It is a strange thing, to meet eternity on a phone screen. A small image, half-lit in the quiet scroll of the day, yet it stops me cold. Maximilien Luce’s Le Bon Samaritain (1896), painted in the fractured light of Neo-Impressionism, retells one of the most enduring parables. A wounded traveler lies broken on the roadside, a Samaritan bends to lift him, and a donkey waits patiently nearby. But here is the crucial detail: this is no first-century Samaritan. He is a Frenchman, clothed in the garments of Luce’s own world. He is not an ancient “other” but a stand-in, there on our behalf.
That choice transforms the parable. In Jesus’ telling, the Samaritan mattered precisely because of his strangeness. To his audience, he was an outsider, despised, the last person one would expect to act with compassion. In Luce’s painting, that identity has shifted. The Samaritan has become something larger than ethnicity or history: he has become an ideal. His value no longer lies in being a Samaritan, but in being the one who stops, the one who lifts, the one who loves.
This shift mirrors the way all religious stories work across time. The concrete dissolves into the symbolic. We no longer hear only about a particular vineyard, or one road between Jerusalem and Jericho. We hear about every vineyard, every road, every traveler. The Samaritan is no longer “a man from Samaria” but, in the words of Luke’s Gospel, simply “the one who showed mercy” (Luke 10:37). The archetype is born.
Jesus himself taught this way. His parables drew on the daily life of his people—seeds, sheep, coins, neighbors—because familiarity gives moral weight. As Paul Ricoeur observed, “The symbol gives rise to thought” (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 348). A symbol works when it feels near enough to touch. If the story drifts too far into the foreign, it becomes safe, distant, ignorable. But if it is clothed in our own world—like Luce’s Frenchman—it unsettles us into recognition.
This is the genius of religious art. It recycles what matters, casting old stories in new clothes so they continue to wound and heal. Byzantine mosaics, Gothic carvings, Baroque canvases, and Luce’s Neo-Impressionism all carry the Samaritan forward. Each translation makes the same point: mercy belongs to this time, not just to the past.
Luce’s technique itself underscores this. Pointillism fragments surfaces into countless dots of color. Up close, they are disjointed; only from a distance do they cohere into form. Compassion works this way. No single act of mercy completes the task, but together, repeated endlessly, they reveal the larger picture of love.
Even Jesus himself is received in this way. What we know of him is mediated, second-hand, carried through gospels, traditions, and centuries of retelling. He is not only man but archetype, not only teacher but story. Carl Jung saw the Christ figure as one of humanity’s great universals: “The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology, because it embodies the archetype of the self” (Jung, 1959, p. 72). Like the Samaritan, he is both historical and ideal, particular and universal.
And this is where the ethical demand becomes clearest. Emmanuel Levinas insisted, “The face of the other is what forbids us to kill” (Levinas, 1969, p. 199). The wounded man’s face, pale and broken in Luce’s painting, makes that demand visible. The Samaritan bends to answer it. But by painting him in modern clothes, Luce makes the demand ours. The Samaritan has become not just the other but any of us.
That is why this story still pierces, even on the dim glow of a phone screen. It reminds us that the parable is never finished. The wounded man lies waiting. The Samaritan bends again. And the question returns to us, sharp as ever: will we play the role of the ideal, or will we pass by on the other side?
References
Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II). Princeton University Press.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1967). The Symbolism of Evil. Beacon Press.
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. Luke 10:25–37.