Parable of the Master and Servant Parable of the Master and Servant The Parable of the Master and Servant is a parable told by Jesus in the New Testament, found only in Luke's Gospel (). The parable teaches that when somebody "has done what God expects, he or she is only doing his or her duty." The parable reads as follows: This parable suggests that "even the best of God's servants are still unworthy because they have only done their duty and no more." Nobody, "no matter how virtuous or hardworking, can ever put God in his or her debt." William Barclay relates the parable to
Parable of the Good Samaritan "nothing strange about a Samaritan travelling in Jewish territory". William C. Placher points out that such debate misinterprets the biblical genre of a parable, which illustrates a moral rather than a historical point: on reading the story, "we are not inclined to check the story against the police blotter for the Jerusalem-Jericho highway patrol. We recognize that Jesus is telling a story to illustrate a moral point, and that such stories often don't claim to correspond to actual events." The traditionally understood ethical moral of the story would not hold if the parable originally followed the priest-Levite-Israelite sequence of contemporary