wilderness, he would have had small chance of being heard at best. But see! a traveller from Jerusalem happens to come by that same way. He is a priest. He cannot fail to pass the man. He sees him lying there half dead, turns his ass to the other side of the way, and hurries on. Terror sank into his very heart when he saw such a sight in such a place, and knew for certain that robbers must be near! - how could he stay to help the victim? But not long afterwards the sound of hoofs might again be heard, and another traveller came by. His head-dress proclaimed him a Levite; and, as he drew near and came to the place, he looked at the wounded man, and then hurried forward on the other side of the way. Like the priest, he shrank from exposing himself to danger for the poor chance of rescuing a man he had never seen before. Was all hope lost? Not yet; for another traveller drew near. It was no one who had been visiting the temple this time. It was a Samaritan. He was going on his ordinary business round, and was hurrying on his way when he saw the miserable sufferer stretched upon the ground. He stayed his mule, and though he saw that the man was a Jew, yet his pity, once stirred, would not suffer him to leave him there. So he dismounted, knelt down by the wounded man to see if he was still alive, and when he found that he was, determined to run the risk! The ordinary equipment of a traveller enabled him to wipe and cleanse the wounds, and make a little salve out of wine and oil. So he dressed and bound up the wounds, and gently raised the man and placed him on his mule, which he led by the reins that its paces might be as smooth as possible. They were fortunate enough not to be surprised by the robbers again, and arrived in safety at an inn, where guests were received without distinction for a small payment, and at which the Samaritan was in the habit of staying. Here the wounded man was laid on a bed, and his friend provided him with every thing he needed, and stayed with him that evening and the following night. Then he was obliged to go on his way, and his patient already appeared to be out of danger. But he was determined not to do things by halves; so in the morning, when he was ready to start, he called the innkeeper and paid him two denarii in advance on behalf of the Jew, for he had been robbed of all he possessed, and consequently could not pay for himself. "Take every possible care of him," said the Samaritan; "and you need not be afraid of going beyond what I have deposited, for if you do I will pay the balance when next I come this way." Then he continued his journey.

66

"Now which of these three," said Jesus to the lawyer, Priest, Levite, or Samaritan, should you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by the robbers?" There could be only one answer; but the lawyer could not bring himself to pronounce the hated word "Samaritan" with commendation, so he answered, with some repugnance, "The one that took pity on him." "Do you go and do the same," said Jesus; and so the conversation ended. This was the practical solution of the abstract question, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus compelled the haughty Jew to allow that the most despised and hated enemy of his people and his faith might be his neighbor, and then dismissed him with the exhortation to forget all differences of race and of religion, and by showing true mercy to make himself the neighbor of others. Ask rather, "Who is not my neighbor?" Whoever helps you and loves you is your neighbor. Do you, then, in your turn, regard yourself as the neighbor of all, without distinction, whom you can help or bless.

1

This parable gives us no right to ascribe to Jesus the paradoxical opinion that "all men are our neighbors," but it shows us very clearly that any one may be our neighbor, and that true humanity throws down all walls of partition between man and man. But there are several considerations which justify us in questioning whether Luke gives us the parable in its true connection. In the first place, it fits in somewhat awkwardly with what precedes and follows, and the context has evidently been affected by another narrative. And, in the second place, the first two Gospels give a much more probable account of an interview between Jesus and a lawyer which Luke appears to have worked up in this passage. According to them the question is put in a much more definite form, and it is Jesus himself who joins the two texts together and gives them out as the essence of the Law. Indeed, it is little short of absurd to ascribe to this Jew so profound and original a view of the question. We may, therefore, assume that the parable is out of place as Luke gives it, and that it was meant originally to show that true humanity and goodness raise even the most despised of heretics, even a Samaritan, above the most religious Jew, above the sacred persons of the priest or Levite. The parable shows small affection for the servants of the temple, and contains a severe rebuke of the Jewish spirit of exclusiveness.

1 Compare Luke x. 25, 26, with xviii. 18, 20 a.

2 Matthew xxii. 35 ff. (Mark xii 28 ff.).

In the preceding chapters we have seen repeatedly and in detail how bitterly Jesus was disappointed in his expectations of his people. Their absolute incapacity to receive his gospel became constantly clearer. But to the very last he went on loving his country as passionately as ever, and straining all his powers to rescue it. Nor was his estimate of the religious privileges of Israel in any degree lowered. The very forms under which he spoke of the ideal future remained intensely Israelitish. Take this threat, for instance:

"I tell you that many shall come from the East and from the West, and shall lie down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast into the darkness without. There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth!"

Here Jesus is speaking of the great Messianic feast;1 and the names of those who occupy the chief places show that it is prepared especially for the Israelites. Accordingly the Israelites are described as the children or heirs of the kingdom, its intended or appointed subjects. Now Luke very properly assigns these words to a late period of the life of Jesus, and brings them into connection with a rebuke of Jewish pride; but since this expression, “children of the kingdom," as applied to the Jews was not at all to his taste, he omitted it. He gives the passage thus: "There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves are thrust out.' But even this was not enough for a certain sectarian editor of this Gospel, who pruned it in the second century of all expressions favorable to the Jews. He substituted "all the righteous" in this passage for the patriarchs and prophets. On the other hand, Matthew has preserved the words in the most original form, but he has inserted them in the middle of a miraculous story, and has quite wrongly assigned them to an early period in the career of Jesus, before he could have had all the mournful experience of his people which dictated such expressions, — nay, at the very moment he was indirectly sounding the praise of Israel! 8

Jesus constantly repeated this threat with ever-increasing emphasis, sometimes under the same imagery more elaborately worked out, and sometimes under other forms. The Israelites would be cut off by their own guilt from the salva1 Compare Revelation xix. 9.

8 See pp. 308, 309.

2 Luke xiii. 28.

tion prepared for them, they would bitterly lament their unbelief when it was too late, and their places would be taken by heathen from every quarter under heaven. Even John had sternly warned his hearers not to trust in their descent from Abraham. And now Jesus found in the Holy Scriptures many and many a lamentation over the stubbornness, the hypocrisy, the dulness of heart with which Israel had rejected the Lord and his messengers, and many an example of a deeper longing for salvation and a greater readiness to receive it on the part of the heathen. And was it not a fact that sinners, who were half heathen, already pressed into the kingdom and put the pious to shame? A little more delay, and their sentence would be passed. And as the Master's disappointment grew, his warnings became darker, and the threatening tone of his discourses rose; while the sense of offended dignity, and the just pride of the rejected prophet heightened rather than toned down the personal claims he put forward. Listen to the reply he made when told that if he wanted people to believe in him he must first prove his claims by a miracle:

"A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign, and no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet Jona. On the day of judgment the men of Nineveh shall stand beside this generation before the seat of judgment, and shall condemn it by their example; for they repented at the preaching of Jona, and I tell you there is more than Jona here! The Queen of the South shall rise up on the day of judgment by this generation, and shall condemn it by her example; for she came from the end of the world to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and I tell you there is more than Solomon here!"

What are we to understand by this "sign of Jona" that was triumphantly to vindicate the mission of Jesus? The context indicates that the sign of Solomon might be substituted; but a prophet and a whole nation furnish a better parallel than a sage and a single woman to Jesus and his contemporaries. It appears from the explanation that follows that Jesus meant to say that heathen were converted by the preaching of Jona. This case stands alone in the history

1 Luke xiii. 29.

2 See p. 106.

8 Matthew xix. 8, xv. 7, xiii. 14, v. 12, xxiii. 37, xi. 21-24, xii. 41, 42; Luke iv. 25-27.

4 See pp. 289 f.

5 Compare vol. ii. chap. vii. p. 69, and vol. ii chap. xix. pp. 525–527.

of the prophets, and may well be called "the sign." In the same way this generation, already condemned by these examples from the olden time, must consent to see the gospel given to the heathen and received by them with regenerating faith. So should the preaching of Jona be a type or sign of the preaching of Jesus. Most certainly Jesus did not mean, as Matthew would have it, that he himself would spend three days in the world below between his death and his resurrection, just as Jona had spent three days in the belly of the monster of the deep. Such an explanation is simply absurd in view of the words themselves, the context, the speaker, the hearers, and the narrative referred to. But neither is Luke correct in supposing the meaning to be that Jesus himself was a sign to his people and his age, just as Jona was a sign to the Ninevites. This interpretation is not supported by the context, and is decidedly obscure; for it would imply that Jona and Jesus were signs of the power of the word, or of the mercy of God, or something similar, all which would be quite inappropriate here. This reference to the Ninevites and the Queen of Sheba immediately calls to mind the similar utterances which we have already heard from Jesus. For instance, he reminded his hearers, on some occasion which we can no longer identify, how Elijah and Elisha, at the command of the Most High, had helped heathen rather than the people of their own country, when the one went to a Phoenician widow and the other healed a Syrian captain. And again, he placed the luxurious and licentious Tyre and Sidon before Bethsaida and Chorazin, and Sodom, the very type of infamy, before Capernaum, in capacity for belief and penitence; declaring that it would be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, for Sodom and Gomorrah, in the day of judgment than for those places which had been the ordinary scene of his ministry. All these are modifications of that one thought: The Jews are sunk below the heathen by their utter incapacity to receive the gospel.

When Jesus had once formed this idea, that the Jews would be excluded and the heathen would take their places, we might feel almost sure that he would give expression to it in an allegorical description of the prospects of the kingdom of God. In point of fact, we have two parables that answer to this description, one of which is given by both Matthew and Luke; but the two versions differ so widely that we can 1 See pp. 235 and 259.