Does the Bible really make you responsible for Christians being persecuted on the other side of the world? Luke 10 gives a sharper answer than most people expect. A lawyer asks Jesus to define neighbour, hoping for a manageable boundary. Jesus answers with a story that removes the boundary, then turns the question back on the lawyer: the issue is not who qualifies for your love but whether you will act as a neighbour to the person whose need you now know about. This study reads that parable closely and tests whether it can carry the weight people put on it when they apply it to the persecuted church far from home.
You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two meetings. Have a Bible open to Luke 9 and 10. The study draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Kori Porter, who does human rights work with Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and Lisa Fields. Porter’s account includes the abduction of children and their treatment in captivity, so leaders should mention that before the group begins.
Start where the lawyer started
The parable answers a question, so read the question first. Luke 10:25 says a certain lawyer “stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” A lawyer here means an expert in the law of Moses, not a courtroom attorney. Tempted means he was testing Jesus. The conversation begins as a contest.
Jesus sends him back to the law, and the lawyer answers well. He joins two commands: love God with everything, and “thy neighbour as thyself” (Luke 10:27). The second comes from Leviticus 19:18, where Israel is told, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” In its original setting, that verse speaks of “the children of thy people.” Later in the same chapter, Leviticus 19:34 extends the same love to the stranger living among Israel, and grounds it in Israel’s own memory of being strangers in Egypt. So the law already pressed outward. The lawyer’s next move is an attempt to press back.
Luke tells us why he asks his follow-up question: “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). In older English, willing means wanting. He wanted to come out of the exchange looking right. A clear definition of neighbour would also be a clear definition of who is not one, and of whom he could safely leave alone.
Observe this before going on. The parable is not Jesus answering an abstract question about ethics. It is Jesus answering a man who wants the category small.
Read the story slowly
Read Luke 10:30-37 twice, once straight through and once with a pencil. On the second reading, note the following:
- Every verb attached to the priest and the Levite in verses 31-32.
- Every verb attached to the Samaritan in verses 33-35. Count them.
- What the Samaritan spends, and what he promises to do later.
- The exact wording of the question Jesus asks in verse 36, compared with the lawyer’s question in verse 29.
Two observations usually emerge. First, the priest and the Levite are not ignorant. The text says the priest “saw him” and “passed by on the other side” (Luke 10:31). The Levite “came and looked on him” and did the same (Luke 10:32). Their failure is not that they did not know. It is that they knew and kept walking.
Second, the Samaritan’s response is long. He comes, sees, has compassion, goes to the man, binds his wounds, pours in oil and wine, sets him on his own animal, brings him to an inn, cares for him, pays the innkeeper and promises to return and cover the rest. Compassion is one verb in a chain of a dozen. Most of them cost him time, money or convenience, and the last one commits him to a future he cannot yet see.
Where the story turns
The most important detail in the passage is easy to miss. The lawyer asked, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus ends by asking, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?” (Luke 10:36).
The two questions are not the same. The lawyer’s question treats neighbour as a category of people to be sorted: who is inside, who is outside. Jesus’s question treats neighbour as something a person becomes by what he does. The lawyer wants to know whom he is obligated to love. Jesus asks him who acted like a neighbour. The lawyer cannot bring himself to name the Samaritan and answers, “He that shewed mercy on him.” Jesus replies, “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37).
Luke’s surrounding chapters sharpen the choice of hero. Only a few paragraphs earlier, in Luke 9:51-56, a Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus because he is headed for Jerusalem, and James and John ask whether they should call down fire on it. Jesus rebukes them. So when Luke’s readers reach chapter 10, Samaritans have just appeared as people who rejected Jesus. The hero of the parable comes from that group. Jesus does not choose a sympathetic outsider. He chooses the one his own disciples had wanted to destroy.
The plain historical reading, then, is this: Jesus refuses to let neighbour-love be limited by ethnic, religious or social lines, and he moves the burden from defining the other person to examining yourself.
How Christians have read the Samaritan
The most widely held reading is the one just described. The parable is an example story that shows what the command of Leviticus 19:18 looks like in practice, and Jesus’s closing command makes imitation its point.
Some Christian interpreters, ancient and modern, have also read the Samaritan as a picture of Christ himself, the despised outsider who finds humanity wounded on the road and pays for its care. That reading is a form of typology. It can be devotionally rich, but it is an interpretation layered onto the story, not something the text announces. It also cannot replace the ethical reading, because Jesus ends with “Go, and do thou likewise,” not with an invitation to admire the rescuer.
One more caution belongs here. The conversation began with a question about eternal life, and someone might conclude that the parable teaches salvation by good deeds. Read in context, it does the opposite of offering a ladder. It exposes a man trying to justify himself. Scripture elsewhere is clear that salvation is a gift received by grace through faith, and that real faith bears fruit. The parable shows what that fruit looks like. It does not price eternal life in acts of mercy.
Kori Porter’s reading, and what it adds
Kori Porter goes to this passage when Lisa Fields asks why a Christian human rights organization defends people of every faith rather than Christians only. “I think it’s important because it’s the way of Christ in some real ways,” Porter says. She retells the lawyer’s question and puts the answer this way: “my neighbor is the Samaritan is the one that’s the other, is the person that would never call on necessarily the name of Christ.” The neighbour, she says, is the person “we would move toward and see human dignity in them.”
Look at what Porter’s reading does with the text. She treats the Samaritan as the outsider the lawyer is told to count, which answers the lawyer’s question on its own terms. Jesus’s final question goes a step further and makes the Samaritan the one who shows mercy. The two readings are not in conflict. If the despised outsider can be the model of neighbour-love, then no outsider can be excluded from it. Porter is drawing the conclusion the reversal implies.
Her application follows from that. Whether the person is a Uyghur Muslim in China or a Christian persecuted in Nigeria, she says, “we treat them both equally the same,” because both bear the image of God, the imago Dei. And she describes the posture that produces: “we’ll scream to the high heavens when there’s injustice.”
That raises the specific question of this study. If the parable reaches the Uyghur Muslim, it plainly reaches the persecuted Christian. Porter’s central example was a Nigerian schoolgirl named Leah. In Porter’s account, Leah was 14 when an armed group took her and her classmates from school. When the others were released, she was told she could go home only if she denied Christ. She refused, and Porter reported that four years later she was still held, likely forced into marriage, and the mother of two children. Porter insists Leah is not an isolated case: “she’s representative of so many children in Nigeria.” She chose Leah’s story for a reason that fits the parable’s movement outward: “if they can see themselves in Leah, then maybe they, we can start to see ourselves in the Uyghur Chinese people.”
Test the reading: does distance break the parable?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. The man in the story is on a road the Samaritan is traveling. The text says the Samaritan, “as he journeyed, came where he was” (Luke 10:33). Proximity is part of the scene. A reader can fairly ask whether a story about stopping on a road obligates anyone toward a stranger in another country.
The parable itself does not mention distance. What it does make clear is where the moral weight falls. Neither the priest nor the Levite is condemned for failing to search out every wounded traveler in Judea. They are faulted for seeing a particular man and passing by. The parable’s question is not how far away someone is but what you do once their need is in front of you.
Lisa Fields names the honest starting point for most readers. Hearing about the Uyghurs from Porter, she admits, “I wouldn’t even know that that was happening,” and explains why: “you’re focused on what you’re dealing with in your space.” Ignorance is not the priest’s sin. But this study has now told you Leah’s name. Once you know, you are no longer in the position of someone who has not seen. You are standing where the priest stood.
That is application, not the parable’s original meaning, and it should be held as such. It also has limits. No one can carry every name, and the Samaritan helped one man, not every traveler on that road. Porter’s own vocabulary points the same direction: “my citizenship is not just so narrow, but it’s global.” A global citizenship does not mean infinite responsibility. It means the boundary of who can be your neighbour is no longer set by geography.
For leaders: some participants may hear Leah’s story through their own experience of abuse or coercion. Let anyone step out or stay quiet without explanation, and do not ask people to share personal history. If the story brings up abuse or domestic violence in someone’s own life, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available in the United States at 1-800-799-7233.
A practice: borrow the Samaritan’s verbs
This practice turns your close reading into one concrete act. It takes a week.
- See. Learn the name and situation of one persecuted person or one specific community, from a reliable advocacy or news source. Write down three things you now know that you did not know before. Do not stop at a country name or a statistic.
- Do not pass by. Read Luke 10:31-32 again with that name in mind. Write one sentence describing what passing by on the other side would look like for you this week.
- Choose one verb. Look back at your list of the Samaritan’s verbs. Pick one that corresponds to something you can actually do: binding up might be giving to an organization that supports families; bringing to the inn might be telling someone else the story; paying the host might be a recurring gift rather than a single one. Porter’s campaign asked people for exactly these kinds of acts: adding their voices, signing a petition and giving.
- Promise to return. The Samaritan says he will come again. Put a reminder on your calendar for one month from now to check on what has happened to the person or community you chose.
In a group, have each person report only the name and the verb they chose. No one needs to explain why or disclose anything else.
Questions for discussion
- Compare the lawyer’s question in Luke 10:29 with Jesus’s question in Luke 10:36. In your own words, what changes between them, and why do you think Jesus made that change rather than answering directly?
- Before reading Luke 9:51-56, how did you picture the Samaritan? How does that earlier scene change what Luke’s first readers would have felt when the Samaritan became the hero?
- Restate Porter’s reading of the parable fairly, then restate the reading that focuses on who acted as a neighbour. Where do they agree, and does either one leave something out?
- The priest and Levite saw the man. Is there a difference between not knowing about suffering and choosing not to know? Where does that difference show up in how you handle news about persecution?
- Porter’s organization defends people of every faith, while this study’s question is about persecuted Christians. Does the parable give believers a special obligation to fellow Christians, or does that obligation come from elsewhere in Scripture? What would you point to?
- The Samaritan’s care was costly and continued past the first encounter. What would continued care look like for someone held captive for years, and what makes it hard to sustain?
- What part of this reading would you want tested further before you taught it to someone else?
The lawyer left that conversation with a command, not a definition: “Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37). He had asked for a line he could stand behind. Jesus gave him a road and a man lying beside it. The question this passage leaves you is not whether a girl in Nigeria counts as your neighbour. You know her name now. It is which of the Samaritan’s verbs you are willing to take up.