15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 10, 2022
Fr. John C. Garrett
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most familiar in the Gospels. We have even taken the phrase “Good Samaritan” into our language to describe someone who goes out of their way to help another person. When hearing such a familiar parable it is very important for us to slow down and really listen to it. It is a mistake to say to ourselves, “Oh, I already know this story.” When we do that, we are not listening to what God wants to say to us today.
One of the first things that we should take note of about this parable is the question which provoked Jesus to tell the parable. A scholar of Jewish religious law asked Jesus the most important of all questions, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” On one hand, this scholar knew the answer; obey God’s will as expressed in God’s law. By the time of Jesus, however, the Jewish people had developed a lot of laws. There were laws that governed public life. There were liturgical laws governing worship and sacrifice. There were moral laws about how to deal with other people. Of course there were the 10 Commandments, given to Moses by God. Finally there were the two great laws that summarized the 10 Commandments, which the scholar correctly answers when Jesus asks him what was written in the law; “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him that he answered well, and that if he does it he will have eternal life.
Now comes the rub. The scholar asks, “And who is my neighbor?” St. Luke says that the scholar asked this question to “justify himself,” but that is not really the best translation of St. Luke’s Greek. We hear, “to justify himself,” as being that he was proud and self-righteous like so many of the Pharisees, but it is better to understand it as his wanting to be sure that he was on the right path.
His question, however, makes the assumption that not everyone is our neighbor. At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people most certainly did NOT consider the Samaritans their neighbors. Just a bit of history of the two groups. After the Jewish people were divided into the two kingdoms of Israel in the north and Judah in the south, Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. The Assyrians exiled many of the Jewish people in Israel throughout their empire, and resettled peoples from other parts of their empire in the territory of Israel, which was also called Samaria. The Samaritans started their own version of worship of God, but it included a mix of idolatry. By the time of Jesus, Samaritans and Jews hated each other.
It is important to take note of the word “neighbor.” It is a very concrete, specific word which means that it must have concrete, specific limits. It is not like the word “humanity” which is abstract. Sacred Scripture never tells us to love an abstraction like “humanity.” We are always called to love concrete individuals, thus there must be limits. The scholar’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” really means “Who is not my neighbor?”
Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan to answer these two questions. The answer, of course, is that everyone is our neighbor. Not “everyone” in a general, abstract way, but each one in particular; every person God brings into our life is our neighbor, saints and sinners alike.
But the parable does even more that. Jesus reverses the relationship between himself and the scholar of the law. Instead of answering his question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus changes the question to “Are you a good neighbor?” Instead of pinning the label “neighbor” on this person or that person, Jesus wants us to pin it on ourselves by our actions. We are not just to know neighbors, we are to become neighbors.
We do not inherit eternal life in heaven by passing a theology exam, no matter how important theology may be. Rather we get there by loving God and whatever person God puts into our life.
There is not just one lane on the road to heaven, there are two, namely the two great commandments. The first one has to come first because God will always send us to our neighbor, but our neighbor will not always send us to God. The second great commandment is “like” the first Jesus tells us, and is equally necessary for “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).
The scholar’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” had a false assumption: that he did not already know the answer to it. What is missing is not knowing the truth, but doing the truth.
This is what Moses says in today’s first reading. The knowledge of God’s will, what is good and what is evil, “it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.”
All of us already know the two great commandments; to love God completely and our neighbor as ourself. Now is the time to start obeying those commandments, no matter what we feel and no matter what the obstacles and the difficulties and the excuses. When we start making excuses, that is evidence that the time has come to do the thing we are making excuses for not doing.