Luke Chapter 10 verse 31 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 31. - There came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Both the priest and Levite were frequent travellers along this road between the capital and Jericho. Jericho was especially a city of priests, and when the allotted service or residence time at the temple was over, these would return naturally to their own homes. It has been remarked that the grave censure which this story levels at the everyday want of charity on the part of priests and Levites, fills up what would otherwise have been a blank in the Master's many-sided teaching. Nowhere else in the gospel narrative do we find our Lord taking up the attitude of censor of the priestly and Levitical orders. We have little difficulty in discovering reasons for this apparently strange reticence. They were still the official guardians and ministers of his Father's house. In his public teaching, as a rule, he would refrain from touching these or their hollow, pretentious lives. Once, and once only, in this one parable did he dwell - but even here with no severe denunciations, as in the case of scribes and Pharisees - on the shortcomings of the priestly caste. The bitter woe was fast coming on these degenerate children of Aaron. In less than half a century, that house, the glory and the joy of Israel, would be utterly destroyed, net to be raised again. No woe that the Christ could pronounce could be as crushing in its pitiless condemnation. The very reason for the existence of priest and Levite as priest and Levite would exist no longer. The selfish life of the doomed order, in which holiness seemed effectually to have been divorced from charity, is portrayed in the lifelike picture of the parable of the good Samaritan.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(31) By chance. . . .--The passage is the only one in the New Testament in which the phrase occurs. Our Lord seems to use it as with a touch of what we have elsewhere termed irony. It seemed so casual, as such opportunities always do to men who neglect them, and yet it was, in the purpose of God, the test-moment of each man's character and life.There came down.--Better, as before, there was going down.A certain priest.--Jericho was at this time a priestly city, and so the journey of the priest from Jerusalem, as if returning from his week of sacerdotal offices there, has a touch of vivid naturalness. He, too, like the questioner, had been doing his duty to God, according to his measure of that duty.Passed by on the other side.--The priest shrank, it might be, (1) from the trouble and peril of meddling with a man whom robbers had just attacked, and (2) from the fear of incurring a ceremonial defilement by coming into contact with what might possibly be a corpse before he reached it. He accordingly "passed by on the other side," not of the road only, but of the ravine through which the road passed.