15th Sunday of Ordinary Time

​Readings: Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Psalms 69:14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, ; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37
The person is the kind of good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.
​(Love and Responsibility, pg. 41).

To the repentant person Moses said, "If only you would heed the voice of the LORD, your God, and keep his commandments and statutes with all your heart and all your soul.”  Echoing the words, he had first said to the Israelites who were about to enter the promised land, “Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” And he encouraged them about doing this, as he said, "For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out."{that is, memorized and recited; And in your heart: internalized and appropriated}
 
The core of the Christian message is faith as total trust in God and his message, which comes through Christ and love as the driving power of all our actions and relationships. We cannot love ourselves, our neighbors or God, as God intends, without faith. This faith, as the Apostle James says in his Letter: “without good works is dead”, in other words, faith without active love is empty of the divine life of God animating it. It is good to be appropriately sensitive to orthodoxy, about thinking and saying the right thing in conformity with the Church’s teaching, but orthopraxis necessarily follows upon orthodoxy. Faith that does not express itself in love is Pharisaism. 
 
In the Gospel reading a ‘scholar of the law’ approaches Jesus. Now, when you encounter the word “lawyer” in Scripture, concentrate on the “law” root. The “law” here is the Mosaic Law, the codified system of rules and regulations meant to govern Israel in God’s ways as the nation lived in the Promised Land. The suffix “–er” means “one who practices.” A “lawyer,” therefore, was an expert or scholar of the Mosaic Law. When the ‘Scholar of the Law’ brought his question to Jesus he knew the answer was in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The living Word of God is clear that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind, and that we must love our neighbors as ourselves.  By that time, these verses had already been combined in Jewish thought and had indeed been considered to be the foundation of the whole Torah.  But it is the second part of that question that gives Jesus the opportunity to further open the mind of the Lawyer beyond how he and many others understood meaning of ‘who is my neighbor’.  
 
Leviticus 19 opens with an imperative addressed “to all the congregation of the people of Israel …: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”. In Jewish thought, Leviticus 19, and indeed the whole Torah, is addressed to the congregation of the people of Israel only. Therefore, the commandment to “love your neighbor” – both in the original context and in later Jewish interpretations – is inevitably restricted to members of this congregation.   In this context ‘neighbor’ (rea) refers to a person encountered within the framework of covenantal relationships. As well, in Hebrew the words “neighbor” (rea) and “evil [one]” (the word that can also designate “an enemy”) share the same consonants: רע (resh and ayin). The difference is only in the vowels, which were not in the text. Therefore, when in the parable Jesus asks the lawyer, “What do you read there?”he is asking, ‘Are you able to see, in the words of the Torah, the command to love both neighbor (narrowly defined) and those you would see as enemies?  Thus, if we think of Jesus as one who “did not come to destroy but to fulfill” the Law, we will see that his use of Leviticus 19:18, and his understanding of the neighbor, however challenging it was for his listeners, was still based on the Torah.  Love for God and neighbor must serve as the basis for any ethics.
 
A key word, twice used in the parable, is “compassion”. In fact, the verb used to express the feelings of the Samaritan for the victim lying on the road is the same as that used to describe Jesus’ compassion for the crowd, when he described them as “like sheep without a shepherd”.  We are to understand that the neighbor is the one “who shows mercy”, one who can show real compassion to a total stranger in need, unconditionally and without moral judgement.
 
Looking back to the dialogue between Jesus and the Lawyer, the newness and shock of this parable will escape a non-Jewish reader, but it is important to understand that “Jews generally then, and now, fit into one of three groups: priests (kohanim) descended from Aaron; Levites (levi’im) descended from other children of Levi; and Israelites, descended from the children of Jacob other than Levi. The citation in the parable of the first two anticipates the mention of the third.” After priest and Levite in this story, a first-century Jew would have expected mention of someone from the third group—an Israelite. However, the third person in the parable is not the expected Israelite, but an unexpected Samaritan – the enemy of the Jews, so Jesus parable would have seemed outrageous to his Jewish audience. Not only is the appearance of this Samaritan absolutely striking, but the fact that this Samaritan expressed compassion and care to his supposed enemy, while the priest and the Levite fail to provide help for their supposed neighbor, directly challenges the contemporary Jewish interpretation of the word “neighbor”. Thus, not only continuity, but also the newness of Jesus’ teaching, is evident here.
 
The parable of the Good Samaritan allows us, above all, to see in Jesus the fulfillment of the law regarding love / compassion to others, pre-eminently seen in and what Jesus has done for us - for the human family as a whole, and for each of us individually. We were like the man left on the side of road to die. Each of us has been robbed of our original holiness by original sin.  Our selfishness and sins, and the sins of others, have deeply wounded our souls. We lay on the side of life's path in need of a Savior.  We have been bruised and broken and wounded by life in a fallen world. In his incarnation, Jesus comes to us like the Good Samaritan. He is the merciful Lord who heals and restores us with the oil and wine of his sacraments, who pays for our salvation with his own sacrifice on the cross at Calvary, who entrusts the boundless riches of his grace to his own innkeeper, the Church, who in turn watches over our convalescence, our growth into Christian maturity, until Jesus will come again.
 
Through the first and the Gospel reading Christ reveals man to man’s self by showing us in his example, the way of love which is the necessary fruit of faith. St Paul, in the Second Reading, proclaims that Jesus is "the image of the invisible God." He is God, our Creator, who has become like us in all things but sin, so that we, in our fallen state, can recognize how Jesus reveals to us his own divine nature as God, who is love. Jesus is God the Father's own self-image, so perfect and complete that it shares the Father's very divinity and exists as a distinguishable Person, the eternal Son.
 
In the sixteen-hundreds a series of visions was shared with a humble French nun, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. In these visions Christ revealed his ‘Sacred Heart’ and by which revelation he communicated about his love for us expressed in both his divine and human natures. These visions were the beginning of the famous devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When he first appeared to St Margaret Mary, he stood in front of her and showed her his heart, describing it as a furnace of love.  Then he reached out and took her heart in his hands.  She saw her heart as if it were a tiny little atom.  Jesus put it inside his own heart, where it caught fire and started to burn with the flames of his love.  On another occasion, he allowed her to look directly at his heart. She wrote later that it was as bright as the sun and as clear as crystal.  Driven into the top of it was a cross.  On one side was a deep gash - the wound he had received on Calvary when the soldiers thrust a spear into his side.  Wrapped tightly around the middle of his heart was a ring of thorns.  Jesus explained that these thorns were the indifference and ingratitude that he received from the men and women whom he loved, for whom he had died, for whom he had become the world's Good Samaritan.
 
“Love your neighbor as yourself” The next really important question that rises from this parable and the Laws in which it is rooted: How am I to love myself?