Mass readings for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Deuteronomy 30.10-14 Psalm 69.13, 16, 29-30, 32, 35-36 Colossians 1.15-20 Luke 10.25-37
The parable of the Good Samaritan answers the question: who is my neighbour? We are to derive principles from this story to aid our discernment of right action toward people in need, in our local neighbourhoods, and in the global community. But in a culture that has left aside spiritual discernment of truth in favour of political games for power, too much of the popular sense of obligation to others comes from moralising dilletantes who are more concerned with the appearance of virtue than to truly live a life of sanctity and authentic connection to others. They point to Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, and then burden others with the costs of the care for which they’ve advocated. Nothing in the teaching of Christ requires the sacrifice of one’s own good, and the good of those close to us for sake of another. We are to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and that logically entails that there be care for ourselves and not the compromise of our health and welfare as individuals or as communities. Jesus’ teaching has this nuance that is reflected in the life of the early Apostolic Church. This being the case, the pious soundbites from scripture we hear that seemingly settle the matter really need to be placed in their proper context so that we can have proper discussions of what really would be the best action to take toward those in need.
Yet, in looking at what Jesus teaches, we aren’t to be searching for loopholes to let us out of what is central to our faith: the love of God and neighbour. The gospel of Matthew’s famous passage where the sheep are separated from the goats, the sheep destined for paradise, the goats for perdition based on how well Christ was served through service to others – this should temper our conversation, and remind us that we are to always apply what our Lord teaches with generosity.
When you look at the parable of the Good Samaritan, the first thing established is that this is about obligation on the personal level. Jesus is not speaking to kings, governors, national or community leaders. He’s talking to everyday people who are living their lives as fishers, farmers, tradesmen, day labourers, etc. The conversation that gives rise to the parable is, however, with a lawyer. This is someone specialized in the teaching and application of the law of Moses, what we find in the Torah of the Old Testament. That law has moral obligations toward others to regulate interpersonal relationships so as to promote a safe and cohesive community. Jesus isn’t talking about a nation’s policy on foreign aid, immigration, refugees, international trade, etc. This is a discussion about what you or I are to do when confronted with another in distress and obvious immediate need.
In Jesus’ parable there is an acknowledgement that we all have prior obligations. With each of the three men who encounter the roadside victim, we know they have places to go, people to see, things to do. In the case of the Priest and the Levite, both have duties in the Temple, and those duties would be seen as of great importance to the community. They facilitate the necessary sacrifices that maintain the people’s relationship with God. We must appreciate how this was no small thing in the eyes of those listening to Jesus. The lawyer he speaks with, he would know the gravity of the decision facing those two men. Yes, they are fellow Jews choosing to ignore a Jew in need, but they have on their mind the needs of the whole of the Judean people. To come into contact with the blood of this sad victim would make them ritually unclean, and so unable to perform their duties, that are, again, in the eyes of many, seen as of the utmost importance.
An analogy would be if a Catholic priest were making his way to offer the Mass and came across someone beaten and bleeding by the side of the road, and had to weigh up the priority of getting to the church on time against helping the victim. Non-Catholics would say that there is no choosing at all in that; but a pious Catholic, while understanding the priest’s stopping to help, and so being late for mass, would also appreciate the gravity of the choice because both things are very important.
With this imagined Samaritan, we don’t know what Jesus’ “back story” is for him. We know he has no Temple obligations. Jesus’ listeners would understand that he being far from home, he must be on business of some importance. So, he’ll have obligations to clients, business associates; he’s likely got a family to provide for. Also, he’s a Samaritan in a part of the world distinctly hostile toward him, he’s got to be looking out for himself; he needs to get back to the security of his home in Samaria.
What we see him do for the beaten and bleeding man is what he can do. He stops, he administers first aid, he gets the man to shelter and cares for him overnight, but then the Samaritan needs to be on his way. So, he provides for the injured man’s needs with the innkeeper and promises to stop in on his way back to pay whatever may be further owed. The Samaritan does not drop everything to nurse the man for days or weeks back to full health; he doesn’t offer to take him home to Samaria to live with him, to make him part of his household. He makes a reasonable effort, based on his personal resources to care for the man while meeting his other obligations which are also important.
So, with regard to the Priest and the Levite who do nothing, they fail in that they don’t even try to figure out what they might do to reconcile the priorities they have. Why does the priest not come to the man, and tell him he’s going to get help? Why does the Levite not begin to stop others on the road to assist him in getting the man the care he needs? Rather than confront the problem of their obligations both to the community and to this suffering person, they just keep walking, and trust that the choice they made will meet with God’s understanding. But in doing so, they forget what the scriptures say about the ordering of sacrifices to God: as in Proverbs (21.3) where it says that doing justice and righteousness is to be preferred to ritual sacrifice; as in the Psalms where God says to us that it is not burnt offerings he wants, but mercy.
What the Samaritan does is to restore the injured man to some semblance of his life because a great injustice has been done. It is righteousness to take the part of the innocent who’ve been harmed and to help them regain their lives. But no one expects the Samaritan to give back to that poor man the life he had before he was attacked. He cannot give what he does not have.
St. Augustine, in The City of God and his treatise, On Christian Doctrine, discusses the ordering of our love correctly: when we love things out of order or inappropriately, we sin. Every love, the love of neighbor, is ordered according to our love of God. This hierarchy extends down to our human relationships where love for family, community, and nation should precede our love for the world at large, not in intensity but in priority of duty and responsibility. We are to love all, but we must also love effectively and to good purpose. The Good Samaritan does not teach us that to neglect our family for strangers, or our community for those suffering in a foreign land is a greater good and a superior virtue. Rather, Jesus teaches us to extend love beyond our immediate circle when the opportunity arises, without neglecting our primary duties. As St. Thomas notes, while we are to love all universally, “we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us” (Summa II-II, Q. 31, A. 3). And there is a logic in all that. If by lack of attention to our duties to family and immediate community we see these begin to disintegrate, then the wealth and security we have that allows us to help others is lost – we’re no help to anyone, anywhere because we neglected building up around us a network of care and mutual concern that could be extended out into the world.
When St. Paul made his famous collection for the needs of the Church in Jerusalem, he did not tell those small Christian communities he’d founded that they were under an absolute obligation to cough up their money for their brothers and sisters in faith in the Holy City. Rather, this was a voluntary sacrifice that was to be instructive to his gentile converts. It helped these new Christians to understand what sacrifice God wanted from them, and that it was not the heaping up of dead animals on an altar to be burned up. Indeed, he was prompting them to give to those who could never repay, who they would never know, but who could reasonably be said to be a worthy object of charity – that is, they weren’t simply giving their money away for the sake of any cause, but for the aid of the poor of the Church in Jerusalem.
So, when in September the good sister from Africa comes to make her mission appeal to us, we can weigh up our priorities, see that we are meeting our immediate obligations to family and our faith community, and then, perhaps wincing a little as we get out our cheque books, make a good further sacrifice for the sake of supporting a saintly nun’s work in a faraway land. Yet no one is asking you to sign over the deed to your house, or to empty your savings account. If you did, that would be a splendid act of faith – a faith in this community that it would care for you in your newly realized poverty! But it would be your choice, and not one imposed on you by social pressure or civil edict. God loves a cheerful giver, scripture tells us; a resentful donor does not please him; and the one who deprives his family of what they need and gives so that others think him a great man, well he’s in a perverse way as much a scoundrel as the rich man who gives nothing to the poor and hungry at the gates of his home.
We must build up the body of Christ so that this body can indeed be our Lord’s hands and feet, going where needed and helping, truly following the example of the Good Samaritan.
Amen.