Seeing with compassion

“What is essential is invisible to the eye, it is only with the heart that one sees rightly”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story well known to many of us. Perhaps too well known. The term ‘Good Samaritan’ is commonly used to describe anyone who comes to the aid of another, but is this really what Jesus was getting at? Was he only telling us that we should be helpful when we come across people in trouble?

Now I don’t want to dismiss the fact that we should help people in need as we are able to, but the parable goes beyond that. This is a story for people who recognise that they are on a journey: not just from the womb to the tomb, but from birth to rebirth, from partial life to abundant life.

In the story, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He is on his own transformational journey. He meets a lawyer who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. He is testing Jesus. Jesus asks him:  “what does the law say?” and the lawyer replies “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself”, and Jesus says, “You have given the right answer, do this and you shall live”. But the lawyer comes back with another question: “who is my neighbor?” and this is where it gets interesting because Jesus doesn’t reply directly but tells the story of another journey.  

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, a dangerous road and not a safe one to travel alone. He is attacked by robbers, stripped and beaten, and left for dead. First a priest passes by and then a Levite. Both see him and both cross to the other side of the road to avoid him. Jesus’s listeners understand why: the man appears to be dead and if either the priest or the Levite touch him, they will be ritually unclean. Both men know the law and it directs them to be ritually clean for worship.

Along comes a Samaritan, and we know, of course, that the Jews held Samaritans in contempt, seeing them as unfaithful to the law of Moses and to the temple worship in Jerusalem. And the contempt was mutual: Luke records an occasion when Jesus himself experienced it.  A Samaritan town refused to receive him on his way to Jerusalem and James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven on them, but Jesus rebuked them.  But in Jesus’ parable, the Samaritan doesn’t pass by, he draws close, moved with compassion, moved by the Spirit of God poured into his heart to cross over to where the man lay.

Maybe the deeper question underneath the parable is this:  What keeps us from seeing the people in front of us and what helps us to stop when we’d rather keep walking?

Let’s consider a couple of examples: 

I recently read about a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad Khatib, who had been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers during street fighting, near his home in Jenis on the West Bank. The boy had been holding a toy gun. He was taken to an Israeli hospital,  where he died two days later. His parents made the decision to allow his organs to be harvested for transplant to Israelis. Five people received his heart, lungs, and kidneys, including a two-month-old infant. His mother, Abla said “My son has died. Maybe he can give life to others”. These parents made their own journey into the compassion of God and were already living eternal life.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, sent rescue teams to Texas after the recent devastating floods. After all the hate, after all the anti-immigration policies, after all the racism towards Mexican people, she still helped, she still showed up, still did the right thing to a country that wouldn’t do the same for Mexico.

There is probably a bit of the lawyer in all of us and in all those who seek security in following the rules and having very clear boundaries, like the lawyer who saw the law as Gospel, but Jesus turns this around with his telling of the parable.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is a story for travelers on the road, a scriptural GPS, routing us in the only direction that God wants us to go: it is the way of love and compassion for others. So this is about more than a parable about a helpful stranger; it is about the transforming power of God at work in those who take the road less travelled.

When we seek to live as though the Gospel is law, we set off down a road not knowing where we are going. We travel by grace as radically vulnerable disciples. Amen.