Christianity Today: From ‘Thou Shalt’ to ‘Once Upon a Time’, by W. David O. Taylor (Fuller Theological Seminary; Author, To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God’s Creation (2026)):
In Luke 10:25–37, a lawyer approaches Jesus with a question: “Teacher … what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers his interrogator with a question of his own: “What is written in the Law? … How do you read it?” The lawyer answers by restating the twin commandments to love God and neighbor alike. Jesus affirms the lawyer’s answer and tells him to live in the light of it. But the lawyer remains unsatisfied. And just how would you define “neighbor”? he persists (v. 29).
Jesus answers this second question with a story—and in doing so he offers the lawyer an opportunity to enter into true neighborliness from the inside.
If the philosopher Blaise Pascal is right in saying that the heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing, then Jesus cleverly addresses the lawyer’s heart, his seat of desire, by way of a narrative. A story can retune the heart to the truth and make it possible to gain a feel for reality. A good story can show us another’s pain in a way that we begin to feel for ourselves.
This is precisely what Jesus aims to accomplish with his story.
The lawyer not only sees the truth as it is played out in Jesus’ tale but also feels true neighborliness as it is exhibited in the Samaritan protagonist. A twist occurs in the story, and the lawyer finds himself implicated in a role that he might never have imagined for himself: playing the “bad guy” instead of the “good guy.”
With Jesus, the unimaginable becomes imaginable. But the point of the story is less about Jew versus Samaritan or even about human beings as such. It is even less so about making the lawyer feel bad. It is about God. The story redirects the attention of the lawyer, and of the crowd listening in on the exchange, to the kind of mercy that describes the character of God. Jesus tells a story so that through this particular parable his hearers might acquire a feel for the things of God’s kingdom, even as they feel with the Samaritan and for the stranger. …
With Jesus’ story in Luke’s Gospel, it is about the reality of true neighborliness. Jesus tells the lawyer who his neighbor is by showing him the reality of a narrated mercy, and in so doing he invites the young man to become a human being who is attuned to the plot line of God’s recreative purposes for the world. …
Rather than telling the lawyer that his idea of neighbor love was wrong, Jesus takes the lawyer’s original question (Who is my neighbor?) and turns it into a better question (Who acted as a neighbor?). He takes the lawyer’s presumed narrative about neighbors and replaces it with a story that shows the lawyer an image of true neighborliness. He invites the lawyer to become implicated in the story and to live his life in light of it. …
All good storytellers possess this skill: to enlarge our hearts with the storied truth of God’s love so that we might love as God would have us love.
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