Good Samaritans - Peter Steele SJ

Thirteenth Sunday
Luke 10:25-37

Our Lord’s parable of the good Samaritan has spoken to every age, and been spoken about in every age. In the last century, one wit said that there are plenty of people ready to do the good Samaritan without the oil or the twopence, which leaves, presumably, the pouring in of the wine.

In our own century, the organisation called ‘Samaritans’, in England, has saved many people from suicide. Recently, a book called Bad Samaritans criticised the giving of aid to stricken nations without doing anything about the system that is part of the strike against them. And in the gospel for the Thirteenth Sunday, we hear the parable told once more. What are we to make of it?

Each of us will have a personal way of hearing it; and if any story was ever meant to be taken personally, this is it. Each of us is far more mysteriously herself or himself than even the best of psychology or of sociology can bring out, since each of us is a unique expression of God’s creative self. If we are tongue-tied when we try to utter our selfhood, that is partly because we are tongue-tied about God. But precisely because of the intimate connection between each of us and God, God’s word can be our story.

So a strong and tender tale like that of the good Samaritan can speak from the strength and tenderness of God into our own potential strength, our own potential tenderness. It can do so in one way—God’s way—to you: and in another way—which is also God’s way—to me. Let me tell you what it says to me.

The Samaritan helped someone who was in need, and who was different from himself. The need is important. We often give things—not only physical things, but company, or advice, or support—to those who don’t, strictly speaking, need these things. There is nothing wrong with that, and it can come from a certain lavishness of the heart in ourselves. Christianity actually encourages this, since at its centre is not mere survival but celebration, not mere good work but the generosity of grace. But giving into real need is different. It can put us in touch with our own fragility.

Visit someone seriously ill in hospital, and part of you is brought into contact with the mortality from which we all suffer. Give some hard-won knowledge into deep ignorance, and beside the consolation of seeing, sometimes, some improvement, there is likely to be an alertness to the radical ignorance about most things in life which is our common lot. The gift made into real need pulls the giver into insecurity, not clear of it. So the element of ‘need’ in the robbed and wounded Jew helped by the Samaritan is important.

And so is the fact that the Jew was different. Our Lord’s clear, but disconcerting, message to us is that the fact that people are different from us does not license our ignoring them, or regarding them as expendable. Temperaments vary, I realise, and so do formative experiences in life: some people seem to have naturally hospitable hearts. It is a great gift of God’s that they do. But it is probably not hard for most of us to acknowledge, at honest moments, that there are many who are, to us, deeply distasteful because of their ‘otherness’.

In extreme cases, we might say that the world would be a better place without them. A Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot: it is easy to see how one might hope and pray for their deaths. But to think much in those terms is, isn’t it, to throw in one’s lot to a degree with theirs. These men are the monstrous haters of ‘otherness’; they are the captives of the demon of narcissism. One would have to be very sure indeed, when making prayers about them, that one was not guided by the same spirit.

In any case, we do not usually, at least consciously, think in such extreme terms. The needy ‘others’ in our lives may be pitched over the fence of our attention because they are, after all, of the wrong colour, or of the wrong—or indefinite—sex, or of the wrong political stripe, or are ‘losers’ on the one hand or ‘silvertails’ on the other. In Australia, angers can breed like rabbits, and we have fewer remedies against the angers than we have against the rabbits.

But everybody, without exception, in Australia has her or his own crucifixion—physical, social, moral, emotional, intellectual, or otherwise. Everybody bleeds, including those who most deny the fact, and including those who are most envied and hated by others because they seem to be denied the common human lot. Everybody will need a Samaritan one day. The poignancy of Jesus himself is that he needed one, at the end, and there was no human Samaritan to be had.

We may take hope, though, from our belief in the Lord’s being raised up even out of the lethal wounding of death. He too, as the gospel says, ‘fell among thieves’; he too was stripped of his clothes, and wounded until wounds could do no more. It is as if his Father then played the Samaritan to him, vitalising him, and setting him on his way for all eternity.

We are all, as Jesus himself was, stricken ones. Our lives have dealt us certain blows. The evolution of our species over hundreds of thousands of years has dealt us more blows still. Ourselves bruised, we are prone to bruise others; the Samaritan blood in us can run very thin.

Yet when we assemble for the Eucharist we gather in the hope that the Father who brought Jesus back from his stricken-ness may make bids for life in us too. We celebrate in this Mass the gift to us all of nothing less than the Spirit of Jesus, something better than the oil and the wine.

Quite certainly, some time within the next few days, each of us will be given the opportunity to play the Samaritan, in little ways or great. Let us not be dispirited by past failures. It is the very meaning of the resurrection to give us a future—a future in which we may discover, in the place of some alien, a wounded sister, a wounded brother.