Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s Holy Gospel presents us with the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan. Instinctively, when we read this parable our thoughts go to the generous-minded soul who is always ready to lend a helping hand wherever it might be necessary. To say of so-and-so that he is a Good Samaritan is a compliment of the highest order, for it denotes a person who knows how to look beyond their own interests in order to invest time, energy and ressources into helping others. This meaning of the parable seems to be what inspired it. Our Lord delivers it in response to a question from one of the doctors of the law, a man who sincerely wanted to know who is truly our neighbour so as to love him and obtain eternal life.
However, with the Fathers of the Church it is good for us to take another look at the parable from the point of view of Our Blessed Lord Himself. Indeed, the man who fell among robbers is at once humanity as a whole and each individual son or daughter of Adam and Eve. Created by God in a state of holiness and grace, our first parents lost those gifts and were cast out of paradise, half-dead, half-alive, as the parable tells us of the man who fell among robbers. Each of us is born into this world half-dead in sin, half-alive through the frail life of our flesh. The robbers are the demons who pounce upon us and strip us of our adopted filiation to God our Father, and we find ourselves, naked and bereft of all spiritual ressources, on the way to eternal separation from God.
The Jewish levite and priest who see the poor man do not stop. Why would they? There is nothing they could do to save him, for the Mosaic Law was not given to save, but only to prepare for the Saviour and show how much we needed a Redeemer. And then comes the true Samaritan, Our Lord Jesus Christ. He had to take the long road from Jerusalem to Jericho, that is to say, He had to come all the way from Heaven to earth, in order to find us. Find us He did. Moved with compassion at our plight, He stops, bends over, pours soothing oil into our wounds, forgiving our sins, fortifying us with wine, that is to say, His own Precious Blood. He then takes us on His sacred shoulders and carries us to the inn, that is, to Holy Church, giving His apostles, that is to say the priests, the charge to care for our souls and give an account for them. Before leaving this world on Ascension day, He does not omit to give to His Church the two denarii, symbolising the double precept of charity, love of God and love of neighbour, along with the promise of an ample reward when He returns in glory.
This parable then is really a summary of the entire history of salvation. It is my story; it is your story. You and I were the man who was lost, but Christ Our Lord stretched out a hand to save us. It should inspire us with immense gratitude to our Lord who did not abandon us to our plight, but came to open for us the path of new and eternal life.
Our Lord concludes the parable with the words: Go, and do likewise. We too must be ready to help someone in need, but for that we must learn how to slow down our fast-paced life, to see faces, to look into eyes, to sense the need, the thirst, for truth, for goodness, for God. Pope Benedict XVI was fond of saying that if we do not give God to those we meet, we do not give enough. Only God can satisfy a soul, and every soul we meet is unsatisfied, and therefore we must give them God. But to give God requires having God in our heart, coming to know Him intimately, communing with His love for souls. If we do have God in our hearts, then we have nothing to fear, even in the darkest of places, for we bring the light of God into the darkness, and the darkness cannot resist it.
And yet, as we do this, we must be mindful of our own weakness. Even when we have been in the “inn” of the Church for many years, we ourselves continue to be in need of the oil and wine of grace, of frequent prayer and frequent reception of the sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist, in order to sustain us and prevent our falling back into spiritual death. And so when we find ourselves confronted with someone to help, as our heart is drawn to reach out to them, it must at the same time reach out interiorly to Christ, that He may hold our hand lest we fall back.
In his closing speech at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI famously said that the Church wanted to be the Good Samaritan, stooping down to be close to the world. That of course has always been true. Faithful to her Divine Founder, the Church has always sent missionaries to every part of the world in order to bring the light of faith. She has always founded schools, orphanages and hospitals for every possible human need that exists. No organisation in human history has done as much as the Catholic Church to alleviate all forms of want and need, both corporal and spiritual.
Those words of the Pope, however, were gravely misunderstood by many to mean that henceforth the Church is to be like the world. Did we not see many priests in aftermath of the Council starting to dress like the laity so as to appear close to them? Did we not see many religious lay aside their habits and eventually lose their vocations, forgetting that embracing the ways of the world while fleeing the world as religious life demands, involves a contradiction? Under the pretext of being a Good Samaritan to the world, many ended up being the man who fell among robbers once again, but this time, with no one to reach out and save, so true it is that when one falls from grace, one’s last state become worse than the first.
It has never been easy to be a Catholic. Our Blessed Lord asks us to take part in His mission to souls, to be vulnerable in dealing with them, while at the same time resisting what in them is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. But if it is hard, the answers are all there, and a truly loving Heart will know how to find the path. We must go back to the parable. The Good Samaritan does not leave the man where he was. He meets him where he was, on the ground, half-dead in sin, but he does not leave him there. Meet people where they are, but do not leave them there, and above all do not lie down there with them in the mire. The true Good Samaritan lifts the soul up, takes care of him and brings him to the Church, in which all the means of salvation are present.
One of the great modern examples of this was St Teresa of Calcutta. She was sharply criticised and her superiors made her wait a long time before permission was given to leave the relative comfort of her convent in order to go out into the slums, seeking the lost sheep among the poorest of the poor. And what sustained her and the many sisters who joined her was a deep spirit of prayer and sacrifice. In a letter to a spiritual father she wrote these telling words: “Do not think that my spiritual life is strewn with roses—that is the flower which I hardly ever find on my way. Quite the contrary, I have more often as my companion “darkness”. And when the night becomes very thick… then I simply offer myself to Jesus. .… I need much grace, much of Christ’s strength to persevere in trust, in that blind love which leads only to Jesus Crucified. But I am happy—yes happier than ever. And I would not wish at any price to give up my sufferings… Pray, pray much for me—I really need His love…”.
With this inspiring example and many others and sustained by the Blessed Mother as we are now in the final days before her greatest feast, may we all learn to become true Good Samaritans, in love with God, in the service of souls.
