Reflection for the 15 Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle C

The lectionary translation of the readings for this Sunday can be found HERE

1st Reading:

Dt 30:10-14

This short passage from Deuteronomy was probably composed during the Babylonian Captivity as part of a Covenant Renewal ceremony. The larger reading recognizes that Jerusalem’s failure to keep the covenant resulted in the exile, but God will eventually bring them back. It serves as a reminder to obey the voice of the Lord by keeping his law, which is where we take it up today. Notice that the Law is presented as being natural law that can be known by paying attention to life.

2nd Reading:

Col 1:15-20

This piece from the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Colossians seems to be an early hymn in praise of Christ; maybe a hymn used at liturgical gatherings. It serves as the underlying basis for the entirety of the letter which is directed toward combatting false teachings brought to the community by false teachers.

Gospel: Luke

10:25-37

“Which of these three [the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan], in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”_{Lk 10:36-37}

Setting & Parallels:

This pericope follows the Sending of the Seventy-Two from last week’s Gospel. It might initially seem unrelated to it, but it is about acting out the law of love which is a manner of preparing the way of the Lord by doing relationship, healing the sick and making the Kingdom present.

The Great Commandment portion of this selection exists in Mark 12:29-31 & Matthew 22:37-40. The Good Samaritan illustration appears only in Luke.

Verse by Verse:

Lk 10:25 “There was a scholar of the law…” | The scholar of the law was probably a scribe whose job it was to copy out scripture. They became exceptionally knowledgeable of the Law.

Lk 10:25 “…who stood up to test him…” | He evidently expected to know the Law better than Jesus. AYB indicates that “the phrase reveals a hostile attitude.”

Lk 10:25c “…what must I do to inherit eternal life?” | This concept of eternal life comes from the Book of Daniel 12:2. This question views life on earth as the stepping stones to eternal life.

Lk 10:26 “…What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” | Jesus turns the question back in the scribe. As this story progresses, we will see that simply living the Law is  not good enough.

Lk 10:27 “…You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind…” | The scribe generally quotes from Deut 6:5. He adds “…and with all your mind…” AYB points out:

The aspects of the human person so expressed have to be understood in the OT sense: kardia, “heart,” as denoting the more responsive and emotional reactions of a human being; psychē, “soul,” the vitality and consciousness of a person; ischys, “might,” the powerful and instinctive drive; and dianoia, “mind,” the intelligent and planning qualities. As a group, they sum up the totality of personal life.

The scribe’s answer is basically taken from the Shema (Deut 6:4-9) which a faithful Jew recites twice a day.

Lk 10:27 “…and your neighbor as yourself.” | He quotes here from Lev 10:18b. Love of neighbor was originally limited to love of other Israelites. Lev 19:34 extended the requirement to loving aliens in the land but not to others. The assumption is that we love ourselves, are concerned for ourselves, and take care of ourselves, although some suffer from a lack of self-love.

Lk 10:29 “…because he wished to justify himself…” | It is not entirely clear what he means by this. Maybe he was embarrassed that Jesus turned the question back on him and he so easily answered it. This might indicate that his motive for asking the question was not to gain knowledge.

Lk 10:29 “…who is my neighbor?” | He may have wanted to see if Jesus’ teachings extends the law to aliens, similarly to Lev 19:33-34. It appears to be a legalistic question rather than a question that tries to get at God’s will.

Lk 10:31 “…he passed by on the opposite side.” | His passing on the opposite side might indicate that he was concerned about coming into contact with a corpse which would make him ritually unclean. He would have to have gone through purification rituals before continuing his Temple duties. Is the choice of a priest, along with the Levi, an indication that religious ritual is not superior to concern for people?

Lk 10:32 “Likewise a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side.” | The Levite conducted minor temple duties and would have had the same ritual impurity problems as the priest.

Lk 10:33 “But a Samaritan… was moved with compassion…” | For all practical purposes, the victim would have looked no different to the Samaritan than to the priest and the Levite. Samaritans were hated by Jews and hated Jews; the victim was ostensibly Jewish. (See the included discussion of their history below.)

Lk 10:37 “…Go and do likewise.” | Jesus extends the concept of love of brother, to include not only our countrymen and aliens in the land but our enemies as well.

Signal Words/Phrases:

Eternal life, neighbor as yourself, neighbor, mercy, do likewise

What the 1st hearers heard:

The first hearers who were Jewish would have heard the familiar part of the Shema with the admonition to love your neighbor added to it. They would have also heard the extension of the concept of neighbor to include even their enemies. This would have taken it beyond a legalistic understanding of relationship with God. The non-Jewish hearers would have heard the same thing and recognized the conflict between a legalistic approach and Jesus’ approach. Remember that the Jewish Christians had earlier tried to impose the Law on the Gentile Christians too.

What would change if our community really heard this Gospel?

 We would start asking ourselves how to go about loving those we despise.

What is the good news in this Gospel?

Eternal life.

Gospel Reflection

Loving The Ones We Despise

I have a Facebook friend that I’m pretty upset with right now. The problem is something he posted that is flat-out wrong and based on assumptions about the motives of people with whom he disagrees. What’s worse is the effect it has on adding to the divisiveness that has become all too commonplace in our society. And to make matters even more worse, he is a preacher of the Gospel.

I was incensed when I first read it and considered blocking him from my Facebook feed. I struggled with the question of whether or not I should talk to him about it, remembering the negative results of having tried that in the past. I shared my feelings with other people only to find myself condemning him. And now I have to deal with this Gospel reading that says I have to love him, and others like him, of which there are many. How do I do that?!

When I advise other people, I tell them that the first step is to make a conscious decision not to harm the other person… you know, like I was doing when I condemned him in front of others. We have to make a conscious decision not to do things like that. We also have to refrain from simply wishing that harm would come upon them from some other source.

Secondly, I tell people to try to develop compassion for the other. That means to get to know them well enough to understand why they feel the way they do. Notice that I didn’t say to understand why they think the way they do. Knowing their thinking is a logic exercise and has nothing to do with the person’s inner feelings. To really know them is to know where their feelings come from and that opens us to the possibility of compassion.

To choose to get to know someone better is, sometimes, a hard decision and acting on such a decision involves courage. We may rather decide to pass by on the other side like the priest and the Levite, but when we do, the problem remains.

Developing compassion doesn’t mean agreeing with the other, it simply means seeing them. That’s huge. When a person feels seen, a healing process begins. Both of us are healed, at least to some extent. Only then can we embrace each other and embrace our differences. I don’t mean that we need to embrace the extreme actions to which our differences sometimes lead us but to embrace the authentic differences of perception to which our experiences have brought us.

Some languages use the term “feel”. Instead of saying “see” the other. They would say they want the other to “feel” them. That gives me an idea of what I might say to my friend. I could possibly say, “I can feel your anger. Tell me about that.” Possibly this could begin a conversation that will help me understand what my friend has been suffering. Then I will be able to see him and affirm that suffering even though I may not be able to affirm his particular response to it.

With such compassion and, I think, only with it, we can begin to improve the world for all, without leaving anyone out. I truly believe that the reason people feel left out is because, whatever side we are on, we refuse to see them. That is what passing by on the other side does and it hurts us all. We can see how refusing to see the other hurts us all by looking at the huge divisiveness and negativity that exists in our country right now.

May the Lord give us the wisdom, the courage and the energy to truly love all our brothers and sisters and act out that love. Amen.

P.S. David Brooks has a book I highly recommend, entitled How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. It is very practical and inspiring.

Personal Reflection:

“Which of these three [the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan], in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” _{Lk 10:36-37}  

Question:

What words or phrases attracted your attention during the Liturgy of the Word on Sunday? What connection do those words or phrases have to your day-to-day life? (Why do you think they attracted your attention?) What might God be trying to say to you through these words or phrases? What response should you make? What action should you take?

Alternative:

Share about/Reflect upon a person or group of people you despise. What would it take for you to get to know the person well enough to have compassion for them? How would you go about doing that? What would it look like if successful?

About the hatred between Samaritans and Jews

Imagine the hatred between Serbs and Muslims in modern Bosnia, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland or the feuding between street gangs in Los Angeles or New York, and you have some idea of the feeling and its causes between Jews and Samaritans in the time of Jesus. Both politics and religion were involved.

According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible(McGraw Hill) by Louis F. Hartman, C.SS.R., feelings of ill will probably went back before the separation of the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms. Even then there was a lack of unity between the tribes of Jacob.

After the separation of Judah and Israel in the ninth century, King Omri of the Northern Kingdom bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer (1 Kings 16:24). He built there the city of Samaria which became his capital.

It was strong defensively and controlled the valley through which the main road ran between Jerusalem and Galilee. In 722 B.C. the city fell to the Assyrians and became the headquarters of the Assyrian province of Samaria. While many of the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding area of Samaria were led off into captivity, some farmers and others were left behind. They intermarried with new settlers from Mesopotamia and Syria.

Though the Samaritans were condemned by the Jews, Hartman says they probably had as much pure Jewish blood as the Jews who later returned from the Babylonian exile.

The story of both Israel’s and Samaria’s failures in keeping to the way of Yahweh is partly told in Chapter 17 of the Second Book of Kings. There, too, the sacred author tells how the king of As-Syria sent a priest from among the exiles to teach the Samaritans how to worship God after an attack by lions was attributed to their failure to worship the God of the land. Second Kings recounts how worship of Yahweh was mixed with the worship of strange gods.

When Cyrus permitted the Jews to return from the Babylonian exile, the Samaritans were ready to welcome them back. The exiles, however, despised the Samaritans as renegades. When the Samaritans wanted to join in rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, their assistance was rejected. You will find this in the Book of Ezra, Chapter Four.

With the rejection came political hostility and opposition. The Samaritans tried to undermine the Jews with their Persian rulers and slowed the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple. Nehemiah tells us (Nehemiah 13:28-29) that a grandson of the high priest, Eliashib, had married a daughter of Sanballat, the governor of the province of Samaria.

For defiling the priesthood by marrying a non-Jewish woman, Nehemiah drove Eliashib from Jerusalem–though Sanballat was a worshiper of Yahweh. According to the historian Josephus, Sanballat then had a temple built on Mount Gerizim in which his son-in-law Eliashib could function. Apparently this is when the full break between Jews and Samaritans took place.

According to John McKenzie in his Dictionary of the Bible, the Samaritans later allied themselves with the Seleucids in the Maccabean wars and in 108 B.C. the Jews destroyed the Samaritan temple and ravaged the territory. Around the time of Jesus’ birth, a band of Samaritans profaned the Temple in Jerusalem by scattering the bones of dead people in the sanctuary. In our own era which has witnessed the vandalism of synagogues and the burning of black churches, we should be able to understand the anger and hate such acts would incite.

The fact that there was such dislike and hostility between Jews and Samaritans is what gives the use of the Samaritan in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) such force! The Samaritan is the one who is able to rise above the bigotry and prejudices of centuries and show mercy and compassion for the injured Jew after the Jew’s own countrymen pass him by!

It is with those centuries of opposition and incidents behind their peoples that we can understand the surprise of the Samaritan woman (John 4:9) when Jesus rises above the social and religious restrictions not just of a man talking to a woman, but also of a Jew talking to a Samaritan. You can find more about the story of the rift between Jews and Samaritans in the various biblical dictionaries and commentaries, and scattered through the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament.