The Good Samaritan: The Most Known Parable We Still Don’t Live
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C
Deuteronomy 30:10–14 | Psalm 69 or 19 | Colossians 1:15–20 | Luke 10:25–37
We live in a world riddled with division. Wars tear nations apart. Economic injustice drives wedges between rich and poor. Culture wars and digital shouting matches fracture societies and families. Once again, we are looking down on one another. Once again, we have forgotten how to be neighbor.
Into this world, Jesus tells a story we all know. Even people who don’t read the Bible have heard it. It’s printed on posters and carved into stone: the parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet perhaps no other parable is so well-known—and so rarely lived.
Imagine Jesus telling this story today, but instead of a Samaritan, He says “a Palestinian.” What would the reaction be? Would the story still feel noble, or would it suddenly become uncomfortable? Confrontational?
That’s the point.
The parable isn’t merely a guide for helping the wounded. It’s a prophetic strike against the walls that divide us—walls of race, religion, politics, nationality, education, and culture.
Jesus isn’t simply teaching human decency. That should be obvious. He’s teaching mercy that crosses boundaries. He envisions a world where Muslims and Christians, Ukrainians and Russians, Chinese and Japanese see beyond their historical wounds and embrace one another as members of a single human family.
This parable prepares us to understand the fruit of the Cross, as Paul describes in the second reading from Colossians:
“For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him [Christ], and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things... making peace by the blood of His cross” (Col. 1:19–20).
The Cross breaks down, in Paul’s words, “the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14)—a wall that still separates us from one another. The Cross isn’t only about personal salvation. It’s also about the reconciliation of enemies.
The Church Fathers read this parable as a profound symbol of salvation history:
The man going from Jerusalem to Jericho represents humanity after the fall, leaving paradise and exposed to the dangers of sin.
The robbers are the powers of darkness.
The priest and the Levite symbolize a religion that sees—but refuses to act.
The Samaritan—rejected, despised—is Christ Himself.
And the inn? That is the Church, where healing is offered through Word, Sacrament, and the works of mercy.
The parable is framed by two questions.
First, the lawyer asks: “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). He’s drawing boundaries, trying to define love within manageable limits.
But Jesus turns the question around: “Who was neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?” (Luke 10:36).
The shift is seismic.
It’s no longer about who qualifies as our neighbor. It’s about whether we are willing to become one.
It’s not about them. It’s about us.
Christ didn’t die for a select few. He died for the whole world.
He gave His life not just for friends, but “while we were still enemies” (Rom. 5:10).
The priest and the Levite crossed to the other side.
But Christ drew near.
He saw our wounds. He touched them. He bore them.
And now He says to us:
“Go and do likewise.”
To follow Christ is to become neighbor—especially to those the world would rather ignore:
the unborn, the refugee, the prisoner, the persecuted, the enemy, the forgotten.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about defining others.
It is about redefining ourselves.
And in a world that has forgotten that we are all human beings, created in the image and likeness of God—
in a world that has forgotten how to be neighbor—
that may be the loudest Gospel we can preach.