Father Rick Bolte's Homily

C: Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time                  2007-07-15

I think the hardest commercials to watch on TV are the ones that feature needy children.  Those requests for donations that have a child with a tear running down a dirty cheek, the child with a small bowl begging for a little rice, or the child with an amputated limb.  It’s hard for us to shut down that innate sense of caring for an innocent child in dire need.  In today’s Gospel story, Jesus tells us the Samaritan was “moved” with compassion.  This is the same passive expression of the verb used to describe Jesus when he sees someone in need.  For the Samaritan as well as for Jesus, it’s not a conscious choice but a heart reaction.

To not feel for someone who is in need, we have to stop thinking of them as a person and instead see them as an object of evil or cause of pain.  World War II vets may recall part of the training included a list of the atrocities committed by the enemy and various depictions of the “Japs” and “Nazis” as something evil and subhuman.  We often can invoke the name of God in calling them evil and deserving of contempt and punishment.

In the Book of Sirach, part of the Jewish wisdom literature that is part of our bible today, God is depicted as saying that there are three peoples God despises, one of them are not even a nation but are the inhabitants of Shechem (Samaria).  For the priest to stop to help a man who may be dead or non-Jewish was to risk being religiously impure, an embarrassing and dishonorable condition.  The Levite too would risk being impure as well as causing an affront to the priest for doing what he should have done.

Normally, in Jesus’ time, the stories challenging the religious leaders would go priest, Levite, lay-Jew.  For Jesus to use a Samaritan would have been shocking.  They were almost never the good person or example in a story told by an upstanding Jew.  For the Samaritan to act would have been an even greater risk than the priest or Levite.  Though the cultural identity of the victim was removed (no clothing and unable to speak), it would most likely have been a Jew.  For the Samaritan to pour oil and wine, Samaritan oil and wine, into the man’s wounds would have angered a Jew since it would have made him impure.  If he came to while the Samaritan was treating him or even upon his return, the Jew might have sought to hurt him.  Had he died, the man’s family would have sought to kill the Samaritan.

The story today is more than just about being kind and neighborly; it’s about standing up to cultural prejudice.  It’s hard to see our own prejudice.  I remember talking to a man who had definite ideas about how African Americans are different than “whites.”  He said, “I’m not prejudice.  I’ve worked with them, that’s the way they are.”  To be prejudice, we have to believe that “they” are different than us, to believe that “they” are somehow bad, evil or inferior.  We can invoke God and morality to allow ourselves to see them not as people like ourselves but rather as different and effectively inferior.  Criminals, pedophiles, gays, Moslems, Hispanics, non-Catholics or any other “them’s” can be treated as less than human without our even realizing it.  That’s not to say we don’t need to protect ourselves from certain people who would hurt us nor is it to agree with what they do or believe, but God calls us to realize that they are always God’s children.

In that sense, they are always like us; loved by God as God’s children.  Even we love our children when they behave badly.  Jesus calls us to let ourselves be moved with compassion regardless of the actions, beliefs, ethnic, etc of the other.