The Good Samaritan

What would you do?

The story in today’s Gospel stirs up a mixture of emotions:  Compassion and admiration for what the Samaritan did on the one hand, shock, indignation and disappointment on the other hand over the ways the “religious-pious” peoples reacted to this tragedy.

The Samaritan arrives on the scene.  What will he do?  Unlike the expert in the Law who had just been questioning Jesus, he does not ask how far his obligations of solidarity extend.  Nor does he ask about the merits required for eternal life.  Something else happens:  His heart is wrenched open.  The Gospel uses the word that, in Hebrew, had originally referred to the mother’s womb and maternal care.  Seeing the man in such a state is a blow that strikes him “viscerally”, touching his soul.  “He had compassion” — that is how we translate the text today, diminishing its original vitality.  Struck in his soul by the lightning flash of mercy, he himself now becomes a neighbor, heedless of any question or danger. 

The burden of the question thus shifts here.  The issue is no longer which person is a neighbor to me or not.  The question is about me. I have to become the neighbor, and when I do, the other person counts on me.  Are you a neighbor?  Whose neighbor are you?