In what is probably the best known parable in the gospels, we encounter a man who is looking to serve God. He knows that we need to love God with our whole hearts, minds and souls and to love our neighbor as ourselves, but he wants to cover all his bases, so he asks, “And who is my neighbor?”
That seems like a fairly simple question, doesn’t it? For many of us, our immediate perception of neighbor is the one who lives next door. For the scholar of the law, however, a neighbor was a member of the same religious community. Anyone who was not a Jew the legal scholar would never consider his neighbor.
Since their return from Babylon, the Jews never regarded the Samaritans as neighbors. In fact, they despised them with an animosity akin to the racial prejudices we witnessed in our country’s past. Might a fitting issue here be prejudice? After all, how can you love God and at the same time, despise someone for being racially or ethnically different from you?
When asked who was neighbor to the victim, the scholar of the law replied, “The one who treated him with mercy.” For him and anyone seeking everlasting life, Jesus then said, “Go and do likewise.”
A neighbor then isn’t just someone who lives nearby. A neighbor is a person who shows compassion and mercy to others, someone who has the capacity to feel with us, step into our shoes and relate to where we are at. We do this most naturally with those closest to us, our family, our friends, our kin, namely those who are “like us.”
The more daunting question than who is my neighbor would be “To whom am I a good neighbor?” Like the Samaritan, do I have mercy toward others? That is a question we need to consider because as Moses said to the Israelites, there is a law written in our hearts which calls for compassion in us. Any time we refuse to help, he cautions, we are breaking the law.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” That to me is the point Moses is making. Made in the image of God, we have within us the capacity to love and care. That is part of our human nature, but as Moses says, “You have only to carry it out.”
The Samaritan did. Putting aside his concerns and prejudices, he responded with mercy, enabling the victim to experience God. The priest and the Levite may have known the letter of the Law but they did not have the law of God written in their hearts.
Many of us likewise can be preoccupied with our own concerns so we pass up opportunities to be compassionate. When the circumstance arises, we move on, excusing ourselves for any number of reasons when we come upon someone in need. How often, for example, thinking some other driver can take a chance on picking him up, have you passed a hitchhiker?
Pope John Paul II once wrote, “Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.” This lesson proved true for a teenager who gave a helping hand to a classmate.
One day as he was walking home from school, Mark noticed the boy ahead of him had tripped and dropped all the books he was carrying, along with two sweaters, a baseball bat, a glove, and a CD player. He knelt down and helped the boy pick up the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, Mark helped to carry part of the load. As they walked, he discovered the boy’s name was Bill, that he loved video games, baseball and history, that he was having trouble with some other subjects in school and that he had just broken up with his girl friend.
They arrived at Bill’s home first, so he invited Mark in for a coke and to watch TV. The afternoon passed pleasantly with a few laughs and some shared small talk, then Mark went home. They continued to see each other around school, had lunch together once or twice a week, then both graduated from junior high. They ended up going to the same high where they had brief contacts over the years. Three weeks before graduation, Bill reminded Mark of the day years ago when they first met.
“Do you ever wonder why I was carrying so many things home that day?” asked Bill. “You see, I cleaned out my locker because I didn’t want to leave a mess for anyone else. I had stored away some of my mother’s sleeping pills and I was going home to commit suicide. But after we spent some time together, talking and laughing, I realized that if I had killed myself, I would have missed that time and so many others that might follow. So you see, Mark, when you picked up my books that day, you did a lot more. You saved my life.” Just think of how many lives we might save with a simple act of compassion.
This parable humbles us like no other, providing us with a ready-made Examination of Conscience. And it does so because it describes such a real situation, laying bare our deep ingrained selfishness and indifference. As we listened, we discovered how we too could be extremely inventive in coming up with excuses for inaction. More importantly, this parable also reminds us that the law of God is written in our hearts as well. Like the Good Samaritan, we reach out to others because through them we are reaching out to God.