In the 1940s the famous ‘Doc’ Toomey was our parish priest and his sermons on Good Samaritan Sunday were a source of delight. One year, the ‘priest’ was the Catholic Archbishop, the Levite, a very proper Seminarian, the Samaritan, the local non-practising Catholic publican; the victim an Aboriginal. He would illustrate the various walking actions from the pulpit. This said something quite powerful about stereotypes, protocols and hidden assumptions of superiority. This ‘parable’ was all the more powerful because of the Doc’s own reputation for pastoral care in the area, at all hours of the day and night - pastoral care for people of all creeds and no creed.
What is Jesus doing here? As we know, Jesus does not answer the lawyer’s original question, with its implicit limitations, but neatly turns it round to ask the wider question ’To whom am I neighbour’? The answer for Jesus is ‘everyone, especially those in need’. Is this the common view now? Was it then?
The answer is a clear ‘no’. We are reminded of the recent public consternation at the Red Cross daring to attend to the injured Taliban in Afghanistan. We recall too the current attitudes of some government members to asylum seekers and the barbarous suggestions about their ‘care’.
Jesus seems to be doing at least two things here: he is certainly intending to shock, to call his listeners to a new position of tolerance and compassion way beyond the limits of religious and ethnic grouping and the demands of the law. Imagine asking a Jew to ‘imitate the hated Samaritan’! Jesus is also revealing something of his own freedom and radical spirituality.
As Albert Nolan says, Jesus was ‘stupefyingly’ free: able to stand up and contradict the assumptions, customs, and cultural norms of his society. He interpreted the laws, especially the Sabbath laws, freely and was bold enough to disregard all the sacred traditions about what was clean and unclean’.( Jesus Today. p180)
So we can ask: What does the parable mean to me? It prompts me to raise the question: To whom have I been neighbour today? Am I like Marie Bashir? She stopped the vice regal car to attend to an unconscious man on the side of the street, waited with him till the ambulance arrived, visited him next day to check on his progress?.
Or am I among those who simply pass by?
Carmel Leavey OP
|
