dying
Explanation
This comic depicts a man (seemingly a preacher or lecturer) telling the story of the Good Samaritan to an audience. He emphasizes that the whole story is that Jesus told people it was remarkable that someone did NOT "just let a man bleeding to death on the ground die," and that the surprising element was that the dying man was "from a slightly different group of Abrahamic Near-Eastern Semites."
The caption at the bottom reads: "The fact that Jesus felt humans needed the Good Samaritan story is remarkably insulting."
The humor is a sharp observational joke about the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In the biblical story, Jesus tells of a Samaritan who helps a wounded Jewish traveler after a priest and a Levite pass him by. The point of the parable is that even people from an out-group (Samaritans were looked down upon by Jews of the time) can show compassion. The comic reframes the parable from a modern perspective: the fact that Jesus had to explicitly teach people that you should help someone who is dying -- and that the "twist" is that the helper belonged to a slightly different ethnic/religious subgroup of the same broader tradition -- is a devastating commentary on human tribalism. The joke is that the parable reveals how low Jesus's expectations of humanity were. SMBC frequently mines religious texts for this kind of darkly logical humor.