Good Shepherd Catholic Parish

Paul T. Keil

15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 10, 2022 (Season C)

          Peace be with you on this, our Mass celebrating the 15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time.  My friends, for me, there are two great Biblical questions I try to repeat in my own heart several times every single day.  Interestingly, neither question was originally posed by Jesus himself, or one of his disciples, or not even from one of the Biblical “good guys” at all.  In fact, neither question probably had any spiritual intent when they were originally asked some 2000 years ago.  The first question is near the end of Chapter 18 in John’s Gospel when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?”  Now that’s one I ask myself about every time I pick up my smart phone or turn on the TV, but I think it’s critical, we must try to ask the question from a truly spiritual perspective in our modern secular society.  We now live in a culture that is constantly trying to redefine truth every day.  It’s reached a point where the concept of truth has become nothing more than an individual subjective opinion.  Words like, right and wrong, good and bad, or even moral and evil aren’t popular in our modern vocabularies anymore because they tend to define – truth.  Sadly, we now live in a world where it sometimes takes real courage to speak the truth.

          The second Biblical question I always try to keep in my own heart every day is one we just heard in today’s Gospel reading.  It came from our stories’ antagonist, a scholar of the law.  He said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”  Now to fully appreciate Jesus’s answer we must step back 2000 years and try to hear this parable in context of the who, where, and when.  In that world where a human Jesus walked, talked, and taught, the words “good”, and “Samaritan” would have never been used in the same sentence.  We always must remind ourselves Jesus and his Apostles were all observant Jews.  And almost everyone Jesus spoke to in the Gospels were observant Jews.  A common misconception many Christians have today is, Jesus wanted to destroy Judaism.  My sisters and brothers, nothing could be further from the truth.  Jesus’s affirmation of the scholar’s answer about his own salvation was proof of that.  “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 Christ simply wanted to bring his Jewish brethren back to the original covenant of God’s love and fortunately for us today, his Jewish disciples successfully carried that same Gospel message out into the rest of the world.  In fact, Biblical scholars tell us if we don’t hear Jesus’s parables in context of a 1^st Century Jew, we’ll miss the meaning.  And that is what makes this specific parable a little scary for two reasons.  First, the word “outcast” doesn’t come close to describe how 1^st Century Jews felt about Samaritans.  Hatred might be a more appropriate word.  Notice the scholar in this dialogue doesn’t even use the word Samaritan himself.  So, Jesus uses a hated foreigner in his parable, but the second reason the story should make us all squirm is this, St. Augustine tells us we should see the Samaritan as Jesus Christ himself, and the half-dead man as Adam, the source and symbol of all fallen mankind.  Is it any wonder, Saint Teresa of Calcutta called the most repulsive outcasts lying in the city’s gutters, Jesus in disguise? 

The Church Fathers saw this story as Jesus curing a fallen world and the parable is full of other signs of Jesus’s healing.  Jerusalem was God’s city on Mt Zion.  Jericho is only 17 miles East but a decent of almost 3,200 feet in elevation and from the Book of Joshua, viewed as a disordered city, a place of sin.  Consequently, the Fathers saw Jesus’s language, “he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho” as humanity’s descent into sin and the robbers stripping and beating as the result of sin robbing all of us sinners of human dignity.  The Priest and Levite going down the same road represent religious leaders without love.  Men who used rules without God’s love to glorify their own egos.

          Scholars point to the pouring of oil and wine as Sacramental signs of Baptism, Confirmation, Ordination, Anointing the Sick, and even Eucharist itself.  St. John Chrysostom used the image of the Inn in this parable as the Church.  He said, “The Inn is the Church, which receives travelers who are tired with their journey through the world and oppressed with the load of their sins; where the wearied traveler discarding the burden of his sins is relieved, and after being refreshed is restored with wholesome food.  And this is what is said here.  For outside the Inn is everything that is conflicting, hurtful, and evil, while within the Inn is contained all rest and health.”

          So, Jesus always was and still is trying to bring all of humanity into a loving covenantal relationship with God.  The message of this parable is certainly pretty clear.  Everyone, regardless of race, gender, faith, politics, or any other orientation,,, is my brother and if they need help, I’m supposed to give it.  Wow, that’s so easy to say but I know, after I walk out of those Church doors today, it sure is hard to put into practice, isn’t it?  It’s just so easy to judge and then allow my judgements to affect my actions.  It’s so easy to become just like one of those ancient scholars of the law, or Pharisees, or Sadducees Jesus was always trying to teach the way of God’s love.

          Well, a couple of years ago I read a mediation by Bishop Robert Barron that really hit me.  He was directing it right at all of us who say we have faith but sometimes lose sight of God’s love.  Here’s what he said.  “The entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love.  Everything else is more or less a footnote.  Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the commandments, sacraments, sacramentals—all of it—are finally meant to conform us to the way of love.  When they instead turn us away from that path, they have been undermined.”  So, in prayer, all I can say is, Lord Jesus, I’ll try my best to be open to your path of love and recognize you – in every person I meet.   Amen.