Where is the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Bible?

Luke 10:30–37. Only Luke records it. The conversation that prompts it begins a little earlier, at Luke 10:25.

What is the moral of the Good Samaritan?

The usual one is to help anyone in need, even a stranger. But Jesus tells it to answer "who is my neighbor?", and ends by changing the question: instead of defining who deserves help, he asks who acted as a neighbor — and the hero is precisely someone the listener despised.

Why did the priest and the Levite not help?

The text does not say. Common explanations point to fear of robbers or to ritual impurity from touching what might be a corpse, but those are guesses. The parable is not interested in their reasons; it is interested in what the Samaritan did.

Walking with Jesus / The parables of Jesus

The parable of the Good Samaritan

They asked who counts as a neighbor. He answered with who acts like one.

A lawyer asks Jesus what to do to inherit eternal life, and between them they arrive at the answer: love God, and love your neighbor. Then comes the real question — "who is my neighbor?" — asked, Luke says, because he wanted to justify himself.

The parable is the answer. And it does not answer what was asked.

The story, step by step

Luke 10:25–29The question: how to inherit eternal life, and who is my neighbor
Luke 10:30A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed and left half dead
Luke 10:31–32A priest and a Levite see him and pass by on the other side
Luke 10:33–35A Samaritan comes near, binds his wounds and pays for the inn
Luke 10:36–37The question handed back: which of the three was the neighbor?

The line the story turns on

Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?

Luke 10:36

The man had asked "who is my neighbor?" — in other words, how far does my obligation go, and where may it stop. Jesus swaps the question. It is no longer who deserves to be treated as a neighbor, but who behaved like one. And the answer the lawyer is made to give, "he who showed mercy on him", he gives without being able to say the word "Samaritan".

What it means

Jews and Samaritans at the time avoided one another for old religious and historical reasons. A Jewish listener would expect the third character, after the priest and the Levite, to be an ordinary Jew — the hero of the people. Jesus puts there exactly the person the listener did not want to see helping.

That is why the parable resists being boiled down to "help people in need". It says that too, but the blow lands somewhere else: the question "who is my neighbor?" is looking for a boundary, and the story hands over none. It ends with a short instruction — "Go and do likewise" — addressed to someone who wanted to know where he could stop.

One parable a day, with the question around it

Walking with Jesus has a collection called The Parables of Jesus that takes them one a day — each with the question he was answering, a short reflection, a prayer, and one thing to carry into the day.

It is a one-time purchase, about five minutes a morning, and it never asks you to catch up on days you missed.

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Questions people ask

Where is the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Bible?: Luke 10:30–37. Only Luke records it. The conversation that prompts it begins a little earlier, at Luke 10:25.
What is the moral of the Good Samaritan?: The usual one is to help anyone in need, even a stranger. But Jesus tells it to answer "who is my neighbor?", and ends by changing the question: instead of defining who deserves help, he asks who acted as a neighbor — and the hero is precisely someone the listener despised.
Why did the priest and the Levite not help?: The text does not say. Common explanations point to fear of robbers or to ritual impurity from touching what might be a corpse, but those are guesses. The parable is not interested in their reasons; it is interested in what the Samaritan did.