In today’s Gospel extract, we hear of a hostile encounter between a lawyer, who obviously wants to catch Jesus out on a point of law, and Jesus himself. Jesus sidesteps the trap of being lured into a legalistic debate on theoretical questions by getting straight to the heart of the matter: what is the moral value at stake here?
Jesus answers his interrogator by placing love of one’s neighbour as equivalent to one’s love of God. Love, in the Bible, does not refer to an emotional attachment, but has more the sense of proper treatment, respect, concern. Jesus’ illustration by the parable of the Good Samaritan is an exquisite treatment of this theme. We are, in our reading of today’s Gospel during Mass, in Samaria, a region in which the hostility towards Jesus and other pilgrims to Jerusalem would be particularly acute. Hence, Jesus’ reference to official religious figures is especially critical: the wounded individual may be dead, therefore to approach his corpse rendered anyone who approached it ritually impure and therefore excluded from public worship and community activities.
The person who shows human, and religious, compassion for the injured person, whom the others may not realise to be still alive, is one of the most despised groups in cultural Jewish thought at the time.
Jesus turns the lawyer’s question back on him. His questioner asks, “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus is posing the question the opposite way round: “Whose neighbour are you?”
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REFLECT
A parish priest once went into his local primary school. A little girl stood up to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan, but became stuck at a particular part of the tale. She kept repeating, “The priest passed by… the priest passed by.” Eventually the parish priest interrupted and said, “All right: don’t rub it in!”
It is perhaps worth reflecting for a little on the characters in our Gospel reading today. The priest and the Levite are very much figures from the religious establishment of their time. In their way of thinking, they cannot approach the figure lying at the side of the road: if he is dead, then they are, in their turn, contaminated and unable to carry out their responsibilities according to the Law, which is uppermost in their understanding of their religious duties.
On the other hand, the priest and Levite would regard the Samaritan as a heretic. But Jesus is saying that he, out of the three of them, understood better what the Law was actually teaching. Theoretically, the priest and Levite were acting correctly; but Jesus is saying: “What is more important: the letter of the Law or the person lying injured by the side of the road?” The despised Samaritan has got it right and understood God’s teaching.
Many Christians are obsessed with the rights and wrongs of the finer details of church doctrine and liturgy rather than the values which these present. Perhaps we all need to be more like the Samaritan.
learn
- Jesus is not concerned about the finer points or academic point of the Law.
- Jesus concentrates on the values which the Law seeks to promote.
- To present a Samaritan as the hero of the parable instead of the priest or the Levite would have profoundly shocked the readers of the Gospel.
- The poor and those on the margins of social and religious society were people of particular concern to Jesus in Luke’s version of the Gospel.
do
Find out who in your community is in need: they are your neighbour, and you are theirs