Luke 10
The seventy-two sent out in pairs return with joy: even the demons submit to us in your name. Jesus' response interprets their victories as the visible outworking of Satan's cosmic fall like lightning. The claim to have given them authority over all the power of the enemy is followed by the corrective that grounds the greater joy in the registration of their names in heaven rather than the exercise of authority. The thunderbolt saying — all things have been committed to me by my Father; no one knows who the Son is except the Father — is Jesus' most explicit self-disclosure in the Synoptic travel narrative. The Good Samaritan parable inverts the lawyer's who-is-my-neighbor question into a who-became-a-neighbor question: the answer is the Samaritan who showed mercy, and the command is go and do likewise. The Mary-and-Martha scene closes the chapter with the same principle from a different angle: Mary who sits at the Lord's feet has chosen what is better — the one thing necessary — which will not be taken away from her.