The basic and most essential Christian ethos of love.
Karl Barth, one of the great Protestant theologians of the 20th century, used to say that we should do our theology with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. In other words, the Gospel is meant to be a living word for the actual world in which we live, responding to the real needs, questions, and anguish of our present day.
In the case of the Gospel for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time this year, it is not so much a matter of having the Bible in one hand and the newspaper (or news feed) in the other.
The Gospel is the parable of the Good Samaritan, and you can quite literally find it in the news of the day, in the discourse around the thorny issues of immigration, the migrant crisis, and the heated debates in multiple nations around exactly who is to be granted entry across our borders and how.
The late Pope Francis weighed in on this precisely by pointing out in Luke 10 the parable of the man lying by the side of the road, the indifference of the priest and the Levite, and the compassion of the Samaritan as the governing model for a Christian ethic of compassion and mercy towards “the other,” towards the one who is a foreigner, an alien, a stranger.
We need to gaze seriously and with contemplative intent upon this parable. The man is lying on the road, helpless, a victim of violent crime, in desperate need. The Samaritan, who alone comes to his aid, is a member of a despised outsider class, a sworn enemy of the people of Israel.
Those who deny the man aid have their reasons and, no doubt, consider prior obligations more important and pressing than the needs of this helpless stranger. It’s all very human, and those of us with any humility can recognize ourselves in the two who decided to walk past “on the opposite side.” Few of us can cast the first stone on that point.
But here we have this Samaritan, who is moved by a different spirit. Apparently, whatever else he had planned for that day, wherever he was heading, whoever was waiting for him there, and whatever claim they might have had on his resources are all just going to have to wait. He spares no expense and goes to extraordinary time and trouble to attend to this man in the direst of need.
It is hard to communicate the level of enmity that existed between Jews and Samaritans in the world of 1st century Palestine. But we don’t really have to exercise that much imaginative power — we see on all sides that same bitter enmity between peoples today. A charity that surpasses that level of ethnic and nationalistic hatred is a charity that springs from the very heart of God.
And this is what the Lord is calling us to.
In the world today there are steeply rising tides of ethno-nationalist and racial hatred. On the political front, polarization has yielded more and more to a hard animosity towards anyone identified as “the other” to the point where political violence seems more and more likely.
Tremendous pressure is put on people to take sides in whatever conflict is being considered, be it the response of the wealthy nations to the floods of migrants from the global south, the economic trade battles that dominate the news as I am writing this article, or the actual wars being fought in so many places.
Yes, take a side, and then give in to utter hatred of those on the other side, be they the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Jews, the Palestinians, the Americans, the Chinese. Be they the conservatives, the liberals, the blacks, the whites, the Latinos. Whoever it may be, choose the target and hate, hate, hate.
Many people, and perhaps quite a few among our Restoration readership, are not prone to this hatred, but we cannot deny that it is a reality in our modern political and social life. It is certainly not absent from our church communities and families.
So we have to contemplate deeply the parable of the Good Samaritan. Not so that we can derive a comprehensive global immigration policy from it. That would be a grave mistake, asking of a Gospel passage something it cannot give. But rather, so that our own hearts can be corrected and confirmed in Gospel values.
The simple truth is that there is absolutely no place for hatred in a Christian heart.
If you hate this politician or that one (fill in the name here), if you hate that group of people (say, the ones coming in to your country and “taking your job”) or that nation (say, the one you perceive as the aggressor in a given conflict), if you hate the people who are on the other side of the political fence from you, the people who voted differently, the people who have a wildly different opinion about all this than yours, if you hate the people who say they hate you — well, let me put it simply — you need to repent.
Besides calling us to the practice of charity at great personal cost and sacrifice, the parable of the Good Samaritan calls us to view every human being on the face of the earth as my brother, my sister, my neighbor. This is the one I am called to love, in whatever way I discern the Spirit of God bidding me to love this person.
There is no way to understand the call to Gospel love if it results in our excluding any human being from our hearts, even the ones we may consider to be outright evil-doers. We may weep over the evil that is done and weep for the ones who do great evil, but we must not close our hearts to them or to anyone.
This is the basic and most essential Christian ethos of love, and it is only out of this that we can make right and prudential choices about how to order our societies, regulate our borders, respond to the crisis of global poverty and dislocation of peoples.
These are not easy questions, but if we begin from a place of deeming this group or that group, this person or that as unworthy of our love and concern, we are doomed to failure from the outset.
Worse, we are living outside the heart of God and so are set on a course of personal and total ruin.
So let us pray wisely and well for the grace to love everyone and from that love to do the good that is set before us each day.
[image: The Good Samaritan by Leon Bonnat (1833-1922)]
