Origen's homily on Luke's lawyer who asks the way to eternal life, unfolding the Good Samaritan as an allegory of Christ rescuing wounded humanity.
Homily on Luke 34 is one of Origen's surviving sermons on the Gospel of Luke, preached to a congregation and preserved in Latin translation. It takes as its text the exchange between Jesus and a teacher of the law who asks what he must do to possess eternal life, and the parable of the Good Samaritan that follows the lawyer's question "Who is my neighbor?" Origen reads the double command to love God and neighbor as the compendium of the whole law, then turns to the parable as its enacted illustration.
The bulk of the homily works through the parable point by point in the allegorical style for which Origen is famous, reporting first an interpretation he attributes to "a certain one of the elders": the man going down is Adam, Jerusalem is paradise, Jericho is the world, the robbers are hostile powers, the priest is the law, the Levite the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ himself. Origen endorses this reading as reasonable and beautiful while cautioning that it should not be forced onto every person's experience, since not everyone literally goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He then develops his own extended reading of the Samaritan as the divine "guardian who neither slumbers nor sleeps," carrying oil and wine as remedies prepared in advance for wounded humanity, and depositing the healed man in the inn, which Origen identifies as the church, entrusting him to an innkeeper he calls the angel of the church.
The homily matters as a compact specimen of patristic exegetical method: a New Testament parable treated simultaneously as ethical exhortation and as a coded narrative of salvation history, with almost every detail (the two denarii, the oil, the half-dead state of the victim) assigned theological weight. It closes by turning the allegory back into a moral command, urging the congregation to imitate the Samaritan's mercy rather than merely admire the story's typology, invoking Paul's "be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ."
“You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole strength, and with your whole mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
— Homily on Luke 34 · read this chapter →
“that the man who went down is Adam, Jerusalem paradise, Jericho the world, the robbers the hostile powers, the priest the law, the Levite the prophets, the Samaritan Christ, the wounds disobedience”
— Homily on Luke 34 · read this chapter →
“This is he who "neither slumbers nor sleeps." This Samaritan set out on account of the half-dead man, not "from Jerusalem to Jericho" as the priest and the Levite were going down”
— Homily on Luke 34 · read this chapter →
“he carries the half-dead man, and brings him into the "inn," that is, into the church, which receives all and denies its help to none, to which Jesus calls everyone, saying: "Come to”
— Homily on Luke 34 · read this chapter →
“for us to imitate Christ and to have mercy on those who "had fallen among robbers," to come to them, to bind up their wounds, to pour on oil and wine”
— Homily on Luke 34 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon on Luke's account of a lawyer asking Jesus how to gain eternal life, which leads into the parable of the Good Samaritan. Origen reads the double command to love God and neighbor as the summary of the whole law, then allegorizes the parable as a picture of Christ rescuing fallen humanity.
He reports an older interpretation in which Adam is the wounded traveler, paradise is Jerusalem, the world is Jericho, the law is the priest, the prophets are the Levite, and Christ is the Samaritan. Origen largely endorses this reading but adds his own emphasis that the Samaritan is the divine 'guardian who neither slumbers nor sleeps.'
Origen identifies the inn where the wounded man is left as the church, 'which receives all and denies its help to none,' and the innkeeper as 'the angel of the church' who is entrusted with the man's ongoing care.
Origen interprets the two denarii the Samaritan gives the innkeeper as knowledge of the Father and the Son, and of the mystery of their mutual indwelling, given to the church's guardian angel as a kind of reward for diligent care.
No. He explicitly cautions that although the elder's allegorical reading is 'reasonable and beautiful,' it should not be supposed that every detail applies to every man's actual circumstances.
It ends by turning the allegory into a moral imperative, urging listeners to imitate Christ's mercy toward the wounded by binding wounds and pouring on oil and wine, since Jesus's command to the lawyer, 'Go, and do likewise,' is addressed to everyone.
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