15th Sunday of the Year
Luke 10:25-37
The question which the lawyer poses in today’s Gospel reading is as complicated today as it was at the time it was posed for Jesus. We are easily able to identify what we call ‘next-door-neighbours’ or the people who live in our ‘neighbourhood’. But who are the ‘Samaritans’ of our day? The Samaritans were despised by the Jewish people at the time of Jesus. They were regarded as half-pagan renegades. It was a shock to his listeners that Jesus would, in his story, portray a Samaritan as the hero.
This parable of Jesus is a ood example of story-telling. He could just as easily have given a literary definition of the term ‘neighbour’ to the questioner. It is almost as if He wanted to shock the people into realising that every person can be a ‘neighbour’. The priest and the Levite who came along the road and saw the huddled body of the victim of assault seemed to have genuine reasons for not getting involved. Contact with a contaminated body would have rendered them ritually unclean and so not fit to exercise their religious functions. The Samaritan was motivated by his heart!
What is written in the law is that ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind ….. And, your neighbour as yourself.’ And, so again we ask ‘who is my neighbour?’
Many of the people who make the headlines nowadays display characteristics that are contrary to our definition of neighbourliness, friendliness or decency. We may well ask ‘how can I love a despot, a dictator, a war monger, an egotist, a narcissist, a murderer or an abuser?
Jesus moved away from a philosophical definition of the word ‘neighbour’ to a practical illustration of how a neighbour might act in love with risk and vulnerability.
So, the story that Jesus tells is not just a ‘story’. It is an invitation to us to enter into the incident on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and discover the tensions within ourselves as to how we look on our fellow humans and on how we judge them. We may be disappointed in ourselves and in our attitudes but that is why we listen to the Word of God as given to us today. That Word always offers us hope and growth.
The questions today are ‘Who is my neighbour?’, ‘What is charity?’ ‘How do I express love?’ Our prayer today might be for the gift of discernment, so that we might know the truth about our neighbour, understand that our very Faith is based on Charity and that we might have the grace to reach out in love.