Hijacking the Good Samaritan as the Patron Saint of Illegal Immigration
Luke’s parable is ultimately about Christ and proclaims the Gospel of salvation by grace
The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best-known biblical stories. Regrettably, this parable of parables is also one of the most misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted of all biblical narratives.
A Good Samaritan is someone who helps at soup kitchens, delivers food baskets to the hungry, or gives up weekends to work with the homeless. The Good Samaritan has become the patron saint of secular society, the Santa Claus of aid organizations, and the Boy Scout of benevolent associations.
The Samaritans in Britain provide a hotline for people contemplating suicide. Good Samaritan Laws in America limit liability for folks voluntarily helping in emergencies. Activist Rolson St. Louis even proposes a Good Samaritan Act to provide illegal aliens a “pathway to citizenship.”
Now, as the Trump administration has begun deporting foreign criminals alongside “collaterals” (illegal aliens present during Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids), Catholic and Protestant progressives are canonizing the Good Samaritan as the patron saint of illegal immigration.
‘Samaritan’ Trending on Social Media
Jesuit pro-LGBT crusader Fr. James Martin is firing a barrage of Samaritan shells on X, claiming that “our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the ‘stranger.’”
Meghan Basham, who opened a can of worms with her recent bestseller Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, has stirred up a hornets nest by interpreting the parable as “a story pointing you to your need for a perfect Savior” since “every single person on the planet fails to meet that standard” displayed by the Samaritan.
Social media warriors with no exegetical expertise who are fighting Trump’s “revolution of common sense” respond by noting that “the Good Samaritan takes care of the neighbor victimized by crime, not the criminals who robbed and almost beat him to death” and “that the Good Samaritan showed compassion — not for the lawbreakers — but for the victim.”
Needless to say, neither the traveler nor the Samaritan is an immigrant. The Jews (from Judea) hated the Samaritans (from Samaria) because they were schismatics. The Samaritans were not Gentiles. They, too, had to obey the Torah. The rivalry between the two groups was sectarian, akin to the hostility between Shia and Sunni or Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
A Catalog of Category Errors
Plus, the Samaritan did not lobby his local representative to institute a tax to help pay for the care of robbed Jews, writes another X user. “This is not a command to the state. Who is the state’s neighbor?” asks Martin Iles, CEO of Answers in Genesis. “And, how does the state ‘love’? It doesn’t even spend its own money. It’s a category mistake.”
Jesus’s parables aren’t morality stories — another category error (though they may contain moral exhortations). They are shocking stories that invert human expectations and offer radically subversive truths about the Kingdom of God. Jesus even warns that those who have hardened their hearts against the Gospel won’t be able to understand the parables.
Progressives, who interpret Luke’s parable as a morality tale, focus on the Jewish clergy who ignore the wounded traveler and the Samaritan who helped him. They even understand that the shock value of the parable lies in Jesus portraying the hated Samaritan as the hero.
But they misinterpret it (Luke 10: 30-35) and turn it into an ethical exhortation to help the needy, because they don’t set Jesus’s story in the context of the dialogue that comes before (10:25-29) and after (10:36-37) it.
Don’t Forget the Debate
The dialogue between Jesus and a lawyer is made up of eight exchanges that fall into two rounds of debate. In each round, the lawyer asks the first question, and Jesus responds with a counter-question. The lawyer answers this. and then Jesus tells him what to do.
Lawyer: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus: “What does the law say?”
Lawyer: “Love God and neighbor.”
Jesus: “Correct. Do this and live.”
The lawyer triggers the second round of debate because he wants to justify himself.
Lawyer: “Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus: Tells parable, then asks, “Which of the three was a neighbor?”
Lawyer: “The one who showed mercy on him.”
Jesus: “Go and do likewise.”
Salvation by Grace
The lawyer should have known that Israel could do nothing to earn or deserve an inheritance of the Promised Land. It is God’s gift bestowed by grace (unmerited favor). The rabbis later understood inheriting the land as a metaphor for being saved in the age to come.
Biblical scholars agree that the Old Testament did not teach salvation by works. One of the verses rabbis most frequently quoted verses is Habakkuk 2:4: “the righteous shall live by faith.”
Rabbi Simlai says that David reduced the 613 commandments to 11 (Psalm 15), Isaiah to six (Isaiah 33:15), Micah to three (Micah 6:8), [Second]-Isaiah to two (Isaiah 56:1), and Amos to one (Amos 5:4), but according to Rabbi Nah.am bar Isaac, it was Habakkuk who provided the one-verse summary of the whole Torah (Habakkuk 2:4b; b. Makkot 23b–24a).
However, by the time of Jesus, some leading rabbis insisted that eternal life was achieved by keeping the law. Jesus’s teaching was upsetting them. Jesus anticipates that the lawyer will answer His question in line with the “works righteousness” teaching of these rabbis. The lawyer oxymoronically believes God wants him to do something to earn what is essentially an inheritance.
Flunking the Test
By quoting a summary of the law: “love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer should have known he is citing a standard no one can fully reach. In his midrash (commentary) on the command to love one’s neighbor, James would explain that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (2:10).
Even though he is beaten in Round 1, the lawyer still wants to trip up Jesus. He continues to persist in believing he can earn eternal life. He thinks Jesus will answer him by defining “neighbor” as “your relative and your friend.” He can then brag and tell Jesus he has loved his “neighbor” and Jesus will praise him and say, “You have truly fulfilled the law.”
“The lawyer will then depart, basking before the people, in the praise of his good works, and enjoying a newly won honor and confidence based on that praise,” remarks the renowned Syriac commentator Fr. Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. 1043).
But by portraying the “neighbor” as a Samaritan, Jesus deconstructs the lawyer’s theology of “works righteousness.” Kenneth E. Bailey in his book Poet & Peasant through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, explains how the Samaritan’s actions in the parable are utterly irrational from a Middle Eastern cultural perspective.
Shooting Down Self-Justification
The Samaritan who stops to help the traveler risks being attacked by the same robbers who beat the Jew senseless. But in taking the wounded man to the inn, he takes an even greater risk in being attacked by the traveler’s relatives, who would assume he was responsible for the state of their their unconscious family member, Bailey observes. “After all, why did he stop?” they would ask.
Given the context, the Samaritan shows extraordinary compassion — and even more significantly, extraordinary courage. Jesus ends the debate by telling the lawyer: “You go and do likewise.” Jesus has tricked and trapped him. Plainly, he isn’t going to do so and cannot earn eternal life.
As in the case of the rich young ruler who asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 18:18-23), Jesus demands from both the lawyer and the ruler an impossible standard to attain. No wonder the shocked disciples, present at the encounter with the ruler, ask Jesus: “Then who can be saved?” Jesus replies: “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
“The last statement is not a general admonition to good works but rather an answer to the lawyer’s question about self-justification,” notes Bailey. “The parable makes clear that any attempt at self-justification is doomed to failure. The standard is too high. Eternal life cannot be earned.”
Jesus Is the Good Samaritan
James Martin’s interpretation of the parable is patently Pelagian (the heresy that we are saved by good works condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418). Jesus never calls the Samaritan “good.” Jesus will tell the rich young man: “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18).
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes. “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded” (Romans 3:23-24, 27a).
The good Samaritan is ultimately a Christological parable. Isaiah describes Israel as covered in “bruises and sores and raw wounds; they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil (1:6). Like the “outsider” Samaritan, it is God’s Messiah who will come from “outside” and save us by binding up our wounds.
But Jesus the Messiah goes much further: “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
The parable of the Good Samaritan is the Gospel. Woe unto them that turn it into the Law.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.