What Can We Learn From the Good Samaritan? — Augustine on the Neighbour
⏱ 15 min read
You know the parable. The man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, the robbers, the wounded man left half-dead in the ditch, the priest who walked past, the Levite who walked past, the Samaritan who stopped. The oil and the wine. The donkey. The inn. The two pence. The promise of return. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? — and the answer the lawyer cannot quite bring himself to say plainly. He that shewed mercy on him.
The lesson, you have been told a hundred times, is to be the Samaritan. To not walk past. To stop. To bind up. That lesson is right. It has, like most lessons that get used too often, gone slightly thin from being everywhere. It has become the wallpaper of Christian-women charity, the verse stitched on the tote bag at the church fundraiser, the line the pastor quotes when the offering is going to be taken next. It has, in the process, lost some of the slow weight it was meant to carry. The compassion-fatigued Christian woman of the modern world — the one who has been the Samaritan, in small daily ways, for years and is now tired — has been preached this parable mostly as a reproach. Be more like the Samaritan. The reproach has, by itself, done very little to give her back the strength to do what the parable is asking.
This is the slow version. Augustine of Hippo, preaching this parable to congregations in fourth-century North Africa and writing about it across the long unfolding of City of God, would not let the parable be used as a reproach. He kept turning the lamp back on the neighbour question, because the question had been the one the lawyer had originally been deflecting from — who is my neighbour? — and the answer, properly heard, was meant to be a relief, not a reproach. The neighbour, Augustine read, is the one in the ditch in front of you. Not the abstract category. Not the cause. The specific person, whose specific need, you can specifically meet. What can we learn from the Good Samaritan, slowly read with Augustine at your elbow, is closer to the tired compassionate woman than the wallpaper version has been.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you want a place to keep the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
If the restlessness underneath the compassion has been the deeper part — the small chronic inward question of whether all the doing is reaching the One it was meant to reach — my heart is restless until it rests in You is the slow Augustine companion. For the wider context of where Christian prayer learned to hold the cost of compassion, why the Psalms were the church’s prayer book walks the older ground. And if the doctrine underneath has been the part that has been thin — what the one God who is love actually means inside a parable like this one — what is the Trinity is Augustine’s slow answer to that.
The road down from Jerusalem
Before the Samaritan, before the priest and the Levite, before the robbers, there is the road. Augustine, preaching this parable in North Africa, drew his hearers’ attention to the road first. The road from Jerusalem down to Jericho was a particular road — a real road, in the fourth century as in the first, descending through bleached limestone canyons that hid robbers in their crevices, the most dangerous stretch of the network of Roman roads in Judea, named in local memory for its specific danger. Jesus chose this road as the setting of the parable deliberately. The hearers would have heard the road’s name and felt, in their bodies, the specific risk of walking it.
For Augustine, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a small allegory of every human life. Down from Jerusalem — the holy city, the place of God’s presence, the inward home. To Jericho — the city of the curse, the city of human striving, the city of the lower place. The wounded man, Augustine read, is the human soul on the descent from its proper home into the world’s exposure. The robbers are the world’s wounds. The half-dead state is the chronic state of most modern souls walking the same road. The priest and the Levite are the institutional religion that walked past. The Samaritan is Christ. The inn is the Church. The two pence are the sacraments. The promise of return is the second coming. Augustine’s allegorical reading was not arbitrary; it was the unanimous reading of the fathers for a thousand years, and it was the reading the church kept until the modern period made it embarrassing.
You do not need to receive every detail of the allegory. The allegory matters because it locates the parable. The parable is not a moral lesson about being kinder. The parable is a description of what Christ does for the soul on the road, and a charge to do, in small daily ways, what Christ has done in the larger way. The compassion the parable commands is the imitation of a compassion already given. The Samaritan who stops is already inside the larger story of the Samaritan who came down — into the very ditch every human soul is in — to bind up the wounds the world had left there. The doing flows out of the having-been-done-to. The reproach version skips that part. Augustine refused to.
The first passage: prayer that serves brotherly charity
“O Lord my God, give ear unto my prayer, and let Thy mercy hearken unto my desire: because it is anxious not for myself alone, but would serve brotherly charity; and Thou seest my heart, that so it is.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Augustine is praying for. Not for relief from his own concerns. Not for his own peace. His prayer, he says, is anxious not for myself alone, but would serve brotherly charity. The Augustinian I — the long, autobiographical I of the Confessions — opens at this sentence into a we. The prayer is for the brother. The prayer is for the neighbour. The prayer is for the wounded man on the road, who Augustine, by his own admission, has been walking past in small daily ways for years.
The honest line in the middle is the one the modern reader needs. Thou seest my heart, that so it is. Augustine is asking God, in the same sentence, to see whether the prayer is actually anxious for the brother or whether it is being decoratively presented as if it were. The honesty is what gives the prayer its weight. Augustine is not pretending. He knows his own heart is mixed. The charity that animates the prayer is real, but it is also fragile, and the fragility is honestly named in the same breath as the desire. The neighbour-love is not asserted. It is offered, for the Lord’s seeing, as the imperfect thing it actually is.
This is the part of the Good Samaritan parable most modern preaching has obscured. The neighbour-love commanded by the parable is not the asserted, performed, social-media-visible love of the compassion-Christianity industry. It is the small, honest, Thou seest my heart love of the woman who has been carrying the wounded ones in small daily ways and is now tired and is asking the Lord, with no decorative language, to keep her from collapsing under the weight. The neighbour-love that endures is the neighbour-love that has been honestly named, before God, as a thing that needs His sustaining if it is to keep walking the road.
For you, the application is precise. The compassion you have been carrying — for the difficult mother, for the friend in the long illness, for the colleague going through a divorce, for the parishioners whose grief has been heavy on your week — has been costing you. The reproach version of the parable would tell you to be more like the Samaritan. The slow Augustinian version would tell you to pray Augustine’s prayer. Let Thy mercy hearken unto my desire: because it is anxious not for myself alone, but would serve brotherly charity. The mercy that has to flow through you must first flow into you. The serving of brotherly charity is the consequence of mercy received, not the engine of a self-generated compassion. The compassion fatigue is the body’s signal that you have been trying to be the Samaritan without first being the wounded man in the ditch who was found by Christ.
The somatic that goes with the compassion-fatigued body
Pause here. The body of the compassion-fatigued woman is a particular kind of body. The shoulders are slightly hunched forward — the small protective curving of a body that has been carrying other people’s grief without enough air around itself. The breath is shallow. The chest is slightly tight. The lower back, often, is held in the small accumulated tension of a body that has been bracing against the steady inflow of other people’s pain for years.
Sit somewhere quiet. Press both feet flat against the floor. Let your spine, by a small fraction, lengthen. Not by pulling the shoulders back deliberately, but by allowing the small protective curving to release by a fraction. Lay one hand lightly on the lower back, behind, where the held tension usually settles. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale — slower than the inhale, until the lungs are almost empty — let the held place soften by a small fraction. The body of the Samaritan is a body with air around itself. The compassion that endures is the compassion that has enough physical space inside the carrier to keep flowing through.
Then take the hand away and read on. The body learning to soften, even by a fraction, is a small piece of the un-bracing the long road of compassion requires. Augustine, who knew the body and the soul were one in such matters, would have called this the slow physical preparation for the serving of brotherly charity his prayer described. The serving requires a body that has not collapsed. The un-bracing is how the body keeps room for the long walk.
The middle: the workbook the slow practice has its home in
The slow reading you are doing right now is the shape of the Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women. One short passage a day. One slow turning of one phrase — Thou seest my heart, brotherly charity, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy — over in the heart, in the middle of the week of carrying. Room on the page for the honest sentence about where the compassion has been thinning and where the mercy received has begun, again, to refill the carrier. No pep. No checklist of acts of service the page is keeping count of. The format of this article, walked one short page per evening, for the woman whose compassion has been quietly costing her too much and who is ready, slowly, to let the flowing-into match the flowing-through.
The second passage: the restless heart made for Thyself
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it twice.
This is Augustine’s most quoted line — the restless heart sentence — and at first glance it does not seem to belong in an article about the Good Samaritan. Augustine puts the two together, however, because the lawyer’s question that begins the parable — who is my neighbour? — is, Augustine read, the deflection of a restless heart. The lawyer was looking for a limit to the neighbour-category. Who, specifically, must I love? The question assumes that neighbour is a finite category, and that the categorisation, once done, will release the lawyer from the obligation to extend love to anyone outside it. The restless heart is the heart that wants to draw the circle small.
Jesus, in the parable, refuses to give a list. He tells a story instead. He does not answer the who question; he answers a different question. Who proved to be the neighbour? The shift is the cure. The neighbour is not a category to be drawn around the recipient. The neighbour is the inward posture the giver takes. The restlessness behind the lawyer’s question — give me the list, so I know who is excluded — is the same restlessness Augustine names in the famous sentence. The heart made for God will not be at rest in the small categorisations the lawyer’s question keeps trying to make. The heart at rest in God will recognise the neighbour as whoever has fallen in the ditch in front of it. The category will dissolve. The compassion will become specific.
For the compassion-fatigued woman, this is the part that brings the relief Augustine intended. The compassion that has been costing you has, perhaps, been costing you because it has not been specific enough. The general carrying of the world’s pain is heavier than the specific carrying of one person at a time. The Samaritan in the parable did not stop for every wounded man on the road that day. He stopped for the one in front of him. The compassion was specific. The donkey was used for one person. The two pence were paid for one person. The neighbour-love, in Augustine’s reading, becomes sustainable precisely because it is specific. The categorical compassion — the carrying of the poor, the suffering, the broken, in the abstract — is what burns out the carrier. The specific compassion — this one, in front of me, today — is what keeps the carrier walking the long road.
(For the sibling article on a man whose obedience was specific and small and faithful across decades, what can we learn from King David walks that ground. And for the apostle whose compassion was specific and city-by-city and exhausting in measurable ways, what can we learn from Paul the Apostle walks the long-form companion.)
The third passage: long-suffering and plenteous in mercy
“These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly. The two divine attributes are the part that lands.
Long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. Augustine, in the Confessions, names two of the Lord’s qualities in a single line. Long-suffering — the older English word for patient, but more particular. The Latin patiens longi names not just patience but a patience that endures over the long stretch, that is not exhausted by the duration of what it is enduring. Plenteous in mercy and truth — abundant, overflowing, not running out. The two qualities are the qualities required of the Samaritan-on-the-long-road, and they are the qualities Augustine names as the Lord’s own.
The reason this matters for the compassion-fatigued woman is the structure of the verse. The qualities are the Lord’s. The Samaritan-imitation flows from the Lord’s qualities being the source the carrier draws from. The compassion you are being asked to carry is not the compassion of your own resources, your own emotional reservoir, your own personal patience. It is the long-suffering of the Lord, the plenteous mercy of the Lord, drawn through you to the wounded one in front of you. The reservoir is His. You are the pipe. The pipe does not have to be inexhaustible. The reservoir is.
This is the part the modern Christian-women self-care discourse has obscured. The compassion-fatigue is real; the solutions usually offered for it are largely incomplete. Set better boundaries. Take more time for yourself. Replenish your own cup. All of which are true in their own register and none of which name the actual source of the durable compassion. The durable compassion does not come from your replenished cup. It comes from the long-suffering of the Lord, drawn through you. The replenishment is real and necessary; it is not the engine. The engine is His patience, His mercy, His truth — and the small daily practice of returning to that reservoir is what keeps the carrier walking the road.
Augustine’s line is the precise theological answer to the compassion-fatigue question. The compassion that lasts is the compassion that has been drawn from the Lord’s own long-suffering. The Samaritan in the parable was, in Augustine’s reading, an icon of Christ, who is the Samaritan of every soul. The imitation flows from being the recipient first. You cannot give what you have not received. The good news of the parable is that the receiving is endless. The Lord is plenteous. The compassion is sustainable.
What we can actually learn from the Good Samaritan
If you came here looking for a single sentence — what can we learn from the Good Samaritan — the slow Augustine answer is this. We learn that Christ is the first Samaritan, who came down from Jerusalem into the ditch every human soul is in. That the compassion the parable commands is the imitation of a compassion already received. That the neighbour is the specific person in front of you, not the abstract category the lawyer’s restless heart wanted to draw a limit around. That the prayer that serves brotherly charity must be honestly named — Thou seest my heart, that so it is — before the Lord, so that the mercy can keep flowing in. That the qualities required of the Samaritan — long-suffering, plenteous mercy, truth — are the Lord’s qualities, drawn through the carrier from a reservoir that does not run out. That the compassion that endures is the compassion that has been honest about its own fragility and has, in the same breath, made room for the Lord’s own patience to be the source.
The parable does not end with the Samaritan riding away. The parable ends with the question. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? The lawyer answers — he that shewed mercy on him — and Jesus says, go, and do thou likewise. The going is yours. The likewise is His. The slow practice, walked over years, is what makes the going possible without the carrier collapsing on the road.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily return to the reservoir that holds the compassion-fatigued carrier in proximity to the long-suffering Lord, until the neighbour in front of you can be met without collapsing the one meeting them.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Augustine’s slow vocabulary — Thou seest my heart, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy, the restless heart made for Thyself — into a daily companion built for the compassion-fatigued woman whose carrying has been quiet and faithful and who is, at last, ready to let the reservoir be His.
