15th Sunday in Ordinary Time — The Good Samaritan

This Sunday’s Gospel recounts the parable of the Good Samaritan. It also puts it in a context.

The context is a test. A “scholar of the law” asked Jesus what he had to do to “inherit eternal life.” That’s a serious question. In comparison to that scholar, can I ask myself how much time I’ve spent pondering that question?

Jesus answers in true rabbinical fashion: He points the scholar to the Law. What does Torah say?

The scholar also answers like a true Jew. He cites the Shema Yisrael, the profession of faith a true Jew recites every day: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). The scholar also rightly adds, “and your neighbor as yourself.”

The Old Testament contains 613 commandments. The scholar, like Jesus, cuts to the quick by recognizing the right priority: Love of God and love of neighbor puts it all in order, not to the others’ exclusion but in recognition of what they serve.

But the Pharisaic Judaism of Jesus’ day “legalized” it all. The Pharisees had the same concern as our scholar: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That’s a good and legitimate concern. But the Pharisees turned that perspective into a legal code in which, undoubtedly, there would be varying interpretations, different weights attached to this or that. 

That’s why the scholar asks a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Because if salvation depends on loving my neighbor, I’d better know whom I should love. 

One certainly should love one’s fellow Israelites, though perhaps not the public sinners (you may not be privy to the private ones) or (semi)-collaborators with Rome (though some of them might have also been high in Israel’s religious establishment). One has to know who is one’s neighbor.

What’s radical about Jesus’ answer is — as the Dominican scholar Father Ceslaus Spicq noted — that he doesn’t tell us who the neighbor is but rather what a neighbor does. He also makes clear that he to whom a neighbor shows what a neighbor does encompasses everybody.

That problem has been percolating throughout the Old Testament. It came to a head in the Book of Jonah. As the Polish Jewish-Catholic writer Roman Brandstaetter retells that story, Jonah is not a bad man. He’s not somebody who necessarily wants to evade God’s will (though, he might have added, that will wasn’t necessarily comfortable). Jonah may have very well been an observant Jew, one dedicated to Yahweh and to seeing the Day of the Lord. 

The problem was that, in asking Jonah to preach repentance to those vile, pagan Ninevites, God was asking him to extend the blessings and goodness given to Israel to those who, at first glance, seemed neither interested in nor deserving of those blessings and that goodness. To do so would be — to steal the New Testament — casting “pearls before swine,” something Jonah could not have imagined God would do. If, then, he was asked to do such a thing, the one asking was perhaps the Evil One masquerading as the voice of God. If so, one should get as far away from such a temptation as possible — like booking a sea cruise to Tarshish.

We know how that idea went belly up.

The idea that a pagan might also be open to hearing the Word of God was a practical problem in Jesus’ day. By the time Jesus was active in his ministry, Rome would have occupied Israel for more than 70 years. Israel sat at the crossroads of the Middle East. It ran into all sorts of people. The theology of Israel’s covenant may have made her God’s elect, but was that election exclusive or for the purpose of preparing through Israel for a broader and more inclusive Divine outreach? Israel wanted to keep herself pure amid Roman occupation. But experience also showed that not every pagan was raving against the Lord. So how to square that circle?

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan does not, therefore, emerge from “trying to be nice and inclusive” to everybody. It came from a perspective of what did Israel’s election mean vis-à-vis an obviously bigger world out there?

We know the classic outlines of the parable. A man is traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. It’s not a long road — about 20 miles — but it’s circuitous, steep and drops almost 3,000 feet in elevation from beginning to end. (Driving it today is about 45 miles.) It was considered dangerous even in Jesus’ day.

He’s ambushed. Travelers have to carry money and so they’re prey. They beat him up, take his clothes, abandon him to his fate (which could have been death) and depart.

Three more travelers encounter him. Two are passers-by. A priest — representative of the religious establishment, trained in the Law, presumably solicitous for his salvation — “crossed the street” to avoid him. So did a “Levite.” Levites assisted the priests in religious and administrative functions in the Temple. He likewise “passed by on the opposite side.”

Maybe they were afraid. Maybe they thought it was a ruse. Maybe they just didn’t want to get involved. 

For a long time, the murder of Kitty Genovese served as a modern-day victim-without-a-Good-Samaritan story. Genovese was a 28-year-old woman who, returning from work in the early hours of Friday, March 13, 1964, was robbed and murdered. The classic telling of the Genovese murder was that there were dozens (the highest claim was 37-38) of “witnesses” of the crimes who did nothing. Reporting today suggests those claims were greatly exaggerated. Some people heard “something” but did not know what nor went out to investigate what they thought they might have heard at 3am in Queens, New York. One neighbor apparently found and waited with Genovese until an ambulance came, in which she died en route to the hospital.

I cite the Genovese story because, the long-lived version of “disinterested passersby” appears to have been modified by a more nuanced account of witnesses, actions (or non-actions) and motives. I suggest the same about the priest and Levite. They might have thought they had good (or at least justifiable) reasons for passing by on the opposite side. Jesus himself does not comment on what they did or did not do: the Gospel provides “just the facts.” They did nothing.

But the Samaritan does something. He goes out of his way to render practical assistance. Not only does he provide the first-century version of first aid, but he moves the victim not just to a safer spot on the road but to a place of civilization — an inn. Having assumed the burden of helping, he continued to help him through the night. The next morning, he even pays the innkeeper to keep up the care, knowing that had he not, the innkeeper would likely have been more proactive than the priest and Levite in getting rid of somebody that was “not his problem.”

The Samaritan is held up not just for providing practical help but because he is a Samaritan. 

The New Testament speaks of the animosity between Jew and Samaritan (see, e.g., John 4:9). Much of it is probably lost in the mists of history.

In 721 B.C., Assyria captured the Northern Kingdom of Israel and deported its people. According to Samaritanclaims, they were among some of the people the Assyrians left behind. Their self-understanding is that they practiced the religion of ancient Israel, including having Mount Gerazim in northern Israel as the center of their cult. According to Jewish claims, the Samaritans were among replacement peoples sent by the Assyrians to take the place of the deportees. Their “religion” was, therefore, a crude syncretistic blend of their pagan roots and vestiges of religion they encountered in Israel. In that sense, for Jews Samaritans were worse than the “average pagan,” because they combined their paganism with vestiges of Judaism.

How could there be anything good about such great pretenders?

Jesus is not saying that religious questions are unimportant. Jesus is not engaging in a primitive form of “moralistic therapeutic deism,” i.e., what matters is “doing good things” that help other people while God looks on from some high heaven, not necessarily interested in religious worship. 

Yet Jesus holds him the Samaritan up to the “scholar” as an answer to “who is my neighbor?” The Samaritan — for whatever other religious deficiencies he may have had — knew how to answer that question, which had direct implications for one of the most important Commandments. The priest and Levite may have theoretically been able to teach the Law, but the Samaritan was a practical witness to it. Recalling last week’s citation from Pope St. Paul VI’s Evangelii nuntiandi, the Samaritan was a teacher for the scholar because he was a witness to what to do, how to be merciful.

Today’s Gospel is illustrated by an 1849 oil painting by the French Romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). The work is privately owned. Delacroix painted when Romanticism replaced classicism as the preferred style in art (and other areas, like literature). Romanticism was a reaction to what preceded it: against the forms and lines of classicism, Romanticism stressed individuality and emotion, particularly powerful emotions, like fear. To some degree, Romanticism tried to ape medieval elements in art in order to overcome the strictures of classicism and Renaissance forms. It valued originality and often tried to embody ideas, e.g., those of the Revolution in France. Romanticism in art originally began with landscape painting. Bold and strong brushstrokes are characteristic of Delacroix’s Romanticism.

We see these elements in his “Good Samaritan.” The desolate wilderness of the Jerusalem-Jericho Road lent itself as a landscape to the painting. We see rocks, bare ground and a few tuffs of grass. The rocks in the background are not sharply defined, as we would expect in classicism: as one commentator pointed out, Delacroix’s color and blurry technique would influence the future Impressionists. 

We capture the Good Samaritan at the moment he has bandaged the wounded man and is about to set him on his mount. The passivity of the victim contrasts with the action of the Samaritan. Both figures, however, seem almost Baroque in their size and musculature. Contrasts of dark and light allow the characters to stick out, especially the horse’s head and the bright red of the Samaritan’s clothes (which contrast to the torn garments of the victim). Once the man is on the horse, they intend to get out of that abandoned place.

Delacroix’s work influenced Vincent Van Gogh’s “Good Samaritan” that dates from 1890 and, at least in terms of positioning, functions as kind of “negative” or reverse image of Delacroix’s painting — what is rightward oriented for Delacroix becomes left-oriented in Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s forms and color palette are characteristically his.

I vaguely remember a line from the new Jurassic Park movie which I think sums up the sense of today’s Gospel: “Doing nothing is not an option.” At least not really.