The Good Samaritan (KJV) — Luke 10:25-37

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

The whole law in two lines — Deuteronomy 6:5 joined to Leviticus 19:18. In Luke it is the lawyer, not Jesus, who recites it.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

The third traveller sees exactly what the first two saw. The difference the story records is what he felt, and then what he did.

And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

The lawyer asked for a definition and is handed an instruction — and he answers without ever saying the word “Samaritan.”

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

The “lawyer” is not a courtroom advocate but a scholar of the law of Moses — the man in the room whose job was knowing this answer. “Tempted” carries its 1611 sense of tested rather than seduced: he is examining the teacher, not seeking help. And notice the shape of his question. It asks what to do, and it treats eternal life as an inheritance to be secured. Jesus takes both of those terms as they stand and hands them back at the end of the passage.

What is written in the law? how readest thou?

Two questions, and the second is the sharper one. Not only what does the text say, but how do you read it — a distinction that turns out to be the whole issue, because the lawyer can quote the commandment perfectly and still be looking for its edges. Matthew and Mark record the same exchange about the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-40, Mark 12:29-31), but there Jesus states the two commandments himself. Only in Luke does the questioner recite them.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself

Two verses from two books, joined: Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. The KJV of Deuteronomy reads “heart, soul, and might”; here the faculties run to four — heart, soul, strength, mind. The second half is the one that will be argued over, and its own wording in Leviticus supplies the reason: “thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The commandment sits inside a sentence about one's own people, so the boundary question is a real one — though sixteen verses later the same chapter extends the love to the foreigner (Leviticus 19:34).

Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live

Jesus agrees with him. The exchange could have ended here, and the words he uses echo Leviticus 18:5 — “which if a man do, he shall live in them.” What follows is not a correction of the lawyer's theology but a response to what he does next, which is to ask for the fine print.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

Luke states the motive outright: the man is willing to justify himself. He is not asking who needs him; he is asking where his obligation stops — a definition narrow enough that he can be sure he has kept it. Every line of the story that follows is the answer to this question, and the story refuses to give him the kind of answer he asked for.

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead

“Went down” is literal geography, not idiom: the road drops more than three thousand feet in some seventeen miles, out of the Judean hills through bare desert to a city below sea level — lonely country with cover for anyone waiting beside it. Note what the robbers leave behind. The man is stripped, so his clothing cannot mark him out; he is half dead, so he cannot speak for himself. No name, no nation, no status. Whoever stops has to decide what he owes a body in the road before he can possibly know who is in it.

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side

Then the Levite: “came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side” (verse 32). Both are temple men, and both, like the wounded man, are going down — away from Jerusalem, their duty behind rather than ahead of them. Luke gives no reason for what they do. Readers have long supplied one, since a corpse made a man unclean for seven days (Numbers 19:11) and priests were forbidden to defile themselves for the dead (Leviticus 21:1), and a body that is “half dead” is exactly the case those rules make hardest. But the parable withholds all of that. What it records is only the sequence: he saw, and he passed by on the other side.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him

The seeing is the same; the third verb is new. Behind “had compassion” is splanchnizomai, formed from the word for the inward parts — the King James renders the related noun as “bowels of mercies” (Colossians 3:12), which is blunt but exact: this is feeling in the gut, not a settled opinion. Luke uses the verb three times in his gospel, and the company it keeps says something. It is what the Lord feels for the widow at Nain (7:13), what this man feels for a stranger in a ditch, and what the father feels when he sees the prodigal a great way off (15:20).

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him

Compassion turns into a run of verbs — went, bound, pouring, set, brought, took care — and every one of them costs the Samaritan something. Oil and wine were the ordinary dressing for a wound, and they are his; the beast is his, which means he is now walking; the inn is a delay on a journey he was in the middle of. He also does the thing the road makes dangerous: he stops, on a route where robbers are demonstrably still working, and kneels beside a stranger with his back to it.

he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee

A “penny” in the King James is the Roman denarius — a day's wage for a labourer, as the vineyard parable makes plain: “when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day” (Matthew 20:2). So the Samaritan leaves two days' wages and then removes the ceiling on his own liability, promising to settle whatever more the man's recovery costs. And he commits to coming back. Mercy in this parable is not a moment of feeling on a roadside; it is an arrangement, with a stranger's name on the bill.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

This is not the lawyer's question. He asked who is my neighbour — who qualifies, out there, as the object of my duty. Jesus asks which of the three was neighbour to the man in the ditch. The word has moved from a category to be identified to a thing to be done, and the point of view has moved with it: the parable is told from the road, where the only question that matters is which of the three men coming your way will stop.

He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise

The lawyer answers correctly and cannot quite say it — not “the Samaritan,” but “he that shewed mercy on him.” And the reply lands where the conversation started. The man opened with “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”; he is sent away with a verb and no definition at all. He never gets the boundary he came for.

The commandment the lawyer quotes — and the sentence it sits in, which frames the love as owed to “the children of thy people.” This is the verse his question is trying to measure.

Sixteen verses later, the same chapter already answers him: the stranger who dwells with you is to be loved as yourself, on the grounds that Israel was once the stranger.

Why the choice of hero was a scandal, stated flatly by a Samaritan woman at a well: the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.

The Sermon on the Mount pushes the same boundary from the other side — where the parable makes an enemy the neighbour, this makes the enemy the object of love outright.

The parable's test, put as a question: seeing a brother in need and shutting up your bowels of compassion from him — how dwelleth the love of God in that?