A Wounded Traveler Finds Mercy

Proper 10/5th after Pentecost, Year C; Luke 10: 25-37

Jul 08, 2025

The most engaging narratives among Jesus’ parables may be those unique to Luke’s Gospel: to retain their traditional names, the Prodigal Son, the Rich Fool, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Good Samaritan. We have noted before that the titles we traditionally give to them aren’t always apt, however. It is true of the “Prodigal,” and it may also be true of the “Good Samaritan.” Samaritans are usually treated as the ethnic outcasts par excellence of the gospel tradition. The supposed moral of the story then becomes “well, if even a Samaritan can be a neighbor, everyone can.” The truth is more complicated.

The story, better termed “The Wounded Traveler” or similar, relies on two recognized tensions: first, the relationship between these Jews and Samaritans, and second, the place of purity and sacrifice relative to other divine demands. Modern readers of the parable can often misread the first, and may miss the second.

We noted recently that there was indeed tension between Jews and Samaritans, but this was precisely because they were neighbors, or even siblings. Samaritans were the descendants of the northern Israelite tribes, Jews were the descendants of the southern tribe of Judah that had remained loyal to David’s successors. Jews and Samaritans acknowledged their common ancestry; they were all Israelites. And all Israelites are, in terms of the Law being discussed in this passage, already clearly neighbors. As Anthony Keddie puts it, the story relies on the Samaritan being a “proximate other” rather than a completely alien figure. It was not shocking then to find a Samaritan identified as a neighbor; here however there is something more specific at issue.

The journey of the wounded man who had gone “down from Jerusalem to Jericho” and had been robbed, beaten, and left “half-dead,” seems to mark him as a Jew, and (like Jesus in chapter 9) as a potential pilgrim at the Jerusalem Temple. This possibility is increased by the identities of the first two characters who appear and then pass by; they are a priest and a Levite, both functionaries of the Temple—towards which Jesus is himself journeying as this conversation takes place. Given their roles, the origins of all three travelers are probably not just “the big city,” but the Temple in particular.

These two passers-by are not elite characters, but workers in the sacrificial system. The implication is easily missed, but has to do with purity rules. Since the wounded man is not just badly hurt, but specifically “half-dead” as Luke carefully puts it, he might then die in the care of anyone assisting. This suggests a concern for ritual impurity, contracted by touching a corpse. Impurity was entirely normal, periodically at least, and even required when a family member died (recall the would-be disciple who had to bury his father, 9:59). Yet clerics like these were generally exempted from involvement in the burial of the dead, precisely because they could not then fulfill their divine service (Lev 21:1–4). The detail that each went by “on the other side,” avoiding physical contact, shows they were being scrupulous and true to role rather than just callous.

The use for these two of the same term as for the traveller, “going down” (v. 31; also “similarly,” v. 32), does however suggest that the priest and the Levite are traveling away from the Temple, perhaps after their courses of duty. Without this last detail, it would be tempting to be more sympathetic, given what has just been noted. The scrupulosity to which they are entitled is readily explicable, but not thereby commended.

“Good Samaritan,” Heinrich Nauen c. 1920. Yale University Art Gallery. Nauen (d. 1940) was a German who been awarded the Iron Cross during the Great War; his art was later denounced as degenerate by the Nazis, as they manufactured their “new golden age of arts and culture.”

The Samaritan on the other hand is “journeying” (v. 33), a different term that does not indicate his origin or destination; he is not someone we would expect to go to Jerusalem anyway, and certainly did not have the ritual dilemmas faced by the two Jewish clergy. Yet as an Israelite, he is also observant of the law of Moses, which we should not forget is the subject which occasioned the parable. He also has an emotional response, the same as that of the Father in the “Lost Son” parable (15:20). The details underline a practical recognition of responsibility.

The lesson usually drawn from all this is of universal neighborliness, but this is not quite right. We have already noted that it was not really very remarkable to suggest that Jews and Samaritans were neighbors anyway; it may however still have been confronting to consider what that actually meant. The lawyer “seeking to justify himself” may remind us of modern efforts to ask such questions as a strategy for avoidance; and it is only a step away from that to distort neighborliness into a form of self-interest, as in forms of chauvinistic nationalism and racism. Yet we do all have real social settings, neighborhoods literal and otherwise, wherein some will make more acute demands on us, by their need rather than by our choices or preferences.

So the concept of neighbor—the fact that there are those whose needs are more immediately and concretely presented to all of us— is not dissolved here, but it cannot be turned into a way of talking about chosen or convenient affinity. The neighbor is not the one we already wanted to help, or be helped by, but the one in front of whom we will find ourselves regardless. Neighborliness then does not consist of affinity so much as proximity.

Just as important as Samaritan-Jewish relations or comparable ambiguous relations to understanding the parable is another issue of the day (and any day), that of how ritual and social responsibility combined in divine service. “Worship” in the Bible never means rituals like sacrifices in isolation, but the whole of human obedience to God, that proper love of God and neighbor that is under discussion in the narrative frame (10:27). Often in the prophetic literature, sacrifices and other rituals are criticized when they are substituted for other forms of obedience to divine command (Micah 6:6-8; Hosea 6:6, Isaiah 1:11, Jeremiah 7:21-3 etc.). Emphasizing the formal demands of purity and sacrifice without regard to community and society could actually be faithless, if this meant ignoring the real needs of a “neighbor.”

The whole parable thus seems to enact the line from Hosea (quoted twice in Matthew’s Gospel by Jesus) “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” The two clerics who had been presented as assumed “neighbors” to the wounded man were fellow-Jews, but they were in fact more distant from him precisely as cultic leaders whose sole priority was that form of service. The lawyer, as he answers Jesus’ final question, acknowledges that the true neighbor was the Samaritan, the one who showed mercy, not the ones who administered sacrifice.

Less clear in this passage perhaps, but evident in the Gospel of Luke as a whole (and this travel narrative in particular), is that the questions being raised about the Temple, sacrifice, and divine service are being answered not just in the words of Jesus, but in his actions and his very presence. In saying “go and do likewise,” he claims the prophetic authority to remind every hearer and reader that divine service cannot be fulfilled without love of neighbor.

Andrew’s Version

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