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| Bede the Venerable |
Bede’s best-known parable interpretation is his allegorical reading of the Good Samaritan. Bede first observes that the lawyer who stands up to test Jesus exemplifies a “wise” person from whom God had “hidden these things” (Luke 10:21), and the lawyer is pretending not to know the Law’s command. Bede initially interprets the parable as an example story that “sets before us the perfect road to the life of heaven,” where humans are called to act with mercy as did the Samaritan, who showed his love not in word alone but in his concrete actions: “Remember that it is with such prompt mercy you must love and sustain your neighbour who is in need.” Love must be “proved also by deed, which brings us to eternal life.”
Bede
then moves to an allegorical interpretation: the parable teaches us that a
neighbor is one who shows mercy, but it also “at the same time” describes Jesus
himself who became our neighbor through his incarnation, and interpreters must
use allegory to understand the full message. Like earlier interpreters, Bede
identifies the wounded man as “Adam, who stands for mankind” and its fall into
sin, the robbers as “the devil and his angels,” and the stolen clothing as
symbolizing the loss of Adam’s immortality.
The man was left wounded and “half dead,” and Bede
adds a nuance to Augustine’s interpretation: The man’s attackers, the devil and
his angels, did not really “go away”; their attacks instead become more crafty
and subtle:
The
wounds are sins, by means of which they implanted in his weakened body a sort
of seedbed (if I may say so) of growing death, profaning the integrity of human
nature. They went away, but not as ceasing from their assaults, but to conceal
their attacks by craft. They left him half dead; for though they were able to
strip him of the blessedness of immortal life, they were not able to deprive
him of the power of reason. For in that part of him in which he can taste and
know God, man is alive. But in the part that is grown weak from sin and faints
from wretchedness, he is dead; defiled by a mortal wound.
Using Augustine’s language, Bede agrees that the
priest and Levite “signify
the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament,” but he elaborates that the
“decrees of the Law” could only point out the wounds of sins and not cure them.
The Samaritan (Defender/Guardian) is Jesus
who
for us men and for our salvation, coming down from heaven, took the road of
this present life and came near him who there lay perishing of the wounds
inflicted on him; that is, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit
found as man (Phil. 2:7), came close to us in his compassion, and became
our neighbour through the consolation of his mercy.
And, going up to him, bound up his
wounds, pouring in oil and wine. He binds up the sins, which he finds in men, by rebuking
them; inspiring with the fear of punishment those who sin, and with hope those
who repent . . . .
And, setting him upon his own beast,
brought him to an inn and took care of him. The beast is his own flesh, in which he deigned to come to
us. On it he placed wounded man, because he bore our sins in his body upon
the tree (1 Peter 2:24); and according to another parable, laid upon his
shoulders the lost sheep that was found, and brought it back to the flock (Luke
15:4) . . . . The inn is the present Church, where travellers, returning to
their eternal home, are refreshed on their journey. And well does he bring to
the inn the man he placed upon his own beast; for no one, unless he who is
baptized, unless he is united to the body of Christ, shall enter the Church.
Bede concludes that Jesus’s parable makes clear
that being a neighbor means showing mercy to one another, and no one is more a
true neighbor than Jesus, because he healed our wounds of sin. In response, we
should love him as a neighbor in return and love one another as neighbors:
And Jesus said to him: Go, and do thou in like manner; that is, show that you truly
love your neighbour as yourself; doing with love whatever you can do to help
him, also in his spiritual necessities, to the praise and glory of God the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost.
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| Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral |
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