On Reading the Good Samaritan Story Allegorically

* From David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible), pgs. 150-151)

The theme of the conjoined commandment to love God in a total, all-encompassing way, and out of that to love the neighbor as oneself, was regarded by medieval writers as one single and basic rule for the Christian life. They referred to it as the law of love. There is much biblical warrant for this compression...The good Samaritan story casts a practical light on the love of God for the kosmon ("world") (John 3:16), which those who reciprocate his love are called to imitate at many levels. There is a polyvalent aspect to the good Samaritan, who reminds us by his action that on the biblical definition, "God is love" (1 John 4:16) is a wider sense than might occur to us. Since Jesus himself is the "image of the Father" (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15; 3:10; Heb. 1:3), what he is teaching us in such passages is primary theology, intensifying what he has already told his disciples earlier, namely that to follow him is to walk in a moral way of life in which everything is verified or falsified in terms of actual godly behavior rather than formal or legal understanding. He is also showing them poetically that they are called to nothing less than to imitate him as imago Dei, the divine prototype (cf. 2 Cor. 3:18)...Jesus commits all his powers to imitating his Father. Inviting us to imitate him, he invites us to imitate his own imitation. It need hardly be said that this standard entirely alters the perspective in which questions about obligation or justice may be raised and considered. The totalizing character of the commandment to love the Lord your God with all one's "heart", "consciousness", "will", and "intelligence" (Luke 10:27) makes the radical character of the kind of neighbor-love the good Samaritan exhibits a necessary corollary: neighbor love, too, must be total and unstinting. The familiar Calvinist distinction between faith and works in regard to eternal life is not at issue here. What is at issue is the "perfection" to which we are called, in imitation of Christ to present ourselves as "a living sacrifice" (Rom. 12:1) and so to conform to the "perfect will of God" (12:2)...To follow Jesus will not only take us out of our comfort zone, as was suggested to would-be disciples in the latter part of Luke 9; when we put the totality of our personhood into loving God, we will find ourselves axiomatically living out his love in a self-sacrificial way toward others. This too is imitatio Christi, as perhaps Origen, Ambrose, Theophylact, and others also intended, when in their allegorical readings of the parable they identified the good Samaritan with Christ. 

Thus, while most of the exegesis of this parable is moral theology, reflecting the tropological or moral force of the text (which indeed was its point in the immediate context), the allegorical sense of the text is an added dimension that struck early Christian interpreters as a characteristic register for further contemplation of the believer. On this level the parable reveals itself as essentially christological, broadly hinting at Christ's full soteriological identity, his own saving ministry to a sin-wounded world. For Origen, as for Ambrose and Augustine after him, we can see in the poor traveler, descending from Jerusalem, this visio pacis, toward Jericho, a city identified with the sin of the world, a kind of everyman figure, embodying in his descent from divine intention the universal journey into the fallen world of the first Adam. On this reading the robbers are the demonic assaults and depredations of sin, which indeed leave us bereft of substance and half dead. The priest and Levite are figures for the law and the prophets, or for the establishments of religiosity, which do not minister to our condition. Christ is the good Samaritan, the one regarded as outcast by these religiously proper persons and institutions but who actually seeks and saves the lost at his own expense. The pandocheion or inn is like the church, which receives the wounded first Adam for whom the Second Adam, Christ, alone made saving provision. This Christ, moreover, will return to his church and restore all accounts one day. At this level, the parable of the good Samaritan is not only an explicit guide to loving our neighbor as ourselves but also tacitly and more deeply an insight into the history of human salvation as the early church saw it revealed in scripture and fulfilled in the ministry of Christ. In Luke's schema for his Gospel, it comes near the midpoint of his symmetrically organized narrative and is in the spiritual sense a synecdoche, a precis of the whole biblical story of salvation."