A lawyer asks who counts as a neighbor, looking for a boundary, and gets a story with the boundary inverted: the two religious professionals pass by (plausibly for reasons of ritual purity, which the audience would have recognized), and help comes from a Samaritan, a member of a group the audience despised as heretics. Jesus then flips the question — not who is my neighbor, but who acted as one — turning a category to be defined into a role to be occupied. "Good Samaritan" as a phrase has softened it: the original force depended on the shock of the pairing.