The parable of the Good Samaritan

Because the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37) is often misused in political discourse, I'll make a few exegetical observations. 

The parable employs a reflection symmetry (i.e. left/right reversal), where the application of the story is the mirror image of the story. The immediate context involves the question of how members of the ingroup (e.g. Jews) should treat members of the outgroup. 

The historic setting involves a conversation between Jesus and a Jewish questioner. Of course, the audience for Luke's Gospel is Christian, so the parable has wider implications.

We'd expect Jesus to tell the story of a Jew showing neighborly love to an outsider. That would be a straightforward answer to the question.

Instead, Jesus flips it around by telling the story of an outsider showing neighborly love to a Jew. (I assume the default identity of the victim is a Jew.)

Why does Jesus do that? It's one thing for a Samaritan to need the assistance of a Jew, quite another thing for a Jew to need the assistance of a Samaritan. To receive help at the hands of a Samaritan would be humiliating. Something a Jew would normally avoid. But in his extremity, he has no choice. Since his countrymen refuse to come to his rescue, he must settle for the Samaritan.

The application is in reverse of the story. Although the immediate point of the story is to illustrate how religious insiders (Jews, Christians) should treat religious outcasts (Samaritans, pagans), the story itself depicts a religious outcast caring for a religious insider.

So when we attempt to apply the parable, we need to distinguish between analogues inside the story and analogues outside the story. Who stands for what inside the story in contrast to who stands for what outside the story. Because the structure is a reflection symmetry, you can't directly analogize from the story to the application. That's not how they match up. 

Here's one modern-day parallel. Suppose you have a white supremacist who normally avoids minority doctors. But he has a child who becomes deathly ill. The child requires medical intervention. But the only available physician at the ER is a minority (e.g. Black, Asian, East Indian). 

Ordinarily, the white supremacist would turn down assistance from a minority. But because the stakes are so high in this situation, he relents. On the one hand, the physician condescends to treat a patient whose father despises him. On the other hand, the father swallows his pride to accept assistance from someone who's "beneath" him. Now he finds himself in the subordinate position. 

The general point of the story is that true neighbor love obligates us to help someone in need regardless of customary markers that distinguish members of the ingroup (your own group) from members of the outgroup. But Jesus makes an additional point by skewering Jewish pride–which, of course, has many non-Jewish analogues.  

This is a radical ethic, because traditionally, many humans don't care about what happens to members of the outgroup. 

At the same time, we can't make the parable prove things it wasn't intended to prove. In the parable, the victim is not a terrorist. The muggers are the terrorists. 

The parable concerns our prima facie social obligations. In the parable itself, you don't have competing obligations. It's not a parable about how to treat muggers, but how to treat the victim of muggers. 

It doesn't address the question of what the Samaritan should do if he arrived on the scene at an earlier point when the crime was in progress. That might well demand a different kind of intervention.

In the parable, the victim's life was in danger because he was injured and incapacitated. But, of course, you can have a situation in which a potential victim is in danger, unless someone forcibly intervenes to protect him or her. Yet the parable is silent on that scenario. It doesn't address that question one way or the other.