Jesus and the lawyer did not just happen to run into each other and stop for a friendly conversation. Both men were in the same place at the same time by design. Although the place is not specified on this particular occasion, many similar narratives indicate that they normally took place in a local synagogue. Modern readers imagine a synagogue to be a building where worshipers gathered on the Sabbath. However, so far, archaeologists have failed to find the remains of any buildings dating back to the time of Jesus that seem likely to have been used as houses of worship that would serve the needs of a Jewish village. Given this result, it is much more likely that the word "synagogue" refers to the gathering of the people and that this gathering most likely took place in the village marketplace. An itinerant preacher like Jesus, then, would come to the center of town on the Sabbath, or any other day, and offer to preach to the people.

Meanwhile, up in Jerusalem, the priests who run the temple and perform the sacrifices, wanted to make sure that the temple retained its status as the focal point of Jewish identity and the source of orthodox teaching. They did this by sending lawyers out to visit the towns and villages where they would instruct the people in the observance of the Torah and, of course, monitor any unauthorized itinerant preaching that was going on. To thicken the plot, the Pharisees developed a spirituality based on achieving ritual purity required of priests for themselves, with the hope of converting the whole nation to this same level of purity so that Israel will become a pure nation. They, too, sent out emissaries to teach the people gathered in the marketplaces and also to check up on any free-lance itinerant preaching. The lawyers and the Pharisees, then, would have known pretty quickly when the son of a carpenter from Nazareth got into the habit of usurping their job of instructing the people in the Torah. It was no coincidence, then, that when Jesus put in an appearance in a village, a lawyer or a Pharisee, or both, would also be on hand.

Although the crowd of listeners is not mentioned in the narration of this exchange, not even to give their reaction, their presence had a great effect on what was said. Jesus and the lawyer were not primarily speaking to each other; they were speaking to the crowd. The crowd's presence upped the ante considerably because either Jesus or the lawyer could touch off a mimetic movement with potentially catastrophic results. Some of the people gathered might be rooting for their home team while others perhaps hoped that the official authority figure would put the local agitator in his place. Still others might just be keeping a sharp ear out for which bandwagon to jump on. Being mindful of the crowd of listeners has another, more important, value. We are invited to join this crowd of listeners and to listen carefully ourselves.

In the broader context of Luke's Gospel, the event immediately preceding this exchange between Jesus the lawyer is the return of the seventy disciples from their highly successful preaching and healing mission. (Luke 10: 17-24) One can imagine what must have gone through the lawyer's mind when he entered a village to teach Torah to the people only to find the most notorious free-lance teacher welcoming back a large group of gloating followers. As if that were not enough, he would hear this preacher tell the disciples that he saw Satan fall from the sky, that God has revealed to infants those things that He has hidden from the wise, and that the disciples have seen what prophets and kings desired to see and hear but did not see or hear. Surely the lawyer would catch the implication that this teacher and his followers think they know something that he, the one trained in Torah, does not know. Worse, the people of the village are also likely to think that it is the preacher and his followers who have the deeper knowledge unless he does something about it right on the spot. That Luke intends the lawyer's question to be an immediate response to this previous episode is made quite clear when he says "just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus."

The lawyer's question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" is hardly a request for information and insight. As in similar incidents when the Gospel writers say that Jesus knew what was in the hearts of his questioners, there is no need for supernatural intuition. The setting makes it quite clear that the lawyer is throwing down the gauntlet. He is purposely asking a question that is sufficiently vague that even a profound and well-crafted answer should furnish a bone for the lawyer to pick. Jesus realizes this and so he returns the question: "What is written in the Law? What do you read there?"

The lawyer, of course, has to give an answer. He can hardly say that he doesn't know what is written in the Torah. However, he probably thinks he still holds the higher ground. Although he has been foiled in his attempt to get a response that he could tear apart, he is given the opportunity to do what he does best: instruct the people gathered around him in Torah. The lawyer knows that he has to give an answer that is direct, to the point, and comprehensive. One of the cultivated skills of a lawyer is the ability to bring together commandments of the Torah that are scattered in different places. In this case, he puts a verse from Deuteronomy up against a verse from Leviticus to give this answer: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." (Deut. 6:5 & Lev. 19:18) After delivering such a stunning answer, the lawyer was most likely preening himself for what he had said. Surely he had shut up the unauthorized teacher. Many faces in the crowd were glowing with admiration.

But the lawyer's triumph is short-lived. Jesus replies: "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live." Suddenly, the table are turned. Jesus' compliment is a stiff challenge. In being goaded into giving his brilliant answer, the lawyer is trapped into being validated by the itinerant teacher! It is the lawyer's job to validate another teacher or to prove him guilty of false teaching. If the lawyer leaves the scene at this point, he comes off second best because it is Jesus who has appraised his teaching and passed judgment on it. Luke says he wanted "to justify himself." That is, he wanted to be the one who was considered the more righteous by the crowd. In order to accomplish this objective, he must put Jesus to shame in some way. He must throw another challenge, a challenge that Jesus cannot deflect back on to him. This time, Jesus will have to say enough for the lawyer to reveal the falsity of his teaching and capitalize on it.

There are two basic avenues the lawyer can take in making his challenge. The first avenue is to weigh the relative force of the two commandments cited if they should conflict, or seem to. If one were to be in a situation where one had to choose between love of God and love of neighbor, what does one choose? The second avenue is to the define the scope of one or more of the terms. The key term at hand for dissection is the word Neighbor.

It is worth examining the avenue the lawyer elected not to take. His choice was not arbitrary. In the event of a conflict between showing love of God and love of neighbor, the lawyer knew the answer. That was not the problem. The problem was the crowd. If Jesus and the lawyer were alone, having a discussion over coffee, he might have taken this the avenue. But the crowd listening to this discussion changed all that. Why?

The lawyer was astute enough to know that the villagers faced the conflict between love of God and love of neighbor every day. It wasn't a matter of whether or not one had nice feelings towards God or towards one's neighbor. It was a matter of economics. The priestly class in Jerusalem levied a temple tax on all Jews. The tax was for a good cause. It supported the sacrificial cult in the temple, the focal point of Jewish identity. The tax supported the priests so that they could negotiate with God for seasonable weather and good crops, etc. If you love God, you pay the temple tax. The problem was, it was not possible for most of the peasants in Judea and Galilee to pay in full the temple tax year after year and have enough money left over to care adequately for their families and anybody else in need. Many people lacked the economic resources to do either. As a result, just about every peasant was seriously in arrears in their payment of the temple tax. Since the people hadn't paid up, the priests were off the hook if their sacrifices didn't provide seasonable weather. When it came to assigning the blame, you could blame the peasants who hadn't paid their taxes. As a result, the temple staff still got a lot of money from the peasants, but not enough money so that they had to worry about how effective their sacrifices were. So, day by day, the villagers listening in on the debate anguished over when to love God by sending money for the temple tax and when to love their neighbor by providing for their own families and other needy people in the village.

A debate between Jesus and some Pharisees recorded in Mark (Mk. 7:9-14) makes it pretty clear that Jesus know how the lawyer would adjudicate the conflict of commandments if push came to shove. On that occasion, Jesus accused his opponents of nullifying the commandment to honor one's parents by making their estate korban, i.e. dedicated to the temple. In this instance, the lawyers and pharisees had taken the position that if somebody has to choose between providing for family or paying for the temple sacrifices, the choice should fall on the latter. Jesus' words at the time did not endear the lawyers and the Pharisees to the crowd, and the lawyer surely knew that stating the same opinion in front of the listeners this time around would not increase his popularity. So, although the lawyer knew how to one should resolve a choice between the two commandments cited, he also knew how the people felt about that position. If he should fling this question of the relative wight of these commandments at Jesus, Jesus would likely say something to the effect that love of neighbor came first. After all, Jesus had a reputation for not being too keen on the sacrifices in the temple. By his answer, Jesus would convict himself of heresy out of his own mouth, but the lawyer might not live long enough to enjoy having won the debate. A stinging reply, heretical as it might be, might light a fire fueled by the resentment of the villagers that could end up with one lawyer strung up on a tree. No, that avenue was too dangerous. It was much better to ask Jesus to define the term Neighbor. Surely there would be plenty of room to find something in Jesus' answer to that question to shame him in front of the crowd and turn it away from the unauthorized teacher. The lawyer knew quite well who was a neighbor and who wasn't. He was not asking for information or insight. The trick was to catch Jesus stepping over the line in his definition. As it happened, Jesus stepped over the line by several miles, but not without setting a few booby traps, for all his listeners, the lawyer included.

Jesus begins his reply by presenting the image of a man who is attacked by robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He is stripped, robbed, and left for dead. Since this road was notorious at the time for the dangers it posed to travelers, the scenario proposed here was not merely hypothetical. This was something that could happen to any of the listeners who ventured into the same territory. It is significant that out of the four main characters in this narration, the man attacked on the road is the only one who is not identified by nationality or social standing. All we know is that this man is a victim. He might be a righteous man, or he could be a tax collector who uses unscrupulous methods to extort money from the poor. Yet here, we know him only as a victim. Since road robbers often work in gangs, the detail that it is a gang that does this job may not be particularly significant. On the other hand, a strong, armed bandit could have done the job himself. With the potential of a mimetic reaction of the crowd that could result in collective violence on the spot, however, it makes sense for Jesus to present an image of collective violence in the story in order to draw sympathy to a victim of such violence. The lawyer was not the only one who feared this possibility redounding on himself. Jesus feared it, too. This detail, then can be construed as a subtle signal that Jesus does not want to incite the crowd to a violent reaction against the lawyer any more than he wishes it to happen against himself. It is worth noting in this regard that, if Jesus had played the crowd just right in Jerusalem, the mob violence directed at him just might have been redirected at the Romans or the Jewish leaders. The result would have been a bloodbath, but it could have been done. Jesus didn't even try.

In the story, the first two people to come along and pass by on the other side are identified as a priest and a Levite. Here, Jesus speaks to the question that the lawyer did not ask. The priest and the Levite are not necessarily being cold-hearted in passing by the wounded traveler. According to the Torah, touching a corpse makes a man ritually impure. A sense of caution would lead both of them not to take any chances on getting near the man to see if he is dead or alive. If they should become ritually impure by touching a corpse, they would not be able to perform their religious obligations on behalf of the people for a time. That is to say, Jesus presents two men faced with a conflict between following to commandment to love God and the commandment to love their neighbor, and both of them choose the first. This dilemma would likely have affected any Pharisee or sympathizer with that party in the same way. The Pharisees, though laymen, had taken it upon themselves to maintain all of the purity laws traditionally required only of the priestly class. Between the resentment aroused by the temple tax and the graphic description of the victim, the sympathy of the crowd is almost surely for the man lying wounded by the road rather than with the priests and their ritual purity. This is the reaction Jesus wants and expects. The problem is that these same listeners are likely to feel self-righteous about being morally superior to the lawyer in their midst and the priests and Levites at the temple. Realizing this, Jesus has a big-bending curve ball up his sleeve for his next pitch.

The third man to come along is identified as a Samaritan. The crowd's expectation would be that if the priest and the Levite passed by on the other side, the Samaritan would run the other way. Today, we grow up hearing the phrase "the good Samaritan" used for anyone who helps others in need. In Jesus' day, the phrase was considered a contradiction in terms. The Samaritans were heretics who had built their own temple in the wrong spot and who had their own system of worship. The Samaritans were not the kind of people who performed good deeds. Jesus' disciples would have felt this way with particular intensity. Just before the successful preaching and healing mission, they were denied hospitality in a Samaritan village. (Lk. 9:51-56) When Jesus went on to recount in detail how the Samaritan helped the wounded man, the lawyer would not have been the only listener to experience a tightening in the stomach. The same would have happened to most or all of the villagers and even sharply to Jesus' disciples, who had asked Jesus if they could command God to send fire down upon the Samaritans who turned them away. In order to get any feel at all for how it should feel to hear this parable, we must each imagine the group of people we fear and hate the most and then imagine a person from that very group doing what Jesus says the Samaritan did. For Jesus to go on with the details of what the Samaritan did must have poured salt into the emotional wounds of all of the listeners. One would think that it would be enough just to administer First Aid, call the police and, in a pinch, drive an injured person to the hospital. But how many people encountering a similar situation will offer to pay all medical expenses? The Samaritan has done far more than is required by the call of duty.

What Jesus has done with the way he told the story, is unite all of his listeners. However, instead of uniting them against a victim, he has united them around a victim. Everybody had to agree, at least publically, that the victim should be helped. It was not possible to deny it without looking bad front of everybody. If anybody though the priest and the Levite were the ones who did the right thing (and theoretically, the lawyer thought just that) that person could hardly admit it. With everybody united in sympathy for the victim, everybody was also united in favor of any person who should help this victim. Yet when Jesus brought on the Samaritan, the listeners were immediately united in hatred of him even more strongly than they were united against the priest and the Levite. When Jesus turned the tables on his listeners by making the Samaritan out to be the good guy, it was not possible to deny that this bad guy was the one who did the right thing. The result was that the crowd united in hatred of the Samaritan was suddenly reunited in admiration for the Samaritan, however grudgingly. When we recall the way Jesus, along with his disciples, had just been treated by a group of Samaritans, it becomes apparent that Jesus was putting into practice his teaching that we should love our enemy. It wasn't just the enemy of the villagers and the enemy of the lawyer whom Jesus cast as the good guy; it was Jesus' own enemy who was cast in this way.

It is no accident that it was a marginal person who performed the act of mercy. This is a typical theme in Luke's Gospel, where the forgotten people who have no real place in society are the special focus of God's love and mercy. Beyond that, however, the implication is that a marginal person has the greater freedom to do the right thing. The attached a person is to a social position, the less freedom of conscience that person has. The priest and the Levite each had a position to maintain and that position did not allow for stopping to check up on a person who might be alive and in need of assistance, but also who might be dead and therefore a source of ritual impurity. A Pharisee would have faced the same dilemma. A Samaritan was so far beyond the pale that he had no ritual impurity to lose. Moreover, the Samaritan would hardly be troubled over whether or not to spend his economical resources on his family, others in need, or towards his temple tax. So, when the Samaritan found the injured man by the side of the road, he was free to expend as much of his material and financial resources on the victim as the victim needed. Perhaps the Samaritan was rich and could easily afford what he gave out, but we should not assume that.

Jesus has, of course, defined the scope of the term Neighbor in such a way that nobody could argue with him. He has also answered the first question, the question that the lawyer chose not to ask. Posing the question of the relative weight of two commandments puts those commandments into a mimetic rivalry where one commandment wins and one loses if push comes to shove. In this case, God and neighbor are brought together in a relationship of rivalry and one of them has to win out over the other. In this parable, however, Jesus makes it clear that God does not compete with humans for love. By making it impossible for anybody in the crowd to deny that stopping to help the victim would be the right thing to do, Jesus makes it equally impossible to deny that it is God's will that the victim be helped. It is not God's will that temple sacrifices be made at the expense of an injured man on the side of the road.

When Jesus posed the question to the lawyer: "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?", it was a rhetorical question. He could hardly give any other answer than the answer he gave: "the one who showed him mercy." He must have choked on those words, because they conceded defeat in the debate with the unauthorized itinerant preacher. The lawyer had been trapped into giving the unpalatable answer out of his own mouth the way Simon the Leper was trapped into admitting that the debtor who was forgiven the greater debt had the greater love for the master, when he must have known that his words would lead to the contemptible sinful woman looking better than he. (Lk. 7: 36-50) The lawyer's only consolation was that the villagers around him, too, were stung badly enough to keep them from making the most of their opportunity to celebrate the defeat of a big shot. The lawyer softened the blow to himself by identifying the helper only as the one who showed mercy to the injured man. He still could not admit that the merciful man was a Samaritan.

If we stop the story of this encounter here, we end with Jesus winning his debate with a lawyer. That is, we have a story of a contest where two men compete and one man wins while the other man loses. Jesus could walk on to the next village to the cheers of the crowd, subdued cheers, though, because of the Samaritan in the story. Jesus, however, responded to the lawyer's admission of defeat with four words that change everything: "Go and do likewise." To the lawyer, those words were a challenge that he be willing to compromise his ritual purity for the sake of a similar victim. But after saying those four words, the lawyer was no longer singled out as the loser of a debate with Jesus. Instead, all of the listeners join the lawyer in facing the same moral challenge. Allegorical interpretations to the effect that Jesus was the Good Samaritan who came to the aid of humanity wounded by sin and the devil are not taken seriously today by many people. However, in this case, such an interpretation hits the mark by noting that Jesus modeled in his whole life on the mercy modeled in this story by the Samaritan. That is, Jesus himself faced the same moral challenge that he presented to his listeners, in solidarity with them. These four words refocused the crowd on their sympathy for the victim, only this time, the focus was extended into real life. Anybody could encounter such a victim at any time and be called upon to help. When everybody's attention is drawn to the victim, there are no more debating points to be won. There is no contest. There is only God's kingdom where nobody loses and everybody wins.