The parable of the Good Samaritan has been central to how I think about politics. Before I get to the politics, though, I have to register a frustration. Most handlers of this passage rush to the moral — go and do likewise — and never say the most fundamental thing about it. Christ is the Good Samaritan.
The parable humbles before it commissions. The man in the ditch is not finally a stranger I am meant to pity; he is me — stripped, half dead, unable to inherit eternal life by any effort of my own. The true Good Samaritan is Christ, who crossed enemy lines to a people who counted him a foe, bound my wounds, and charged my debt to his own account. Only a man who knows he was the one in the ditch can go and do likewise without turning mercy into a payment scheme. We love because he first loved us. The love is always a response.
And the love it responds to is proactive. As a Calvinist I confess something that orders everything else I believe: before the foundation of the world, God chose to adopt me as a son through Christ. He did not wait by the road for me to stagger into need and then take pity. He set his love on me before I existed, before I had done anything to attract it or repel it. That is proactive love, and it is the kind of love that made me start thinking about this parable politically.
Work with me. The Samaritan in the story is reactive. He comes upon a man already beaten, already robbed, already in the ditch, and he responds with mercy. But suppose he had the chance to be proactive. Suppose that, having delivered the man to the inn, he looks back at the road. This stretch of the descent to Jericho is known for robbery. It has produced victims before, and it will produce them again. Suppose he does something about the road — petitions the authorities for a patrol, funds a watchpost, organizes the innkeepers to post a guard. Has he left mercy behind and wandered into politics? Has he missed the gospel?
He has done the same thing he did in the ditch. He has loved his neighbor — the next traveler, the one not yet beaten. He has added the virtues God also commands: prudence, foresight, wisdom, planning. Mercy that kneels in the ditch to pick up the victim but never asks why this particular ditch keeps filling up with victims is narrower, not holier.
Here the old worry surfaces, the one from the last essay. Is this not mission creep — the church trading the gospel for a program of social repair? The parable settles it. The command is fixed: love your neighbor. The venue is prudential — a torn cloak, two denarii, or a signature on a petition. Scripture commands the love and leaves the mechanism to wisdom, which is the ground I marked off before. Public policy, rightly understood, is neighbor-love made proactive and durable. A just law is mercy that guards the traveler the lawmaker will never meet, on a road he will never walk, years after he is gone.
This requires the obvious caution. Because policy is prudential, no one holds a mandate to baptize his preferred program as the Christian position. The command to love the man on the road does not tell you which patrol to fund, and a Christian who pretends otherwise has confused his own wisdom with the word of God.
But set the caution beside the gospel and the direction is clear. Jesus did not die simply to forgive me, reactively, each time I sin. He died to give me a new heart — a new will from the Creator — so that I would move in righteousness and be zealous for good works. His love is far more proactive than we usually reckon it. It reached back before creation, and it reaches forward into a renovated will that wants the good and goes looking for it. Our love for our neighbor is meant to run the same direction. It should not only wait at the roadside to bind the next victim’s wounds. It should go to work on the road. That is why political policy is meaningful at all: as an expression of a neighbor-love that has learned, from the love that saved it, to be proactive.