A Year in Luke/ActsNäide

In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus allegorically references many of the issues Luke is using this gospel to highlight. The experts in the law and religious leaders had all of the right answers available to them, but they were not living them out. Jesus was trying to demonstrate what it really meant to live out the implications of the law. It is easy to say “love your neighbor,” but living it out can be quite different.

Tom Wright sets the story of the Good Samaritan within the wider framework of Luke’s gospel, the beginning of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem:
“Jesus is himself on the road to Jerusalem - it is perhaps significant that the first parable told on the journey is about people coming and going on the road Jesus himself will shortly tread - and his challenge to Israel is to see that the way of confrontation with Samaritans, Romans and pagans of whatever sort is not the way of living and showing God’s grace. He is urgently offering the way of peace, and only the ‘children of peace’ (10:6) will escape the self-inflicted judgment that will befall those bent on violence.

What lies at the heart of the confrontation with the lawyer, then, is a clash between two quite different visions of what it means to be Israel, God’s people.” (p128, Luke for Everyone).