HOMILY WEEK 27 01 – Year II
A Church of Good Samaritans – Loving as Jesus Loved
(Gal 1:6-12; Ps 11; Lk 10:25-37)
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As participants in a course at the Tantur Ecumenical Centre in Jerusalem, we attended a Sabbath service, then we were invited to share a Sabbath meal in the home of a family. At their three-story apartment building, I was not allowed to take an elevator, despite a bad knee, as that would violate the Sabbath. We were not allowed to take pictures of the family, nor phone for a taxi, as that also would break the Sabbath rules. The kids had to walk us to the nearest taxi stand.
On one of our tours, our Israeli guide confided that her people did not like the prophets, who were always scolding them. They tended to focus more on the Midrash, a genre of rabbinic literature trying to solve difficult passages of scripture using rabbinic methods to align them with the religious and ethical values of religious teachers. They also tried to find rabbis who tended to agree with them, she told us.
Those experiences, and the gospel today about the Good Samaritan, remind us to put the law of love first, over any other rules that both society and religion have developed.
In the gospel, the lawyer asks Jesus a legal question – what are the limits to getting involved and caring about the needy? Jesus’ answer is the story of the Good Samaritan. In it he shows that one who loves seeks not limits but opportunity. Jesus deliberately depicts the two extremes: the Jewish servants of God and the Samaritan layman considered an apostate by the Jews. In so doing, Jesus strikingly conveys the absolute and boundless requirement to love our neighbor.
There is strong symbolism in this story: We are the wounded strangers; Jesus is the Good Samaritan; the Spirit is the oil; the wine is the blood of Jesus, the inn the Church; Jesus will come again. The question “who is my neighbor” limits love; the questions “who is being neighborly” expands it to all regardless of race or creed, resonating with the hope expressed by Pope Francis that we be a “church of good Samaritans.”
The power of this story is in the choice of character to illustrate love of neighbor – the social codes and boundaries of Judaism were clear, and a Samaritan would never be considered a model of neighborliness. This story voices Jesus’ protest against the rules and boundaries set by the culture in which Jesus lived.
The incidents mentioned above give us an insight into why the priest and Levite in the gospel could pass by the victim – as they could become unclean and break some rules. The priest represented the highest religious leadership among the Jews; the Levite was the designated lay associate of the priest. A Samaritan foreigner was not expected to show sympathy for the Jews.
This story exposes the injustice of social barriers that categorize, restrict, and oppress various groups in any society (Samaritans, immigrants, refugees, victims of violence, gay persons, women, etc.). To love God with all one’s heart and one’s neighbor as one’s self, meant then and now that one must often overrule society’s rules in favor of the codes of the kingdom – a society without distinctions and boundaries between its members. The rules of that society are just two – to love God and one’s neighbor – but these rules are so radically different from those of the society in which we live that keeping them invariably calls us to disregard all else, break the rules, and follow Jesus’ example.
I was travelling with a companion in November trying to make it to our destination by midnight. We came upon an Indigenous man standing under a light by a bridge, hitchhiking. My companion, who lived by a reserve and had developed a bias against the Indigenous people, reacted in fear at the thought of picking him up. As a missionary among the Indigenous, I had the opposite reaction – I was relieved it was an Indigenous person and we stopped to pick him up. It turned out he was a businessman who had taken a cab to try to catch a bus that he missed, and decided to stop at the bridge when the cab could not catch the bus. We had a great conversation with the man. After dropping him off at his destination, we came across a young Caucasian couple with a child in a stalled car near my companion’s home. The couple had foolishly run out of gas and were shivering from the cold, so we took them to his home, gave them some warmth and gas, and they were on their way. Reflecting on this experience, we both realized that we had just lived out the parable of the Good Samaritan, complete with the racial element, and had learned its lessons a little more deeply.
The Eucharist is Jesus as the Good Samaritan going out of his way to bind up our wounds, and empowering us to go out and do the same – to fulfill Pope Francis’ dream that we be a church of good Samaritans to others.
