Reversing the Ethical Perspective: What the Allegorical Interpretation of the Good Samaritan Parable Can Still Teach Us

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has one demon describe to another the use he is to make of his subject’s budding interest in becoming less selfish. “A sensible human once said, ‘If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit’; and again, ‘She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.’” Or as Friedrich Nietzsche once put the same point: “he who humbles himself wills to be exalted.” I dare say that individual illustrations of these quips come to mind quite readily for those who have been involved in church life for any length of time. All too often we have occasion to see how our efforts to “help others” can amount to nothing more than alternative expressions of self-assertion. That realization itself is no guarantee that we will not fall into the same trap ourselves, though. While avoiding this pitfall (as any other) is ultimately a matter for grace, there are some useful reference points provided by the tradition that can help us keep before our eyes the crucial distinction between self-serving interference and truly self-giving service. One such reference point, I submit, is the parable of the Good Samaritan, especially as it has been interpreted by the Church Fathers.

The parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37 appears on the surface to be the ideal New Testament text for exhorting selfless service to one’s neighbor in need. At first glance, it would seem that the specific social and ethnic identities of the characters featured in the passage are of central importance to its exhortatory power in this regard. Hence the puzzlement of so many readers when they discover that patristic interpretations of the parable tend to gloss over these particular social identities entirely in order to draw from the text a meaning more expressive of universal doctrinal claims. St. Augustine, for instance, followed the standard reading of his day in identifying the Good Samaritan as a figure of Christ, with the beaten man representing postlapsarian humanity and the priest and Levite symbolizing the ineffectual dispensations of the Old Testament. The question that immediately arises in light of this reading is whether by redirecting the parable’s focus from specific temporal social relations to universal themes of divine–human interaction, this interpretation in fact evacuates the parable’s challenge to social prejudice. Does Augustine’s allegorical reading of the parable completely neutralize its ethical power to challenge those categories of unjust group identification which prejudicially circumscribe neighbor love?

I argue that Augustine’s exegesis is not only reconcilable with the parable’s moral confrontation of social divisions, but that his reading actually constitutes a natural theological outgrowth of the ethical paradigm that makes the best sense out of the actual narration of the parable. It is Augustine’s reading, that allows the parable to function as a real counterforce to the sort of self-absorption that would turn our attempts to serve others’ needs into occasions of self-affirmation. It does so not only by reaffirming the Christian’s constant dependence upon Christ, but also by more consistently embracing of the viewpoint of “the outsider.”

Taking the text on its own terms in its own context, we discover the story to be a rhetorical engagement deeply rooted in the cultural attitudes and religious practices of first-century Palestine. The parable is given as a response to a challenge issued to Jesus by an expert in the Jewish law who, the text says, “stood up to test him.” In his article “Jesus and the Reduction of Group Conflict,” Philip Esler argues that this exchange in Luke is a classical example of the social dynamic of “challenge and riposte” found in ancient Mediterranean culture. ¹ In Esler’s words, this sort of challenge represents “an attempt to enter the social space of another, roughly one’s social equal, with the aim of winning honor from the audience through success in the exchange that ensues.” ² Jesus rebuffs the lawyer’s initial challenge by asking him what the law says, thereby eliciting from him the twofold love command. The lawyer, however, poses a follow-up question, either to prolong the contest or to reveal his real challenge for which the first question merely set the stage. Either way, the parable itself is Jesus’ definitive riposte in this public duel between two “experts” in the Law.

There is thus a certain irony here, in so far as the acquisition of honor serves as both the occasion and subject of the debate. Jesus’ parable puts a mirror in front of the very practice in which he and the scribe are engaged, a challenge to the very system of honor and shame presupposed by the challenge. For at the heart of the dispute—at least as it would have been envisioned by Luke’s contemporaries—is the proper demarcation of God’s favor as reflected by one’s health, wealth, status, and prestige. There is little quarrel then with the first command Jesus offers: of course everyone should love God. Where the contested issue of legal interpretation arises is with the second command, and in particular with the precise delineation of which sorts of interpersonal relations are subject to that command. As Esler notes, the lawyer is here asking Jesus “a boundary question of an exclusionary sort.” ³ This type of question was and still is perfectly at home in the Jewish tradition of halakah, which is precisely the practice in which the lawyer expects Jesus to engage. And at first, it sounds as if Jesus does so, since he offers what amounts to a “case study” for deliberation.

A certain man of uncertain identity is attacked, beaten, and stripped on the dangerous route from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus describes him as “half-dead,” meaning that an observer would have had reasonable doubts about whether or not he was still alive and in need of help. Then along the same road come a priest and a Levite, individuals with clear and familiar identities who find themselves confronted not only with standard obligations defining the parameters of neighbor love, but also with special precepts regarding ritual purity. They of course pass by the man; and we have no reason at this point to assume that Jesus is going to reprimand the clerics for doing so. In the context of a dispute over legal theory, it would be reasonable to assume that Jesus is merely aiming to define the legal grounds for withholding help from the downtrodden man, reasons justifying the clerics’ judgment, and thus re-inscribing the hard boundaries of neighbor love that are currently operative. In this way, Jesus strings the lawyer along with what actually appears to be a very interesting rabbinical puzzle: while it had already been established that God’s law required one to love one’s neighbor, the test case Jesus presents looks at first glance like a sophisticated attempt to negotiate the complex factors regulating this obligation, factors such as ethnic and social differentiation, requirements of ritual purity, circumstantial dangers, and above all the lack of certainty about the extent to which these factors in fact apply. But of course, Jesus’ account of the Samaritan turns things on their head.

Up to this point, it would have made the most sense to assume that the parable posed a dilemma to be worked out from the point of view of the priest and Levite, perhaps in direct contrast to the behavior of the token Samaritan, who, while familiar with the prescription of Leviticus 19:18 (“love your neighbor as yourself”), would have presumably demonstrated a misunderstanding or misapplication of it. ⁴ Yet instead of a botched attempt to help the man—one that ended tragically, say, in accidental defilement, ambush by waiting robbers, or betrayal by the victim who ultimately turned out to be an enemy—Jesus describes a kind of hyperbolically extravagant compassion toward the wounded stranger, an act that utterly diminishes the lawyer’s original concern for legalistic exactitude.

The Samaritan’s compassion casts into shame the sorts of delineations of neighbor love to which the lawyer sought to give a more precise definition, and so it effectively transforms the meaning and orientation of the lawyer’s challenge. Originally an exercise in justifying exclusionary principles of social recognition and assistance, the parable now becomes precisely the opposite: a deconstruction of the social criteria governing the scope of the neighbor love command.

Yet is it not the specification of the identity of the Samaritan that serves as the monkey wrench in the lawyer’s mechanistic logic of divinely warranted social exclusion? Is it not through this specification that Jesus effectively shifts the aim of the debate from defining neighbor love according to a prior conception of the neighbor to defining the neighbor according to a prior conception of love? No longer is any ethnic or social characteristic sufficient for specifying the neighbor relation, but only the potential for acting in a way that would itself reflect and constitute the neighbor relation. This shift not only recategorizes the different identities in play, but ultimately decategorizes them in light of the moral injunction to “go and do likewise.” Jesus’ message is that the only criterion that matters in determining the identity of the neighbor is the need that calls forth mercy.

Such is the standard modern interpretation of the parable. Yet to the surprise of many, it has not been the dominant one throughout most of the Christian theological tradition. Early patristic thinkers such as Origen and Irenaeus acknowledged and passed on an allegorical interpretation of the parable that construes the downtrodden man as a picture of fallen humanity and the Good Samaritan as Christ. Augustine inherited this reading and developed it to an unprecedented extent, integrating it at many points into his vast corpus. His most detailed explanation of the parable’s allegorical meaning occurred in Quaestiones Evangeliorum 2.19, where he summarily deciphered the text as follows: the traveler is Adam, or humanity, Jerusalem represents heaven, and Jericho (because of its etymological relation to the moon and its waning phases) represents mortality. The thieves represent Satan and the fallen angels, who strip Adam of his immortality and leave him “half dead.” ⁵ The Levite and priest represent the Old Testament and its ritual dispensation, while last but not least, the Samaritan is Jesus Christ. ⁶ By binding the man’s wounds Augustine took the parable to refer to the empowerment Jesus gives the believer to resist sin, while the healing oil and the wine respectively signify good hope and the exhortation to fervent striving. According to Augustine, the beaten man is placed upon the beast just as the penitent relies upon Christ’s incarnation, by which the wounded soul is brought to the “inn,” which represents the church. The “next day” mentioned in the parable designates the new era issued in by the resurrection, while the two coins given to the innkeeper signify both the two love commands and the dual promise of life both here and in heaven. Finally and most imaginatively, Augustine took the innkeeper to be the Apostle Paul himself, insofar as the Samaritan’s assurance of future reimbursement recalls the Apostle’s limitless self-offering to his fledging church communities.

The obsessive quality of Augustine’s translation of the parable’s parts into doctrinal categories—in many ways more midrashic than the parable itself—has understandably led many modern interpreters to dismiss his reading as perversely eisegetical. In his Anchor Bible commentary on the parable, Joseph Fitzmyer refers to Augustine’s mode of interpretation as both “extrinsic” and “farfetched.” ⁷ Mike Higton expresses a similar aversion in his essay “Boldness and Reserve: A Lesson from Saint Augustine.” “Doesn’t this wholesale allegorization,” he writes, “by a strange alchemy transform its difficult arrangement of unfamiliar parts into an easy arrangement of the familiar?” ⁸ Does it not refine into glass “all the grit it picked up from its time and place,” thus leaving us with something transparent and colorless? Of special concern are the specific social identities at play in the narrative: what have they left to offer us once they have been converted into more universal categories? Does Augustine’s reading in any way preserve the radical message of the original parable? Could it possibly offer any correlative challenge to the specific social prejudices of his own time? Or by allegorizing the story, does Augustine not in fact defuse its potentially disruptive and subversive implications? By homogenizing the ethnic identities in play, isn’t he exempting his audience from confronting the forms of exclusion at work in their own practice of neighbor love?

One might even argue that Augustine’s allegorical approach in a way reverts to the mindset of the lawyer, who inquires into the identity of the neighbor only because such knowledge serves a purpose unrelated to the neighbor’s well-being. Let us not forget, after all, that Luke explicitly gives us the lawyer’s motive in this affair: he asks Jesus the question “seeking to justify himself.” Jesus, for his part, reveals the lawyer’s question to be wrong-headed precisely because it sought to justify the prejudicial exclusion of outsiders by subordinating their need to other aspects of their identity. Does not Augustine bring us back to this same mindset? Instead of blurring social boundaries in order to decategorize them against a horizon of compassion, doesn’t Augustine’s allegorical rendering consolidate the identities in order to re-categorize them along specific doctrinal lines? If so, we must ask ourselves: Is Augustine’s traditional allegorical reading ethically retrogressive? Is there anything here that can continue to give voice to the text’s original admonition of a compassionate recognition of the outsider?

Not only do I believe that there is, but I contend that the theological insights contained in Augustine’s allegorical reading are vital if we are to appreciate the full ethical impact of the parable. This point can be hard to understand, however, if we do not first realize the extent to which most contemporary moral readings of the parable of the Good Samaritan proceed from modern assumptions about the function of ethics more generally. The proper realm of modern ethics is generally assumed to be the confrontation of “problem cases” by reflective, autonomous individuals who must rationally deliberate so as to determine the best course of action. Most modern ethical readings thus tend to view the parable of the Good Samaritan as a dramatic illustration of a certain moral principle or maxim, such as “the demands of compassion should override religious or ritual demands” or “you should concern yourself with being a neighbor before worrying about who is a neighbor to you.” In other words, we too often treat the parable like an Aesopian fable, expecting to hear at the end some nice, neat moral to the story, like “a neighbor is known by his neighborliness.” I believe that a more careful analysis of the parable reveals this sort of ethical reading to be deeply flawed, or at least woefully insufficient on its own.

The critical piece of evidence in support of this conclusion is the change of agent perspective implied by the telling of the parable. Many exegetes, such as J.I.H. McDonald and Robert Funk have taken account of this pivotal shift of perspective, which comes out most fully in Jesus’ final question to the lawyer. ⁹ Instead of asking why the Samaritan considered the man his neighbor, Jesus asks in effect which of the travelers the beaten man himself would have considered to be his neighbor. This shift of viewpoint has radical implications for the ethical framework most of us bring to our reading of this parable. The climactic question— “which one was the neighbor to the man?”— turns the tables not only on the lawyer’s moral posture, but on the whole methodology of modern ethics as well, in so far as that mode of moral reasoning assumes the point of view of an autonomous self-determining agent, coolly arbitrating between alternative courses of action.

The initial presumption of most modern readers of this parable is that Jesus is doing little more than illustrating a propositional principle through a hypothetical scenario, and hence that what really matters is the priest’s, Levite’s, and Samaritan’s demonstrable answers to the question of the beaten man’s relational status. According to this manner of reading the parable, the beaten man himself appears at first to be a mere prop, a necessary pretext for the ethical deliberations of the able. But Jesus’ “punch line” makes it clear that the story is not merely a didactic fable after all, since it is not told from inside the heads of the priest, Levite, or Samaritan, but rather from the perspective of the wounded man.

The recent emergence of care ethics in philosophical literature resonates deeply with the alternative moral perspective proposed by the Good Samaritan parable. This school of thought sharply critiques the perennial model of moral philosophy that assumes the perspective of the self-determining, self-regulating agent. Describing this perspective, Eva Kittay writes,

In response to the focus on the individual and the ideals of independence in [most modern ethical] theories, an ethics of care emphasizes the relational character of human life, the relational nature of self-conceptions … and the inevitable dependencies and interdependencies too often ignored in theories that begin with adult moral agents pursuing their own conception of the good. ¹⁰

As many of these thinkers have argued, Kittay most especially, modern ethical theories are severely short-sighted because they focus only on the generation and analysis of rational principles based on an ideal of the freely associating, fully autonomous individual who is either unentangled in or undetermined by relationships of asymmetrical dependency. As Alasdair MacIntyre has similarly pointed out in his book Dependent Rational Animals, such relations of asymmetrical dependency are an inescapably necessary condition of the development of the kind of rational agency upon which modern ethical theories are based. ¹¹

Such a critique is perfectly at home in the Good Samaritan parable, if we take the time to look carefully enough. Yet it is easy to miss this connection if we read the parable solely through either an allegorical or ethical lens. For both the allegorical approach and the strictly ethical approach possess an equal tendency to explain away the parable’s meaning in terms that make the actual story superfluous, as if the parable was meant merely to demonstrate some abstract truth. These allegorical and ethical distortions actually mirror each other in the sense that they both presume the parable to be some esoteric puzzle or dramatic object lesson, which could be more clearly explained in theoretical terms. But suppose the parable’s intent was not merely to chastise compassion killing legalism or even to challenge social prejudice? Suppose its primary aim was to invite the audience to a new perspective on neighbor love through the recognition of the need all of us have for neighbor love?

The idea that we need to “figure out” how we can best love our neighbor already presumes that we are in a position to dispense that love; it presumes that we occupy the role of givers, doers, performers. It risks completely overlooking the fact that all of us have been and will continue to be dependent in some way upon the very neighbor love we ourselves are commanded to show. Ethical theories of care insistently highlight the significance of the symbiosis that exists between receptivity and activity, an exchange that necessarily accompanies the inescapable fact of human relationality. Instead of deriving an account of moral equality and obligation from particular qualities of the isolated individual, ethicists of care endeavor to develop what Eva Feder Kittay has called a “connection-based model of equality” in which equality and moral obligation arise from the demands of those relationships that are most constitutive of an individual’s dignity and well being.

For instance, instead of insisting on the idea that everyone is equal in their right to life, liberty, and self-determination, Kittay’s connection based model conceives of equality in relational terms: we are all “some mother’s child,” and so we all have an equal right to that type of fundamental social relation, and to the respect and care such a relation implies. Conceiving a moral theory in terms of these fundamental relations as opposed to abstract principles or universalizable decisions makes a tremendous difference in how one views human action, and produces a substantially different picture of what is going on in the Good Samaritan parable.

I argue that the relations based approach makes much better sense of the parable both hermeneutically and theologically. Like the rich young man of Matthew 10, the lawyer Jesus encounters asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, as if eternal life is the direct result of some process of divine–human reciprocity. The lawyer’s interest in the identity of his neighbor arises from his desire to pin down the abstract principles that govern what actions are expected of him so that he can effectively secure the promised reciprocal response. Jesus, on the other hand, does not specify any correspondence between discrete actions and divine reward, but rather focuses on the quality of the relation constituted by the actions described. What matters most in the end is not what actions follow from the specification of the neighbor relation, but rather what actions reflect and foster that relation. The point of the parable from this perspective is not that we should treat everyone equally as if they were our neighbor, so as to satisfy the conditions of God’s favor, but rather that in giving and—most importantly—in receiving the kind of mercy the Samaritan exhibited, we can in fact become a neighbor to others.

There are, then, significant theological implications involved in looking at the parable through the lens of an ethics of care, and these implications throw new light on Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the parable. When placed against the theological horizon of salvation history, it makes perfect sense that Jesus would intend to shift his audience’s identification from the perspective of one who dispenses mercy to that of one who desperately hopes to receive it. Jesus turns the lawyer’s question into a similar exercise in ethical reorientation, an exercise that is fully consonant with the overall pattern of his ministry and teaching. Like so many of Jesus’ other practical directives, his admonition here does not anticipate but rather follows a restorative act of mercy. God’s favor is not gained by some moral commitment or achievement, but is rather reflected in the passing on of the mercy through which God heals us. If one insists on extracting a maxim from the Good Samaritan parable, it would probably look something like the golden rule in reverse order: “as you would have others do unto you, do unto others.” Since the hero of the story is an outsider, the only option for Jesus’ clerical interlocutors is to associate themselves either with the shamed clerics or with the man in need. Like the parable which Nathan told to David, the Good Samaritan parable induces a conversion of self-identification with decisive moral implications. Such a reorientation of perspective not only rebukes the lawyer’s hardness of heart, but commends him to the reception of compassion from others.

If we read the parable through this lens, we see then that Jesus is exhorting his audience to assume the perspective of the beaten man. This exhortation to see the world through his eyes also happens to be the key to understanding why Augustine and his many predecessors interpreted this parable in the way they did. For Augustine’s allegorical reading proceeded from the insight that simply telling a story about an outsider’s hypothetical compassion is not enough to dissolve our callousness toward the outsider, even if we explicitly recognize such callousness to be sinful. Augustine’s reading presumed that in order to heal the social division among us, we must first receive the healing of the division that sin causes in our souls. Since we cannot bestow what we have not yet received, neither can we love others as ourselves unless a proper self love has first been planted within us. Augustine’s interpretation is thus able to unleash the ethical power of this parable in a way modern interpretations cannot, since it aligns the compassion described in the parable with the compassion that God has shown to us by sending his only begotten Son to dwell among us and to heal us through His redemptive love.

In Augustine’s allegorical reading, the parable becomes more than just an imaginary fable applied to a legalistic dispute; it becomes an image of what has already happened to us. This reading in no way displaces or compromises the more straightforward moral appropriation of the text, to simply “go and love your neighbor.” Rather, it simply brings into view the larger horizon against which Jesus imparts the final directive to “go and do likewise.” The “go and do likewise” on this reading takes on a new and almost irresistible power, given the relational context and moral motivation which the allegorical interpretation specifies. That our own alienation from God has been overcome by His becoming a neighbor to us leaves us with no possible excuse for continuing to accept and perpetuate our own alienation from others. I maintain that the allegorical interpretation brings this larger horizon into view, and makes clear that Christians are to love their neighbor not out of servile obedience to a directive nor even out of a personal attraction to an abstract moral ideal, but rather because they themselves have been the recipients of love. By reading the parable in this way, early Christian exegetes like Augustine have in a sense anticipated the important insights about ethical perspective which have been articulated by contemporary thinkers such as Kittay. Yet it is ultimately Scripture itself that has made this idea an explicit ethical principle for Christians: “this is love,” writes John in his first epistle, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us, sending his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins … and since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:10–11). It is the merciful initiative of the divine outsider, who comes to us—wounded as we are—which moves us to show mercy to the wounded outsiders we encounter in our time and place.