Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 13, 2013
Church of the Resurrection, Cincinnati
(Based on Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37)
The story in today’s Gospel is so well known that it is part of our secular speech. Even the most confirmed atheist might refer to someone as a ‘good Samaritan.’ He might praise the medical people who cared for him at “Good Sam.”
That creates a risk: It would be easy to treat the story as just a run-of-the-mill moral or ethical parable: ‘don’t pass by someone in need.’ If we do that we miss the jolt that it gave to its initial hearers, and that in turn saves us from having to ask difficult questions about our world today.
So what is the actual context?
Earlier in the same chapter Jesus was welcoming back the 70 disciples on their return from a mission. He rejoiced with them and added: “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”
Now he’s going to meet one of the ‘wise and learned.’
The lawyer is out to test him. He’s going to see how good Jesus is at this law stuff. He’s not really interested in relating to Jesus, he’s playing a game of “Gotcha”. For him it’s all about definitions, about boundaries. His question is really: who do I really have to love?
In the tradition he represents there were different answers to that question at different times. In Leviticus you were commanded to love “the sons of your own people.” That’s your clan, not all the people of Israel. Later they enlarge the boundary to include the proselytes: non-Jews on the way to being accepted as Jews.
In any case, it was all about who’s in and who’s out. And non-Jews were clearly among the ‘outs.’
As he undertakes to respond to the lawyer Jesus does a fascinating thing. (Something very rabbinical, actually.) He rejects the way the lawyer had framed the question in the first place! He turns it around. It’s not a matter of definition, it’s a matter of the human heart. Not who gets included under ‘neighbor’ but what being a neighbor consists in. At the end of his answer he doesn’t say “that’s who your neighbor is,” he asks instead “which of the three was a neighbor to the man on the road?”
So let’s take our places with the early disciples as they heard the story. (And remember, they heard it, sentence by sentence; they didn’t read it. There were no written Gospels yet.)
Maybe the first thing that could bring us up short after we’ve domesticated the story for so long is that it is so violent. This in no bed-time story. The man has been beaten so badly that he’s “left half-dead” on the road. We need to attend to that bloody, bruised body out in the sun—for who knows how long? Surely anyone with a shred of common decency would stop to at least find out how he is?
So Jesus introduces the first two passersby: a ‘priest’ and a ‘levite.’
At those words the ears of his hearers would have perked up: These are not just anybodies, they are the religious leaders of the people. They’re the ones you’re supposed to look up to, the ones who set the religious tone of the community. Surely they’ll stop?
Actually, what do they do? They see him and swing over to the other side of the road.
The story is frequently told as if they were too busy to stop. That makes it like the way we feel when we drive past a car with a flat tire at the side of the road: we have a momentary hitch, and then realize we’ve got to get to someplace. That makes the story commonplace, about our calendars and demands on us.
That’s not what’s going on here. They turn to the other side of the road because this fellow is unclean! He has blood all over him. That makes him legally impure. They don’t want to be defiled. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that for them he’s a piece of roadkill. You don’t want to get close to him; you keep your distance. There’s a whole of religious beliefs at stake here.
So Jesus introduces another character familiar to his listeners: a Samaritan. Now they are really attentive.
For them this fellow is himself unclean, by the very fact of being a Samaritan. He is certainly not the romantic fellow “good Sam.” The audience has been trained to see him as religiously corrupt. They wonder where Jesus is going with this story. What will this guy do?
In contrast to the religious types who created distance from the victim the Samaritan “draws close.” Then, more disturbingly, he touches this loathed object. He wipes off the blood and rubs oil on him. This is scandalous! And this is the kind of behavior Jesus approves of?
His actions are so shocking that the hearers might have missed why he acts like that—and that’s the whole point of the story.
Jesus says “he was moved by compassion.” Compassion. ‘Suffering-with.’ The man identifies with the victim. He sees himself in the man lying there. Not just ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I’ but ‘there go I.”
The priest and levite are so lost in the rules of the purity code that they are alienated from themselves. They’ve lost touch with their own humanity.
In today’s first reading from Deuteronomy Moses is at the end of his life. After reviewing the demands of the Covenant he says in effect that it’s not all that complicated, really. It’s not something we have to travel far to get, it’s inscribed in our hearts. It’s in our being, the way we are made, to care for our own flesh. Jesus is expanding that idea for us, by enlarging who is ‘flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood.’ It’s not just our clan; it’s not even just the Israelite people—it’s everyone, without distinction or boundary. There are no ins and outs.
For us who are baptized the message cuts even deeper. For by Baptism we are united with the Lord himself. With the one whom Paul in Colossians says has
reconciled all things in himself. We are called to see our neighbor with his eyes and his heart; to touch and heal with his hands. Our neighbor—anyone—is not merely ‘flesh of our flesh’, children of Adam and Eve. He has made our neighbor ‘flesh of his flesh.”
In the preface of today’s Mass we read that the Father has sent one to redeem us who is “like us in all things except sin, so that he can love in us what he loves in him.” As Christians our com-passion is rooted not only in our shared humanity but in the fact that Jesus identifies with our neighbor.
The end of the Gospel story is very simple, very direct.
“Go and do likewise.”
So we go to the table of the Lord with great thanksgiving. Because we go knowing that he is offering us the strength to do exactly that: to have his compassion toward all we meet.
Amen?