Context and Theme
The context in which Jesus tells this parable is important for understanding what the parable itself means. The Gospel’s narrator reveals that the legal expert talking to Jesus is attempting “to justify himself ” when he asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” His intention, therefore, is to limit the understanding of who rightly can be considered his neighbor, to limit the range of people whom he must love. The parable responds by expanding the notion of who qualifies as a person’s neighbor.
Message
1. The lawyer’s question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ is turned round the other way in Christ’s form of it at the close. It is better to ask ‘Whose neighbour am I?’ than ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The lawyer meant by the word ‘a person whom I am bound to love.’ He wanted to know how far an obligation extended which he had no mind to recognize an inch
farther than he was obliged. Probably he had in his thought the Rabbinical limitations which made it as much duty to ‘hate thine enemy’ as to ‘love thy neighbour.’ Probably, too, he accepted the national limitations, which refused to see any neighbours outside the Jewish people.
2. ‘Neighbourhood,’ in his judgment, implied ‘nearness,’ and he wished to know how far off
the boundaries of the region included in the command lay. There are a great many of us like him, who think that the obligation is a matter of geography, and that love, like force, is inversely as the square of the distance. A good deal of the so-called virtue of ‘patriotism’ is of this spurious sort. But Christ’s way of putting the question sweeps all such limitations aside. ‘Who became neighbour to’ the wounded man? ‘He who showed mercy on him,’ said the lawyer, unwilling to name the Samaritan, and by his very reluctance giving the point to his answer which Christ wished to bring out. We are not to love because we are neighbours in any geographical sense, but we become neighbours to the man farthest from
us when we love and help him. The relation has nothing to do with proximity.
3. The condition of neighbor does not depend on the race, on the fact that they are relatives, on sympathy, on closeness or on religion. Humanity is not divided into neighbor and not neighbor. To know who is our neighbor depends on us: to arrive, to see, to be moved with compassion and to get close. If you get close, the other becomes your
neighbor! It depends on you and not on the other! Jesus overturns everything and takes away from the doctor the security which could come to him from the Law.
4. In answer to an academic, theological question, “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus tells the scribe not WHAT or WHO is his neighbour but to go and BE a neighbour. The story has a secondary lesson for us about stereotyping. For the Jews there was the negative stereotype of the Samaritan (which was probably reciprocated). Our world today is full of stereotypes. We have stereotypes of practically every race and ethnic group and skin colour and they can influence our attitudes deeply and often unconsciously.