The Good Samaritan
Though the Good Samaritan is one of the best known and widely preached parables in Jesus' repertory, it appears only in Luke's Gospel, where Jesus gives it in answer to a question meant to ensnare him when “a certain lawyer” asked him what he would have to do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus asked him how he reads the Law on that question, the man replied, “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.”But, he asked when Jesus concurred, “who is my neighbor?”
The Spirit of the Law
Jesus replied by telling the story of a man traveling on the road to Jericho being attacked, stripped, robbed, and left injured on the roadside. A priest and a Levite going that way saw him lying in great pain but passed by without offering aid. But a Samaritan, a member of the untouchable class in the midst of Israel, seeing the man, stopped, dressed his wounds, put him on his donkey and took him to an inn for additional treatment and time to recuperate, telling the innkeeper he would take care of any additional charges that might be accrued the next time he passed that way. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho, though ancient and long traveled, was notoriously dangerous both by the terrain it crossed through treacherous passes, and because of highwaymen like those who beset the victim in Jesus' story.
The priest and Levite fell short of the spirit of the Law. The Samaritan, a member of a sect that claimed to be Jewish but was shunned because they were considered apostate by the orthodox, showed more of the Law's spirit than its representative main advocates in Israel.
The Woman at the Well
John writes that in order to return to Galilee from Judea (from the area of Jerusalem to that of Nazareth and Capernaum) Jesus “had to go through Samaria.” And there he stopped at a well, a center of community life, to rest and get a drink while his disciples went into town to get something for lunch, it being around the sixth hour, which in the way of reckoning in that era meant noon, or about six hours after daybreak.
Jesus didn't have anything to use to draw water from the well, so he waited until a woman from town approached to get her household water, and asked her for a drink. She was taken aback: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask me for a drink, seeing I am a woman of Samaria and the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans?” To this, Jesus replied that if she knew who it was who was asking, she would be asking him for a drink which, once drunk, would quench her thirst forever. And he also revealed that he knew her very heart by describing her sinful past, though they had not met before.
factum
So powerful was Jesus' Good Samaritan parable that, even in today's parlance, a Good Samaritan refers to a stranger who offers help to someone in need. The origins of the Samaritan ethnic and religious minority in Israel have been studied for centuries. DNA tests made on what remains of ethnic Samaritans show that their genetic lines go back to both Jewish and Assyrian ancestors.
The Samaritan woman at the well was so amazed at what Jesus said that she ran to bring the men of her household to meet him, something that the disciples were scandalized to see when they returned. (Presumably it was okay to buy food from the Samaritans, but not to be sociable with them.) Jesus' radical departure from the customs of his generation is in line with his eating with publicans and touching lepers to heal them.
