What can we learn from the parable of The Good Samaritan?
The main thing in this parable is to check the context. Any child can get the point that one should help those in need. Someone who does a little deeper study will realize that the Samaritans and Jews had hated each other for more than five centuries, therefore your neighbor can even be someone from an ethnic, racial or religious group you have reasons to dislike. But the most deeply spiritual teaching of the parable is that a Jewish expert in the Law wanted to know how to inherit eternal life, and Jesus showed him that he couldn’t get it by anything he did–and neither can you. It takes something more than what a person can do; it takes help from God. He understood that the point of each of the Ten Commandments is that you should love God above all and your neighbor as yourself. He wanted Jesus to make it easy for him to do these things, first by ignoring God entirely and second by restricting “neighbor” to people he would just naturally like. Instead, Jesus expands it to include nati
