Why Jesus is the Good Samaritan of the parable
Why does Christ call Himself a Samaritan, accepting a name of reproach – and how does the parable match up to the Incarnation and Redemption?
Why does Christ call Himself a Samaritan, accepting a name of reproach – and how does the parable match up to the Incarnation and Redemption?
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…
How the Good Samaritan reveals Christ’s own hidden charity in the Incarnation.
That our neighbourly duty rests on His redemptive condescension and personal guidance of souls.
Why the inn and innkeeper show the Church’s role in His ongoing care for us.
He shows us that in tending our neighbour we imitate Christ’s costly mercy to us.
For more on the general context of this Parable, see Part I.
The Good Samaritan
The Preaching of the Cross, Part I, Chapter XVII
St. Luke x. 25-37
Story of the Gospels, § 100
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Have we made the wrong assumptions about the Good Samaritan parable and its context?
The Good Samaritan, external rituals and theological debates
The Good Samaritan and using religion as an excuse for neglect
Our Lord is describing himself
The original of the picture is our Lord’s own compassion upon us in becoming Man for our sakes, and in doing for us all that He has done in the dispensation of the Incarnation.
He is Himself the Good Samaritan.
But it is here as elsewhere, when our Lord speaks of His own love and condescension to us. That is, He hints at what He has done, rather than describes it. He gives a few features, but He leaves the most touching and tender of all the manifestations of His charity to be drawn out by others rather than by Himself. So it is when He draws the picture of the Good Shepherd, or of the Father of the Prodigal, or of the Householder, or of the Lord rewarding his servants for their faithfulness. His own language is inadequate as a representation of the truth, as if He chose always to leave much unsaid about His own goodness.
Thus we find it to be in the picture of the Samaritan. He is a ‘certain Samaritan on His journey.’ They had but lately at Jerusalem called Him a Samaritan as a title of reproach, and He had not answered the charge. Now He takes on Himself the name of the outcast nation.
He is on His journey, but He does not tell us that He became a Man for our sakes, that His journey is from no less a place than Heaven, that He is sent by His Father into the world to redeem it by His Blood, and that the end of His journey is His return to Heaven after having opened its gates to us by His death.
This is but the first of a series of reticences. For the description of the traveller who was in so evil a case is a very faint account of the state of man, who had fallen into the hands of his spiritual enemies—fiends whose malice and hateful power so far exceed any human malignity, who have brought about his Fall, wounding him grievously even in his natural powers, and tearing away from him all the rich gifts of grace and knowledge with which his nature had been enriched by the pure bounty of God, Who had created him in great beauty and power, and then had added the preternatural treasury of graces which he had received in the state of original justice in Paradise. The description in the parable leaves all this to the Christian imagination.
The Samaritan comes to this poor sufferer, as it were, by accident, but in truth our Lord set out on His journey for no other object than to save us. The journey of the Samaritan involved no loss or humiliation, whereas the Incarnation involved in our Lord the most stupendous condescension, the emptying of Himself, the making Himself nothing, and more than nothing, in the infinite abasement of the Passion to which it led.
And the binding up the wounds, pouring in oil and wine, may be taken as representing the cleaning and healing effects of the graces administered in the Incarnation.
But what wounds inflicted by robbers who leave a man half dead, can represent the foulness and misery of sin and its effects, or what cleansing and healing by the most effective resources of the physician can answer adequately to the purifying and life-giving sacraments and the other means of grace in which the fruits of the Incarnation are stored us? It was no doubt an excess of charity in the Samaritan to give his own personal service in the case of the wounded man, to set him on his own beast, and conduct him to the inn.
All these details are added in by our Lord for the purpose of hinting at the details of His own action towards us. But, after all, they supply hints which but very faintly represent the magnificent and intense charity to which they refer. The wine and oil cost the Samaritan little, but it is the lifeblood of our Lord that was required for our healing.
The Good Samaritan and the Incarnation
It would take many long considerations to draw out all the depth of meaning contained in the truth that it is our Lord Himself Who tends us in the dispensation of the Incarnation. Beside and beyond all that He alone could do in redeeming us, satisfying for us, purchasing us pardon and grace and the title to Heaven as the sons of God, there is His tender action in dealing with each individual soul one by one with a marvellous wisdom and love, which we shall never understand until all things are made known.
There is His careful personal guidance in bringing home to us, one by one, the persons and the occasions and the opportunities and the means of good, the presence and action of which make up our spiritual history. The setting ‘the wounded man on his own beast’ represents very faintly indeed the sacrifice for and to us of Himself, His whole Human Nature, as the ransom of our captivity, the discharge of our debt, the support of our life, the purchase of our eternal bliss.
The inn is not an inn, but a Home, the abode of God Himself, the Holy Catholic Church. He must find some way of representing in the parable the truth that, in the Church, our Lord, for His own most loving purposes, chooses to guide us and tend us and feed us and guard us by means of others who represent Him, though He is Himself ever present in them, the life and strength and light of all their ministrations.
And thus it is that He adds that beautiful incident of the charge which is given by the Samaritan to the host of the inn, who sets before us the whole hierarchy and army of persons and things, consecrated or not, to whose charge He commits us, or on whom He leaves us to lean, in order, among other reasons, to the cultivation of mutual love by means of mutual services received and paid, and in order also that there may be room for the exercise of virtue, the use of graces, the faithfulness in the discharge of the commandment concerning one another which characterizes this dispensation of His as well as all others, and also for that great joy and delight to Himself and to us which will have their place when He comes again to repay whatever has been done for His sake, and in the discharge of functions committed to us or others by Him.
Thus the whole picture of the Samaritan’s dealings is best accounted for, by considering that our Lord had before His mind His own action in relieving our miseries with all the tender and thoughtful charity which is displayed in the Kingdom of the Incarnation, at so great a cost to Himself, and with so many wonderful inventions of His wisdom, and that this was in His mind when He bade His questioner, ‘Go, and do thou in like manner.’
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The Good Samaritan
Have we made the wrong assumptions about the Good Samaritan parable and its context?
The Good Samaritan, external rituals and theological debates
The Good Samaritan and using religion as an excuse for neglect
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