The parable of the good Samaritan presents us with a moral lesson, and the saints who have commented on it do refer to this lesson. However the parable is also remarkable for the way in which the Fathers of the Church consistently understood it as an allegory in which the traveller is the fallen human person, Jericho is the world, Jerusalem is heaven, and the good Samaritan is Our Lord. This kind of interpretation is found in St Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St Ambrose and St Augustine.
This line of tradition is such that a scholar like Jean Danielou could suggest that it goes back to the first Christian community. If that is the case, it is probable that it goes back to Our Lord himself, in the “many other things” that Our Lord said. (Jn 21.25) This is why the Fathers of the Church are so important; they preserve for us the apostolic tradition, the lessons which the apostles themselves learned from Christ but are not written down. St Basil, for example, speaks of this tradition in a passage that has become widely cited because of its liturgical significance, but is important apart from any such considerations. “Of the beliefs and practices whether generally accepted or publicly enjoined which are preserved in the Church some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force.” (St Basil. On the Holy Spirit. 27) One of these traditions is facing the East to pray; others are the threefold action at baptism, blessing the water at baptism and blessing the chrism.
By way of example of the explanation of the parable, St Irenaeus, writing around 180AD says that the Lord showed compassion on the man (all of us) who had been attacked by robbers, bound up his wounds, gave him two denarii which were the image of the Father and the Son, and commended him to the Holy Spirit, represented by the innkeeper.
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