"Go and Do Likewise": Imitating the Good Samaritan, Imitating Christ

Detail of miniature, Good Samaritan, Rossano Gospels, Folio 7v, (6th c., Italy)

“[Jesus said], ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise’.”  —Luke 10:36–37

Jesus uses the parable of the good Samaritan to show what it means to be a neighbor.  The parable shows that it was the Samaritan— “the one who did mercy”—who “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” (Lk. 10:36–37).  To be a neighbor is to do mercy, and the Lord commands us to “go and do likewise” (10:37).  

In calling us to imitate the good Samaritan, the Lord Jesus calls us to imitate himself.  He calls us to be like the one in whom the God of Israel has fulfilled his promise to do mercy (1:72), in whom “the tender mercy of our God” (1:78) has dawned upon us.  He asks us to be like the Samaritan who was filled with compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, lit. ‘moved from the bowels,’ 10:33) when he saw the half-dead man on the road to Jericho, just as Jesus had compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη, 7:13, cf. 15:20) when he saw the mother of the dead man in Nain.  He commands us to, like the Samaritan, “love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (6:35).  In calling us to do like the Samaritan, he says effectively, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (6:36).

The good Samaritan, then, is a figure of Christ.  As the Venerable Bede puts it, “the Samaritan, giving a helping hand to the man found on the road and covered with wounds, is a figure of Jesus Christ, who, in a more worthy and sublime sense and with a special love, became our neighbor by taking upon himself our wounds to heal them.”*  Christ, who did not deny it when he was called “a Samaritan” (Jn. 8:48), comes to us, who are half-dead from sin, and heals us.  He bears us on his flesh to the inn, “the pandochium [πανδοχεῖον] —that is, the Church, which accepts everyone and denies its help to no one.”†  For our healing, he gives the “two denarii” of the love of God and the love of neighbor.‡  He cleanses us that we might produce good out of good hearts (Lk. 6:45), to become “tenderhearted” (Eph. 4:32), to share in the compassion of God.  “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).

Christ is our neighbor:

“Let us, therefore, love him, for he is our Lord and God; let us love him as our neighbor, since, being our Head and we his members, he cannot be nearer to us. Let us also love those that follow him, and show that we love our neighbor as ourselves by giving them all spiritual and temporal help in our power.”§

* Bede the Venerable, Homily on Luke 10:23–27.  Bede draws on an ancient tradition of figural interpretation of the parable, reaching back through Augustine and Ambrose to Origen in the early third century.

† Origen, Homilies on Luke, 34.7.  The Greek word for “inn” (πανδοχεῖον) is compounded from the words “all” and “receiving.”

‡ Cf. Augustine, En. Ps. 126.11.

§ Bede the Venerable, op. cit.