When Jesus prompts the scholar of Torah in today’s gospel to identify
the most important of all commandments in the divine Law, this pious Jew
replies at once: You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Already in the
Law, love of our weak, very imperfect and often irritating ‘neighbor’ appears
as inseparable from love of the Creator Lord and God, who made the neighbor and
placed him unaccountably right next to us. We cannot have life, according to Jesus, unless we practice these two eternally
yoked loves. But then the man, lawyer that he is and consistent with his desire
to test Jesus, begins breaking down the commandment by asking Jesus for a
definition that would perhaps conveniently narrow the field of God’s categorical
injunction Love your neighbor as yourself,
and make it more practicable. Thus, desiring
to justify himself, he said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ {Perhaps
with this question, and Jesus’ response to it in the form of his masterful
parable, the Sacred Liturgy itself is providing us with the theme of this
year’s silent retreat.}
The lawyer instinctively turns abstract and juridical,
wishing to transfer the discussion to the realm of the speculative, but Jesus
responds by deftly grounding the question in the realm of immediate human
experience. He does this by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This very
gritty tale of human malice and the needless suffering we can wantonly inflict
on one another, forces all listeners—at least for the duration of the story—to
turn away from our self-involvement and chronic tendency to self-justification
and the evasion of responsibility. Wonderful and moving as the parable is,
however, Jesus’ central purpose in telling appears to be not to move his
listeners to a sentimental feeling of compassion. After all, the Incarnate Word
knows all too well the passing and fickle nature of the breathless flutterings
of the human heart, what our vanity would like to call ‘Christian compassion’.
Instead, Jesus intends his story to distract us at least temporarily from our
religious narcissism and Pharisaism so
that we’ll be in a better position to answer more objectively the lawyer’s
original question about who his (and our) neighbor might be. And so, after
concluding his parable, Jesus asks the decisive question: Which of these three do you think became (gegone,nai) a
neighbor to the man who
fell into the hands of the robbers? Jesus seems to be saying: ‘Put away your mania for
abstract definitions, which always prove to be a diversionary tactic in the
avoidance of a demanding, hands-on charity. Instead, enact compassion, become
compassion, and embody compassion here
and now. Let your whole being become like mine so that together we can glorify
the Father in revealing his tender Face to the world.’
Do we not see how, by means of the parable, Jesus has
drastically changed the nature of the lawyer’s abstract question, which asked
for a static, disincarnate, impersonal definition of ‘neighbor’? Instead, Jesus’
teaching shatters our complacency and bratty backtalk; he wants us to discover
for ourselves that who our neighbor is
depends entirely on ourselves! The
word ‘neighbor’ is derived from ‘nigh’, the archaic form of ‘near’. When the
text says that the Samaritan went to
[the battered man] and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, it is
literally showing us the Samaritan making
himself neighbor to the suffering victim. Whereas the priest and the Levite
made themselves distant by walking on
the other side of the road so as to avoid any danger of involvement, the
Samaritan walked straight to the dying
man, thus closing the distance
between the two of them. In this way, he made himself near, accessible,
available, and usefully present in his whole humanity. He was willing to submit,
instantaneously, to his own transformation from stranger and foreigner to a familiar fellow member in the tribe of humanity. In Jesus’ view, anyone at all is a prime candidate for entering
into a relationship of neighbor to me; it is wholly up to me whether I choose
to make him such—or rather, whether I choose to make myself a neighbor to him:
that is, whether I choose to close the gap between us that only sin and its violence
have gouged out in the precious fabric of human association as intended by God.
Even though 99% of humanity should be at war, aggressive warfare never ceases
to be an abomination, a hideous monstrosity hated of God.
Jesus’ question to the lawyer is usually translated
either as Which of these three was
neighbor to the man or proved
neighbor to the man. But the original Greek is both simpler and more
impactful, and reads: Which of these
three became neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?
Now, one doesn’t become something
just by accident. Both a choice and an effort are implied, and in the case of becoming a neighbor we intuit a free and
deliberate construction of a new relationship that did not exist before. By the
form of his question and by his word choice, Jesus is declaring that his vision
of universal brotherhood among human beings can only be implemented one person
at a time, by that person’s creative act of choosing to make himself
responsible for the life and welfare of an other, previously unknown person.
Can we not see how our Lord’s dramatic teaching here, through the parable, is
asking us for nothing less than to enter, along with himself as creating Word,
into a new relationship with another which in fact implies, for both the
persons involved, taking a step out of the nothingness of separation and
alienation and into new fullness of shared life? Such a decision enacts at a
highly personal level, available to each of us, the creating act of the Holy
Trinity at the beginning, which brought forth the universe and all its
creatures out of nothingness into the light of resplendent existence and
community. Communion is the secret
name of God, and without communion God does not exist, nor consequently do we.
After being awakened by Jesus to the depths of Trinitarian truth, we must
deliberately embrace in act the will
to communion which the Creator has imaged in us in potency.
Jesus’ commandment to the lawyer and to each of us at the
end of the parable, therefore, is: You
go, and do likewise. The Book of Deuteronomy declares that the word [or commandment] of the Lord is very near you. It is in your
mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. In other words, Jesus’
teaching today is nothing foreign or hostile to human nature as God created it
in the beginning. God’s Word is by nature our ‘neighbor’, more interior to
ourselves than our very souls! The longing for true, active, universal brotherhood
is a constitutive element of the human heart, since the Three-Personed God
created us in his own image and likeness. The Godhead that is the primal Source
of our being and life is, in himself, Eternal
Relationship of Mutual Caring Love, is therefore also community, is
fatherhood, is sonship and brotherhood, is spousal union between bride and
bridegroom. All of these are intimate, close-up, ‘neighborly’ relationships. Only
our egotism and self-serving individualism, only our craze to gratify our every
whim and our craving for comfort and an undisturbed existence, get in the way
of the deepest longing of our soul: this is to fulfill our own divine capacity
and need to receive and give love—in other words, to become neighbor, to achieve fullness of Christ-like humanity by
joyfully taking on responsibility for the life and well-being and thriving of
another human being, hoping, even against hope, that he will do the same with
me.
In the Christological hymn from Colossians we have just
heard, St Paul proclaims that all things
were created through [Christ] and for him… For in him all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell, and through him to
reconcile to himself all things. When we hear such a sublime glorification of Christ our
Lord in tandem with today’s parable, so bursting with human misery, we must ask
ourselves what the glorious Pantocrator who reigns on high has to do with the
wretched man lying half-dead on the desert ground, and with the merciful
Samaritan who comes to his aid so spontaneously and unconditionally, investing
his own wealth, time and, above all, heart’s worry in the matter. It is obvious
that, in the allegorical take on parable, the Good Samaritan is the Incarnate
Word himself, who though he was rich, yet
for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich (2 Cor 8:9). Jesus is perfect compassion, and if we were
all necessarily created through him, still
we shall not truly exist for him and in
him until we allow his overflowing compassion to fill us as well, in order
that through us it may reach every wounded soul lying prostrate in our proximity.
As we know from the Our Father and Jesus’ teaching on offering sacrifice, we shall
not be reconciled to our Redeemer until we actively choose to be first reconciled
to our brother and sister by making ourselves their neighbor.
Then, and only then, will we allow Christ to be fully the
head of the body, the Church. Only then will we allow him to become preeminent in everything, because he has
not willed to be glorified without our participation and cooperation in this
work of redemption. ‘Becoming a neighbor’, ‘making ourselves a neighbor’, truly
and radically as Jesus intends, is infinitely more than merely a private act of
goodwill and civility. In its staggering Christian meaning it is nothing less
than a participation in the cosmic, redemptive deed of Christ as he reconciles to himself all things, whether on
earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. On the cross
Christ made himself our neighbor at the cost of his life, and he does so again
and again at this Holy Table, where he graciously chooses to come close enough
to burn our hearts.
Homily by Father Simeon.
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