LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2019, Page 289

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II. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

289

He Is Our Righteousness
Leader’s Guide

Session 3:
Another Question and Another Test
Luke 10:36

The Story Continues — Luke 10:36

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Jesus has finished His story, and we would not be surprised
were He to ask the lawyer if the question has now been
answered, but this He does not do. He asks a new question
that, in effect, turns the lawyer’s original question on its
head. Over against the command to love, the lawyer had
asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Since his concern is fulfilling the requirements of the Law, the force of the lawyer’s
question is “Which people, exactly, does the Law require me
to love? Whom does the Law not require me to love? I must
know the answers to such questions in order to know if I
have done what needs to be done.”
Review last session’s material if necessary, then read
together Luke 10:36.
Jesus’ question is “Which man proved to be a neighbor to the
one who fell among the thieves?” If we and our lawyer are
still identifying with that man who fell among the thieves,
the question is no longer about whom we have to love,
but it is now a question about who has shown love to us,

especially when receiving love meant the difference between
life and death. The story offers a very indirect answer to the
lawyer’s question; in fact, it only very indirectly addresses
matters of Law at all.
Perhaps you are feeling, at this point, that this study has
turned Jesus’ parable on its head. Let’s return here to the
large, overarching question of what this parable is really
about — what message it speaks to “lawyers” both ancient
and postmodern. For reasons that we cannot examine here,
John Calvin’s interpretation of the parable has dominated
both the study and use of this parable for centuries. Robert
Stein summarizes the situation for us with no attempt
whatsoever to conceal his approval of Calvin’s reading of
the parable:
In rejecting the allegorical interpretation of the parable,
Calvin reveals not only his great exegetical insight but
his courage and integrity as well, in that during the previous fifteen centuries we know of no one who explicitly
Leader’s Guide |

rejected the allegorical/Christological interpretation of
this parable! The chief aim of the parable for Calvin is
“to show that neighbourliness which obliges us to do
our duty by each other is not restricted to friends and
relations, but open to the whole human race.”1

The parable of the compassionate Samaritan thus undermines the determination of status in the community of
God’s people on the basis of ascription, substituting in its
place a concern with performance, the granting of status
on the basis of one’s actions.3

To this summary and in keeping with its exegetical direction, Stein offers his own view of the message of the parable:

Those who are convinced that such an interpretation is
essentially correct but are uncomfortable with the theological implications of leaving things here will perhaps prefer a
second approach. They may argue that this, of course, sounds
entirely legalistic because Jesus’ purpose in all of this is to
bring the lawyer into a true face-to-face confrontation with
the demands of the Law. In that respect anyway, our passage
does parallel Luke 18:18–23, and hearer and lawyer alike
should ask in despair, “Then who can be saved?” (Luke 18:26).

One thing is clear. We cannot choose whom we shall
have as our neighbor. Rather, we must seek actively to be
a neighbor and to love all. But we must especially seek to
love those who are the most oppressed and the most in
need. As we reflect over the meaning of this parable, for
whom should we especially prove to be a neighbor? Is it
our cranky next-door neighbor? Is it the starving child
in a far-off land whose name we do not know? Is it the
person next door who just lost a job? Or is it … ? Until
the parable speaks to us on this level, we shall never
really know what it is teaching.2
Where does such an understanding of the parable and, for
that matter, of Jesus’ interaction with this lawyer leave us?
The two chief points of the pericope now appear to be that
(1) in order to inherit eternal life, one must love God and
love the neighbor as the Law demands, and (2) the neighbor includes everyone, but especially the person in need of
our love. We might expect a verse 37.5 to read: “When the
lawyer heard these things, he became very sad, for he had a
lot of neighbors” (cf. Luke 18:23).

DISCUSSION QUESTION
Does the parable of the Good Samaritan
teach that the way to inherit eternal life is
to keep the Law?

The problem with this second approach is that it renders the
parable unnecessary (as the comparison with Luke 18 might
suggest). The Law had already been summarized, and Jesus
had already said, “Do this, and you will live” (Luke 10:28).
Had the lawyer loved the Lord his God with heart, soul,
strength, and mind? Had the lawyer even loved — as he
loved himself — his closest neighbors, the people he had
no question about? The Law was there before him, its voice
ready to condemn the man, stripping him of his self-justifying self-righteousness. The parable would seem to blunt the
force of the Law by turning the lawyer’s eyes (and our own)
away from the self-examination so obviously needed.
Can there be another way to understand the parable and the
conversation in which it is set? This study has been driving
toward just such another way from the very beginning. In
one of his sermons on this passage, Luther writes [Note that
the student worksheet asks the students to guess who might
have said this]:
In this Samaritan, Christ pictures and shows the kindness, help, and comfort which He provides in His kingdom through the Gospel; this is just what He initially
spoke to His disciples: “Blessed are the eyes which see
what you see,” etc. [Luke 10:23]. He paints most comfortingly what faith has in Him and how very different His
Gospel is from the teaching of the Law (which the priests
and Levites also have). I have previously spoken about
this abundantly. But in this picture we need to look at
how we have fallen into sin against God’s commandment, lie under God’s wrath, and must die eternal death
— and also at how we have been rescued by Him, so that

We seem to be left with two choices. Is Jesus telling the man
that, to be sure of his eternal inheritance, he needs to be a
good man like the Good Samaritan? How could such an
interpretation not confirm the fears and doubts we began
with — namely, that in the teaching of Jesus we do find a
righteousness based on our own actions that secures for
us our share in the eternal life to come? Though we have
no reason to suggest that as helpful a scholar as Joel Green
would champion such a view of salvation, how else are we
to understand his summary of the parable’s message?
Robert H. Stein, An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1981), 50.

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Stein, 81.

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Green, 431.

we receive God’s grace, comfort, and life for our conscience and even begin to keep the Law.4
We would love nothing more than for this favorite parable
to turn out to be a beautiful picture of our salvation in
Christ Jesus. And we would love nothing more in this 500th
anniversary year than to be able to say that Luther is right.
But can such a position be defended? Isn’t it suspect precisely because that’s what we would like the message to be?
Arthur Just provides an entryway and begins to lay a foundation for a defense of the traditional Christological reading
of the parable.5
• Just begins by reminding us that, if Jesus’ intention had
been simply to teach us to love the very person we find
difficult to love, the story should have featured a halfdead Samaritan rescued and nursed back to life by a Jew
who really knew what it meant to love the neighbor. Just
also notes that Jesus completely reverses the perspective
of the lawyer’s earlier question. Since it is all too often
seen in discussions of this parable, it is worth noting here
that commentators themselves reverse the force of Jesus’
question back to that of the original question. Plummer is
a good example. He writes:
Christ not only forces the lawyer to answer his own
question, but shows that it has been asked from the
wrong point of view. For the question, “Who is my
neighbour?” is substituted, “To whom am I neighbour?
Whose claims on my neighbourly help do I recognize?”6
Compare the two questions again closely:
Luke 10:29 καὶ τίς ἐστίν μου πλησίον;
kai tis estin mou plēsion?
And who is my neighbor?
Luke 10:36 τίς τούτων τῶν τριῶν πλησίον δοκεῖ σοι
γεγονέναι τοῦ ἐμπεσόντος εἰς τοὺς λῃστάς;
tis toutōn tōn triōn plēsion dokei soi gegonenai tou empesontos eis tous lēstas?
Who of these three, do you think, proved to
be a neighbor of the one who fell among the
thieves?7
Look again at Plummer’s paraphrase above. Notice that,
when Plummer paraphrases Jesus’ question (v. 36), it ends
4

LW 79:62 §39. Cf. Luther, 53 §39.

5

Just, 454–455.

6

Plummer, 288.

�oti�e� �y the way� how the genitive �ο� �μ������ο� (tou empesontos; “of the
one who fell”) of verse 36 lines up with the genitive μου (mou; “my”) of verse 29.

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up looking just like the lawyer’s question (v. 29). The lawyer
wanted to know just that: whose claims on him does he
have to recognize? To truly show the difference, the second
question should be given as “Who has been a neighbor to
me? Whose neighborly help can I depend on? What has that
neighborly help meant to me?”
To this point, four more can be added to show that such an
understanding is not only “exegetically sound” but is the
understanding that lets the parable once again “do its work”
on us.
• We have already seen from the negative side why the
Calvinist understanding of the parable all but renders the
parable unnecessary; what can we say from the positive
side? Had our Lord tried to speak of justification by grace
through faith as clearly and with the same words that Paul
used a few decades later, His teaching could hardly have
made sense to anyone. It only made sense to Paul himself
in light of the great events of Christ’s death and resurrection. What Jesus does instead is to show the lawyer gently,
lovingly but insistently that he’s asking the wrong questions. The parable forces someone who sees the neighbor
as only responsibility and burden to at least question
whether or not he himself stands in need of a neighbor.
• A natural reaction on first hearing the parable is that it
is entirely unrealistic. “What’s the point?” we might ask.
“Has anyone ever loved like that? Can anyone ever love
like that?” In the Samaritan, we see the same generosity
to the point of extravagance that we see in the sower (Luke
8:5–8) and in the prodigal’s father (Luke 15:11–32).
• Σπλαγχνίζομαι (splanchnizomai; “I feel compasssion,
pity”). In verse 33, we read καὶ ἰδὼν ἐσπλαγχνίσθη (kai
idōn esplanchnisthē; “and when he saw him, he had
compassion”). Commentaries will often point out that
the use of this verb here draws a comparison between the
compassion of the Samaritan in the parable and that of
Jesus Himself, who ἐσπλαγχνίσθη (esplanchnisthē; “had
compassion on”) the widow of Nain (Luke 7:13). What commentaries should point out is that the verb occurs 11 other
times in the New Testament (all in the Gospels) and that
in every case the subject of the verb, the person showing
such compassion, is either Jesus Himself or a character
who symbolizes God.8 Our verse 33 would be the sole
exception in the New Testament. It seems rather to be the
case that, in New Testament usage, this verb expresses a
See Matt. 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 18:27; 20:34; Mark 1:41; 6:34; 8:2; 9:22; Luke 7:13;
15:20.

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2019 Convention Workbook