Meditations on the Good Samaritan

These days, when I read the Gospels, I see that every sad sack in need of a miracle is really just me in a different costume. That’s the latest gospel lens I use to read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My fallenness is so acute that God rolled out a whole host of beggars and lepers and blind men and demoniacs to show me who I am, and who Christ is for me.

And so it is with the Good Samaritan. In this story, first and foremost, I am the half-dead guy in the ditch, and Jesus is the Good Samaritan. He picked me up when nobody else would. And he took care of me like nobody else could.

But the doctrinaire in me wants to add a qualifier to all this good, true, and beautiful stuff. I don’t want anyone thinking that Jesus just stumbled upon me and was surprised by what he saw. Jesus did not react to an unfortunate turn of events that had befallen me. He knew that I and so many others would fall prey to that great bandit who steals, kills, and destroys, and that we would have perished if he had not intervened.

We don’t have great language for this kind of foresight, but the least we can say is that Jesus acted proactively, before the fall had ever taken place. He had a plan.

Now, while this Christological lens is glorious, from any sound exegetical perspective it is a kind of gospel cherry on top of the sundae. No doubt Jesus understood himself to be the great Samaritan. But he is telling this story to serve what Reformed theologians call the first use of the law.

Most Reformed theologians see the law as serving three purposes:

1. The pedagogical use (the mirror). The law shows us God’s righteousness, exposes our sin, and drives us to Christ (Rom 3:20; Gal 3:24).
2. The civil use (the curb). The law restrains evil in society, even among the unregenerate (1 Tim 1:9–10; Rom 13).
3. The normative use (the guide). For believers, the law shows what pleases God and directs our sanctification. Calvin called this its “principal use” (Ps 119:105; Matt 5:17–19).

Jesus tells this story to answer a question:

²⁵ And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” ²⁶ He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” ²⁷ And he answered, “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.” ²⁸ And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” ²⁹ But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” ³⁰ Jesus replied… [insert Good Samaritan story]

Jesus uses this story as a legal standard the lawyer must meet in order to inherit eternal life. Here, as in the Sermon on the Mount and so many other places, Jesus is showing us God’s character and how woefully short of his glorious standard we have fallen.

And then, of course, we know how it ends. Right after telling the story, Jesus turns to the lawyer and says, “But I know you can’t do that. That’s why I’m telling you, so that you’ll see your need for me, confess me by faith as Lord and Savior, and be justified through my righteous sacrifice.”

Actually, I’m kidding. Jesus tells the lawyer, “You go, and do likewise.”

What jumps out at you about this response? One thing arrests me immediately. For the last 20 years, I have been told that false conversion is a problem I should be actively trying to prevent as a preacher of the word of Christ. Here, it feels like Jesus is breaking the rules.

What is he thinking? A guy just implied that he can earn his way into heaven. Rather than give him a formal talking-to about the ordo salutis, Jesus just tells him to go take care of the next half-dead guy he finds in a ditch? I have a feeling half-dead guys in ditches were relatively common in Bible times. What if this sassy attorney actually goes looking for one?

If you study the Bible on your own, you’ll find this is not a one-off. See the Rich Young Ruler, among others.

My sense is that Jesus’s use of the law is not “Use One” or “Use Two” or “Use Three,” but “Use One” AND “Use Two” AND “Use Three.” The Holy Spirit uses the law-word of Christ to accomplish God’s foreordained purposes, according to his distribution of varied measures of grace.

Theologians have long understood that not all grace is saving grace. Jesus taught this clearly in the Sermon on the Mount, where he reminds us that God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.

And while, from an eschatological perspective, the telos of every blessing is either salvation or condemnation, we must not harmonize Matthew 5:45 out of existence! In a very real sense, God loves all people and gives them nice things because he wants to (Acts 14:17; Ps 145:9).

And so we return to our sassy attorney. Suppose he rejects the first use of the law outright and makes it his mission to find the least dead guy in a Palestinian ditch. He does all the bandaging and so forth, then rubs his hands together in smug satisfaction that he has attained eternal life. So at least he has that going for him, which is nice.

Even in that salvifically ruinous situation, the half-dead guy in the ditch still got taken care of. And God likes that sort of thing (Amos 1:3–2:3; Ezek 16:49).

This is what I mean when I say Jesus uses the law in all three ways at once.

With one parable, Jesus used the law for purpose one. Some who heard these words understood exactly how far short they fell of God’s radically righteous love, saw their uncleanness, and called out for a Savior. For those same people, once they were brought to faith, “go and do likewise” became a rule of life. They loved their neighbor out of gratitude, not to earn anything. That’s use three.

Others in the crowd had been foreordained to receive merely common grace, and so took his sayings as a kind of moral improvement plan. But even there, the law was doing its work, restraining evil and producing outward good among people who were not saved. That’s use two.

So what about use two in the more traditional sense? Is Jesus speaking in a way that shapes the legal code of a nation-state? Not directly. He wasn’t drafting statutes. But I would argue that over time, through the combined work of uses one and three, societies emerged that decided to codify a very Christian understanding of neighbor love into all sorts of laws.

And remember what I said at the beginning. Jesus is not reactive. He knew exactly what he was doing. Read a history of morality book like Tom Holland’s Dominion and tell me afterward if you think that it’s impossible that the Great Teacher didn’t just know exactly what he was building with this story.

I think the Great World Maker upholds the world by the word of his power, and that word accomplishes many things at many different levels of existence, all at the same time.