"Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God..." (Col 1:15)
I remember sitting in a classroom during my college years at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and listening to our wise Dominican professor state rather candidly, "Christianity is not 'Jesus and me, to hell with thee.'" If I remember correctly, the class revolved around the institution of the Church by Christ, and the role she plays in the mystery of salvation history. Our good professor was instilling within us the fact that our faith is not something which concerns only "God and I", and that such a notion would have been not only wholly foreign to the experience of the early Church, but also a contradiction to the reality of the Church which Christ established. As I've heard Archbishop Charles Chaput state this reality in positive terms, "our faith is always personal, but never private."In a way, today's Gospel passage reminds us of this simple truth. A scholar of the law of Moses approaches Jesus and eventually inquires into the nature of the second greatest commandment found in the Old Testament, which is to love your neighbor as yourself. This is the backdrop to the famous parable of the Good Samaritan who comes upon a man who has been beaten, robbed, and left half dead along the side of the road. Two men had already bypassed the man on the road - one was a Jewish priest, and the other a Levite - while the Samaritan puts his own journey on hold to care for the man and help him recover. It is important to note that the Samaritans and the Jews were very hostile toward one another at the time of Jesus, and yet it was not the priest nor the Levite to stop and care for their "neighbor" (their fellow Jew), but it was their "enemy" - a Samaritan. The two men from the tribe of Levi (ancestors of Moses and Aaron) had special duties and privileges in the public worship of God, and they are the ones to ignore without hesitation their own fellow Jew in need. This was the attitude my professor had been trying to eradicate from our hearts with his statement that Christianity was not about "Jesus and me, to hell with thee."
At the end of the parable, Jesus asks the scholar of the Law, "which one of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers' victim?" The answer is of course, "the one who treated him with mercy." The particular characteristic of mercy is that it is a sympathy and compassion of heart which leads one to do something about human suffering and misery. As John Paul II pointedly remarked, "solidarity is not a vague feeling of compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both far and near. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say the good of all and each individual because we are all really responsible for all." With these words the stark reality of what the second greatest commandment means in our day to day life becomes immediately clear. Mercy must become incarnate if it be said to really exist. This is why I opened this post with a quote from today's second reading, "Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God...." In Christ mercy did become incarnate. God reached out to human misery and united Himself to each of us by becoming man. Almighty God took upon Himself our misery, sin, suffering, and death - even though we brought it upon ourselves by turning away from Him.
So just as we can say there is no spiritual life without prayer, so we can also say that no one can be called merciful until he reaches out to meet human suffering and misery through concrete acts of mercy. This is what we are reminded of in today's liturgy - we are called to make the merciful love of God present once again in our world through our acts of mercy. Our love for others originates in the love that we have received from God, and leads us back to God's love (and in this we differ from "social workers"), but we cannot disillusion ourselves with a vision of Christianity which begins and ends at the front doors of the church we attend each Sunday. This was the mentality and error of the two Jews who walked past the man beaten and left for dead on the road.
As I am writing this post from Tucson, Arizona, I cannot help but be reminded of the immigration law debate raging right now within the borders of the United States. It is a complex issue to say the least, and one which demands serious attention. Let us invoke God for the wisdom necessary to find a solution that respects the precepts of justice and solidarity, for both the nation and individuals. Have a blessed Sunday.
(Photo of the "Good Samaritan" courtesy of Br. Lawrence Lew, O.P.)
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