally can.⁶ Boettner states the same point as a general pattern: language that looks like an offer of self-help is often meant to expose inability rather than confirm ability, driving the hearer to cry out for help rather than attempt the law on his own strength.⁷

If the parable’s point is to expose inability rather than to teach ethics, does “Go, and do likewise” carry any real force? McCormick answers that it does, just not as the primary point. He is explicit that he is “not suggesting that there is absolutely no call to personal obedience in this story”; Jesus holds out the Samaritan’s mercy as “a good example to follow,” and the whole scene still functions to encourage good works and mercy toward all kinds of people. What keeps that call from becoming a path to earn eternal life is the frame Luke puts around it: the story opens with the lawyer’s question about inheriting eternal life and his motive of self-justification, which together indicate that exposing that motive, not supplying a new strategy for satisfying it, is the story’s primary aim.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Ken Magnuson, “2. Ethics and Moral Reasoning,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩
The Shorter Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 42. ↩
The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 122. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 1. Text confirmed against the Westminster Confession’s identical chapter 19 as quoted in Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 128, with the 1689’s own chapter 19 confirmed to affirm the same wording in Carol Man Fen Chen, “Post-Reformation Development of Covenant Theology,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 196. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, para. 5. Text quoted, for both the Westminster Confession and the 1689 together, from Richard C. Barcellos, as cited in Chen, “Covenant Obedience in the New Covenant,” in “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 259-260. ↩
Micah John McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 137-177, at 156-157. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 133-134. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 8, sec. 55. ↩
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chap. 8, sec. 56. ↩
McCormick, “Humanity’s Obedience for Eternal Life After the Fall,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 157-158n46. ↩