Prioritizing love
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
He answered: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Luke 10:25-28
In Luke 10, a Torah teacher asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus affirms his response: to love God and love neighbor. This man was not asking how to earn an afterlife of salvation but how to practically live in such a way that brings heaven on earth now and in the age to come. Entering God’s kingdom is by grace, but we live out our salvation through loving God and others.
There are 613 commands traditionally enumerated in the Torah (about which only a third have practical application to gentile believers today). When life is complicated, it’s impossible to follow them perfectly. For example, if a man’s donkey fell into a pit, you are to help it out, but you’re not supposed to do work on the Sabbath, so what should you do if the donkey falls in on the Sabbath? You prioritize the more important and set aside the lesser. The man’s question was partially about prioritizing the greatest command, which everyone agreed was the “shema”.
The “shema” is a set of passages that includes Deuteronomy 6:4-5, devoting one’s entire allegiance to God alone. Prayed a few times daily, “shema” means “hear” or “obey” and is a central passage to faith like we view John 3:16. The passage instructs us to obey and listen to God alone, loving him with all your heart (internal thoughts and emotions), soul (physical actions and body), and might (external resources and influence).
Sages debated what came next in priority. The Sadducees taught purity laws around the temple were #2, with the Sabbath shortly behind that. Pharisees, such as Paul’s rabbi Gamaliel, prioritized welfare of one’s neighbor as #2. The 10 commandments and later Micah 6:8 distilled the 613 laws into two categories: our vertical relationship with God and our horizontal relationships with each other. These two summarize all 613. They shouldn’t be in conflict: we show our love for God by loving our neighbor. In fact, Jesus links these two commands (Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18) by the shared word in Hebrew which translates as “and you shall love”.
Bad neighbors
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Luke 10:29
The man then asks, so if I’m to love my neighbor, who does that include? Leviticus 19:18 tells us to love the neighbor who is “like you”. That means only those closest to me, right? Well, later in that same chapter (verse 34) it also says to love the foreigner or stranger who is “like you”. We shouldn’t love others only if they are like us (a filter); we should love others because they are like us (a reason). Despite differences, superficial and deep, they too are made in God’s image and deserving of his love.
This leads us to the parable proper. This is the only parable mentioning a physical place: Jericho. The mountainous road down from Jerusalem to Jericho was a dangerous one, and muggings were not uncommon. An Israelite man meets bandits who leave him half-dead. Jesus sets up a 3-part story to deliver a massive punchline, like jokes that start with “a priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…”: two similar examples and a contrasting one.
First comes a priest, likely a Sadducee. Leviticus 21 clearly states priests are not to become unclean by touching any dead person other than close family. The priest sees the half-dead man and possibly thinks, “if I help him out and he dies in my care, I will have sinned and won’t be able to perform my duties at the temple without a complicated purification ritual. He’s not close enough of kin to put my purity at risk.” However, the man wasn’t yet dead, and by prioritizing his religious piety above his love of others, he acted wrongfully. By not loving his neighbor he was failing to love God.
Next comes a Levite, probably also a Sadducee. Priests were a subset of Levites; Levites were the equivalent of church volunteers and worship team members. He was not obligated to follow all the priestly regulations and was headed home away from the Jerusalem temple, not towards it. If he was rendered impure by helping, a ritual washing would have sufficed when he was at the temple the next time he was on duty. But possibly out of fear of an ambush by hidden bandits, following the priest’s example, or some other unease, he turns a blind eye to the man’s need and carefully steps around the injured man. In playing it safe, he prioritized his own comfort above love for neighbor and also sinned.
The teacher asking the initial question would have next expected, per the typical 3-part structure, that the third to arrive would be a Pharisee. Unlike those temple leaders, the teacher expected to be justified and honored: surely a man like himself with the right priorities would take care of that hurting man. Imagine his surprise when Jesus says one word: Samaritan.
“Good” Samaritans
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.
Luke 10:33
Who were the Samaritans? A brief history lesson: the nation of Israel was divided into northern and southern kingdoms. Assyria conquered the northern kingdom in 722 BC, exiling some of the people and replacing them with their own. The Israelites in this area of Samaria intermarried with the Assyrians and mixed their culture and worship of God with pagan traditions. Later in 586 BC, Babylon conquered the southern kingdom of Judea and exiled most of the people there. When the southern kingdom returned from exile, these new half-Jewish/half-Assyrian Samaritans were in the land.
The Samaritans thought of themselves as the true people of God: they had remained faithful to God by preserving ownership of the land, at the cost of adapting to changing cultures around them when needed. The Judeans (Jews), however, knew they were the true Israelites: they had remained faithful in bloodline, culture, and worship, not bending to the world, even though they had endured exile.
Heated rivalries between these two groups were rampant in Jesus’ day. Judeans had burned down the Samaritan temple at Mt Gerizim. Samaritans had desecrated the Jerusalem temple. Imagine the worst religious conflicts and racial tensions combined and multiply that by ten. When the disciples weren’t welcomed by the Samaritans near the end of Luke 9, it’s no surprise they wanted to call down fire from heaven on them!
There’s no way Jesus would have called heretical Samaritans their neighbor, right? Sadducees only included fellow Jews as neighbors, and Pharisees also included some Romans and pagans but never those “subhuman” half-breeds. So why a parable about a Samaritan and an injured man near Jericho?
2 Chronicles 28 tells of a time when Israelites from the southern kingdom were defeated and captured by their enemies. Israelites from the northern kingdom came to their rescue and liberated them. Verse 15 states that these northern Israelites of Samaria bandaged the freed captives’ wounds, clothed them, and carried them on their donkeys to Jericho – all details Jesus includes in the parable. This parable was not purely a hypothetical allegory; it was a dramatic reframing of historical events.
The enemies of Jesus’ day had once been their closest allies. Despite generations of conflict separating these groups, Samaritans and Judeans were still neighbors with a shared heritage. Jesus’ message: even outsiders like them are “like you,” worthy of God’s abundant love. We’re used to hearing the message “love your enemy” and often use the phrase “good Samaritan” to simply mean helping someone in need, but Jesus’ shocking words were to show that even our fiercest enemies sometimes show radical compassion better than some of us who seek to honor God religiously.
Love’s consequences
Jewish writings after Jesus claim the first temple’s destruction and exile was due to failing to love God. They also cite the second temple’s destruction a generation after Jesus was due to their failure to love their neighbor. At the end of Luke 13, Jesus laments over the prophetic coming destruction of Jerusalem, foreshadowing the tragic consequences when we ignore his plea for us to love each other.
Instead of asking “who is (or isn’t) my neighbor?”, we should ask “who can I show compassion to today because they are my neighbor?” May we seek unity in pursuing love of both God and neighbor, whether friend or foe. In doing so, we bring heaven to earth and make God visible to a world in need.