Dear Parish Family,

The Gospel story of the ‘Good Samaritan’ is a very popular story that has caught the imagination of people that we have Hospitals, Retirement Homes and Hospices named after this Samaritan whose real name we do not know. Well! He is a character in a story that has unnamed bad Priest and a bad Levite. Because the story is so moving that we can skim over the context that elicited this masterpiece story from Jesus. The scholarly lawyer asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Eternal Life” is unending intimate relationship with God. The Lawyer wants to know the least ‘action’ to get the great prize. Imagine a young man approaching a young woman, whose has all the qualities he admires and asks her, “What is the least I can do that you will marry me?”

Jesus takes the Lawyer to reflect on the guidance of the Law which states that “everything done unselfishly in love” is required. That seems to be too much for this Lawyer and still harping on the idea “getting away with the least” pursues with a further question of ‘Who is my neighbor?” He wants a definition of neighbor which gives him the minimum number of people to count as the neighbors he has to love. But Jesus upends the lawyer’s continuing desire for a minimum by giving him another maximum: everyone you can love is your neighbor.

We have difficulty loving our neighbor because we do not understand “neighbor” as Jesus did. Neighbor for us means people we like, people who are on our side, who work for a living, and who mind their own business. Jesus redefines neighbor as the hated stranger who is down and out, challenging us to stop what we are doing and care for his/her need. The priest in the Gospel may have been going to the temple to worship God. Jesus is teaching us to see the situation of someone in need as God’s dwelling place: to love neighbor as defined by Jesus is to love God.

One’s neighbor is not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One’s neighbor must therefore be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her.

St. Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1987: 40

Fr. Thomas Kunnel C.O.