Sermon Tone Analysis

! Augustine’s Commentary on the Good Samaritan

A/ certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; / Adam himself is meant; /Jerusalem/ is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; /Jericho/ means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies.

/Thieves/ are the devil and his angels.

/Who stripped him/, namely; of his immortality; /and beat him/, by persuading him to sin; /and left him half-dead/, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called /half-dead.

/The /priest/ and the /Levite/ who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation.

/Samaritan /means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name.

The /binding of the wounds /is the restraint of sin.

/Oil/ is the comfort of good hope; /wine/ the exhortation to work with fervent spirit.

The /beast/ is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us.

The being /set upon the beast /is belief in the incarnation of Christ.

The /inn/ is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage.

The /morrow/ is after the resurrection of the Lord.

The /two pence/ are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come.

The /innkeeper /is the Apostle (Paul).

The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him “to live by the gospel”[1]

 

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[1] Augustine, /Quaestiones// Evangeliorum//, /II, 19 –slightly abridged as cited in Dodd, C.H., /The Parables of the Kingdom  /(New York: Scribners, 1961), pg.

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