John Kilgallen, «Martha and Mary: Why at Luke 10,38-42?», Vol. 84 (2003) 554-561

Given that Luke has wide freedom to arrange his stories as he thinks best, one looks to the material surrounding the story of Mary and Martha to better understand why that story is in its present place. It seems best to think of this story as an affirmation of the teaching of the ‘one thing necessary’, the teaching within the story of the Good Samaritan. Indeed, the Mary-Martha story underlines the Lucan emphasis on the primacy of all Jesus’ teaching.

inherit eternal life (vv. 25-28 and v. 37). With reference to the statement of Jesus (24) that immediately precedes and, we think, introduces this overall teaching, there is nothing in his final affirmation of the Mosaic commands to love God and neighbor that ‘prophets and kings’ have not heard. All that can be said in this regard is that what traditional teachers of Israel taught is also the teaching of Jesus¹⁵.

        On the other hand, within this traditional framework one meets the startling teaching of Jesus that love of neighbor means thorough care for anyone in trouble: ‘anyone’, in turn, means enemy as well as friend¹⁶, and this care extends to care given to the ‘ritually impure’¹⁷. There is little support for Jesus’ definition of ‘neighbor’ in traditional Israelite teaching, when he includes in it such figures as prostitutes, tax-collectors and, generally, ‘sinners’¹⁸.

        Love of enemy is not totally identified as forgiveness of an enemy. Jesus does urge forgiveness of one’s enemies when, in parable, he encourages the Elder Son to rejoice at the return of the Younger Son to health, to life (Luke 15,25-32); he urges forgiveness of a brother who repents and seeks forgiveness, even if he asks seven times a day (Luke 17,3-4). But the parable which details the Samaritan’s help of a Jew goes furthest in Jesus’ defining who is the neighbor whom God obliges one to love in order to inherit eternal life, and who is the neighbor who loves. Forgiveness in itself need not define as ‘neighbor’ the person Jesus has in mind in 10,25-37; thus, his teaching about forgiveness need not stand as unique in Jewish teaching.

        One does well to heed the observation that Luke, in 10,25-37, means to underline the detailed care offered to the person in need; a good portion of the parable recounts all that the Samaritan does for his neighbor, and this fits with the overall concern of the passage to determine what one must do to inherit eternal life. But, though such a warning is well placed, one cannot avoid the fact that the imaginative story within the passage means to identify the term ‘neighbor’¹⁹, and in this context consciously makes not a Jew, but a