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Exploring the word

11 Jul 2010 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

MERCY IS IN danger of becoming an antique word. We live in a tough world where cynicism is the protective wrapping around many hearts. Hostility toward the enemy and suspicion of the stranger are the norm. Our bitterly partisan culture encourages us to be vitriolic toward competing ideas and those who hold them. It's acceptable and even fashionable to be rude, self-promoting, and other-denying. The more hysterical the public rhetoric is, the farther it travels and the more popular it becomes. We must oppose this trend. Christians can't afford to toss their hats in the ring with intolerance, arrogance, and downright cruelty. When hysteria rules, we must remain good stewards of our words and emotions and where they lead us. Spraying unbridled passion about self-indulgently is incompatible with the baptismal vocation. We're called to surrender our lives for others, not trample them underfoot if they oppose our point of view. Why is that important? Because demonstrating mercy toward the neighbor is an imperative of our faith. Eternal life hangs in the balance when we choose to exercise or deny compassion. The great commandment obliges us to love God and neighbor. And if we want to quibble about the definition of neighbor, we only have to listen to the parable of the Good Samaritan again. Good Samaritan has become a metaphor for do-gooding; that's unfortunate. The Good Samaritan is not a philanthropist spreading money around on his favorite causes. No, the Samaritan is not a charitable guy in the traditional sense. He's a brave man who crosses clear social lines to rescue the wrong person: his enemy. A man who hates him. A man to whom he owes nothing, neither kindness nor sustenance. Chances are the fellow in the gutter would have let the Samaritan bleed to death had the roles been reversed. The Samaritan doesn't weigh that probability very heavily when making the decision to help. Most of us can't get our minds around what the Samaritan does because we can't even offer an ideological opponent common courtesy, never mind spending time, money, and genuine compassion on the suffering of a perceived foe. We have little practice with sympathy, much less empathy. The modern model is to be sarcastic, distant, and unconcerned. "Not my problem, not my job" is the mantra. Many of us don't even want to hear about the plight of undocumented immigrants, or gay bashing, or the intimidation of American Muslims, or the continued effect of racism and sexism, even when it operates in our church assemblies. The Good Samaritan remains a rather lonely fellow. Yet the advice of Jesus is plain: "Go and do likewise." Related scripture links Written on hearts of flesh: Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 11:19-2, 36:26-27 We are God's letter: 2 Cor. 3:2-3 The word dwells in us: Phil. 3:16 You shall love the Lord and your neighbor: Lev. 19:18; Deut. 6:5, 10:12 Catechism links Mercy: CCC 1822; 1825; 1829; 2083; 2447; 2822

Authors Alice Camille

great commandment love your neighbor Good Samaritan

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The inner word

11 Jul 2010 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

If only you would heed the voice of the Lord . . . .” It sounds so simple and it is—in theory. What keeps me from listening intently and carrying out the Word of God? In what ways do I recognize that the Word of God is “something very near” to me? It is in Jesus that “all things hold together.” Think of the crucifix in which the vertical and the horizontal meet and where Jesus’ outstretched arms encompass all that is. When I am tempted to resist doing what I know I ought, do I turn to Jesus as the way through resistance to transformation? When, recently, have I run into a “Good Samaritan”? When have I felt someone “pass on by the other side of the road” when I needed help?

word of god Crucifix Good Samaritan

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Go forth and do likewise

Funeral, Sacrament-based, Holy Day, Holiday, Special Occasion - Sample homilies to be adapted for your use

Readings: Luke 10:25-37 "Go and do likewise." If we do not celebrate a person's life's work when they die, we make the same mistake as when we do not celebrate their work during their life. The story of the Good Samaritan is a story about N. Jesus was asked outright what we must do to inherit eternal life, and his answer was to tell the story of the Good Samaritan. Who was the Good Samaritan? We don't know for sure, but it is clear that he was a layperson, not a religious professional. In fact, it is probable that he was some sort of businessperson—for why else would he be on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho early in the morning, and just happen to have oil and wine with him, and be able to pay the innkeeper to take care of the victim, and promise to return on his "way back"? In other words, the Good Samaritan was in the midst of doing his job when he was asked to be a good neighbor. N. was like the Good Samaritan. S/he was a layperson who did most of her "Good Samaritaning" in the midst of the hustle and bustle of her busy life. N. was the kind of person who just did what needed to be done in her daily work on her job, with her family and friends, in her community, and here in the church. She didn't make a big deal out of it, didn't expect accolades or recognition, didn't hold herself up as some sort of saint. She just went about her work without complaint, always looking for opportunities to help others in need, without any thought about whether or not people would notice or thank her properly for her effort. What N. was really doing was helping to build the kingdom of God "on earth as it is in heaven," as Jesus taught us to pray in the Our Father. And in so doing, N. inherited eternal life: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." Do this, Jesus said, and you will live. N. did this, and in so doing she lived a full life [even though it may have been shortened in years] and has now inherited eternal life. The Good Samaritan was in the midst of doing his job when he was asked to be a good neighbor." "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus was asked, and he told the story of the Good Samaritan. He might have told any number of stories from the life of N. [Tell two or three stories about how the deceased was a Good Samaritan, if you know or have been told about the person's work.] N. was a good neighbor. She was a good neighbor for many years at her work at [name of workplace]. She was a good neighbor to those of us who live in [name the community]. She was a good neighbor to those of us in this church. And she was certainly a good neighbor to her family [name specific family members]. What N. did in her life was perhaps not considered heroic. Maybe it did not generate many headlines or garner numerous awards. What she did in her lifetime was to be a good neighbor. She saw someone in need; she stopped and did what she could—it wasn't rocket science, but it was what the Lord asks us to do. For N., acting like the Good Samaritan was what you do if you are a follower of Jesus. And Jesus told the rest of us to "go and do likewise." So let us take our cue from N. Let us go back into our own jobs and families and neighborhoods and do what needs to be done. That is how N. demonstrated that she loved God and loved her neighbor, that is how N. helped build the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, that is how N. inherited eternal life. Let us go forth and do likewise.

Authors Nate Pierce

funeral all manner of death Good Samaritan Luke 10:25-37

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Pope makes good-neighbor visit to island

14 Jul 2013 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday's gospel account of the Good Samaritan, Jesus challenges his audience to consider what it means to be a good neighbor. Pope Francis used the first pastoral visit of his papacy to challenge church and world on the same theme. Upending protocol and politics on a visit to the tiny island of Lampedusa off the coast of Sicily to pray for refugees and migrants lost at sea, Francis criticized "global indifference" to the refugee crisis: "Today no one in the world feels responsible for this; we have lost the sense of fraternal responsibility.“We have fallen into the hypocritical attitude of the priest and of the servant of the altar that Jesus speaks about in the parable of the Good Samaritan," said Francis in a direct reference to the Sunday gospel. "We look upon the brother half dead by the roadside, perhaps we think 'poor guy,' and we continue on our way, it's none of our business; and we feel fine with this.”Lampedusa is only 113 kilometers from Tunisia and has been the first point of entry to Europe for more than 200,000 refugees and irregular migrants who have passed through the island since 1999. The Italian coast guard had just rescued a crippled ship with 165 Eritreans on board only hours before the pope's arrival.The pontiff flew to Lampedusa from Rome on Monday morning and immediately boarded a port authority cutter that has been involved in the rescue of more than 30,000 refugees in recent years, according to the Italian coast guard. Outside the port the pope paused to pray at the sight of a deadly 2011 shipwreck before launching a wreath of flowers into the water to commemorate the lives of those lost at sea "in search of a better life."On arriving in the port the pope then met 50 selected migrants including men, women, and children who were both Christian and Muslim and listened to their stories about their perilous voyage from North Africa. The pope then held a mass for 15,000 people under a blazing sun at an outdoor sporting center on the island. Standing at an altar made of the wooden remnants of refugee boats and dressed in purple robes normally reserved for Lent, Pope Francis gave an emotional homily focused on "global indifference" to the refugee and irregular migrant problem.Homily hint: Though we’d all like to identify with the Good Samaritan in this Sunday’s gospel, when we are honest with ourselves we see a lot of the priest and the Levite in ourselves. Perhaps we can do a little better in community, with the support with others who, like us, would like to get on the right side of the road and be good neighbors. Source: An article by Barbie Latza Nadeau for CNN

Pope Francis immigrants Good Samaritan refugees north africa irregular migrants lampedusa

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In other words

10 Jul 2016 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?” He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?” He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.” “Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.” Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?” Jesus answered by telling a story. “There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man. “A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I’ll pay you on my way back.’ “What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?” (from Luke 10).

Good Samaritan

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Homily stories

10 Jul 2016 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Living in an increasingly violent city like Chicago—or anywhere in this dangerous world—can harden a person. When you encounter trouble, or even sense it, you have to look out for yourself and get out of the way. But that’s how evil grows, when everyone turns a blind eye and simply lets it happen. On Feb. 7, 2016, 32-year-old Marques Gaines, a popular hotel cocktail server, was punched and knocked unconscious into a crosswalk outside a convenience store in Chicago. Footage from surveillance video showed that a group of people immediately gathered around Gaines and two men went through his pockets. Others actually walked right past Gaines without trying to pull him out of the street or block traffic. More than a dozen bystanders failed to help him in the nearly two minutes before a cab accidentally drove over him. Gaines died shortly after. This true story is eerily similar to the allegory of the Good Samaritan—only minus a Good Samaritan. It’s easy to think you might have been the one to step forward and do the right thing in this situation. But . . . how many times have I heard a commotion, put my head down, and kept walking—fast? No one is suggesting being reckless about personal safety, but we also could do much, much more to look out for our neighbors, too.

Authors Jennifer Tomshack

Good Samaritan neighbors

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Exploring the word

14 Jul 2019 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

A lot about religion gets relegated to the overcrowded room of “mystery”: unknowable, unprovable, intangible, invisible. In theological terms, mystery is that which cannot be fathomed by human reason alone, or which depends upon the gift of divine revelation to be grasped. We can get sloppy about the appeal to mystery, however, and start to use it as a catchall for painful intersections where our teaching and our experience are at variance, or simply to silence questions that challenge our authority. Not everything about God is a total mystery, obviously. If the Bible is to be taken seriously, God has spent human history in the task of self-revelation and a relentless bid for intimate relationship with us. God’s self-communication has made the divine will seem not very mysterious at all, truth be told. In story, in law, in oracles, and in supernatural acts, God has been surprisingly transparent about what the divine intentions for our happiness are. So if any mystery is left in what God wants of us, it is that we are still so vague about the plan. Listen to the rants of televangelists and milkcrate preachers in the park, and be amazed at all the ways God’s words are manipulated to make an idiosyncratic point. Ask three people of the same religious persuasion to explain a particular doctrine, and stand aghast at how we routinely domesticate teachings to support a predetermined worldview. As is often noted, after God created human beings in the divine image, we returned the favor by creating an image of God that mirrored us to a T. So long as this mirror-image God we worship affirms the way we choose to live, the whole system of religion hums right along quite nicely. Not exactly rocket science Moses was the first to suggest that we can’t plead ignorance when it comes to knowing the divine will. He insists that we all know darn well what God wants from us. God’s will is not up in the sky or across the sea, some exotic formula lost in translation and perceived through a cosmic mist. It is near to us, speaking in the yearning of our hearts, warning us in the mutterings of conscience, obvious through the long, sad lessons of history. If we do not hear the voice of the Lord proclaimed in story and symbol, word and sacrament, personal history and communal experience, it is not because God has fallen silent or is being deliberately mysterious. Refreshingly, God’s law is written in stone and hasn’t changed much since then. If anything, it has become even more sharply outlined over time, written on hearts of flesh as the prophets foretold, so that we have become the aleph and bet of God’s purposes. As Saint Paul reminded the community at Corinth, those who follow Jesus become letters written in the Spirit, known and read by all. Moses’ declaration concerning the evident nature of God’s truth matches our experience pretty accurately. Most of us have had the experience of being asked for advice from a friend in trouble. Inevitably, the friend knows what must be done to avert disaster and is fairly clear on the outcome of each road that might be taken. The problem is never what to do, but finding the resolve to do the right thing. Rarely do we wander blindly into the path of adversity. Some instinct for right and wrong warns us well in advance that the decision we just made is not wise, honest, or good. If we pursue it to the end, we will wind up more or less where “it was written” that we would. Or if we get off scot-free this time, it is only a prelude to getting caught further down the line, where the stakes are higher and the voice of conscience has become muted from disuse. Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same thing. When ethical dilemmas do confound us, it is usually not the terms of the choice that are unclear, but simply that we are standing in our own way and blocking the light available to us. Jesus and the scholar A scripture scholar came to Jesus with a question basic to the religious enterprise: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” From the first, we sense his insincerity. If he is a scholar, he comes to this question with a host of presuppositions about the answer. This is not the earnest question of a truth seeker, then, but a test of Jesus’ own credentials. This prompts Jesus to direct the question back to the scholar, who replies from within the safety of the “Moses zone” with a chestnut from the Law: Love the Lord completely and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells him bluntly, then, to do it. Ah, but that is the delicate heart of the matter, isn’t it? But the scholar can’t leave well enough alone and does what scholars do best, splitting fine hairs further by asking for clarification on the definition of “neighbor.” I asked my 10-year-old niece what a neighbor is, and she had no problem defining the term. The scholar’s second question underscores his game playing, and so Jesus decides to tell him a little story that sounds the truth loud and clear. At the end, even the cagey scholar has to admit that he knows which character in the story acted like a neighbor. Applying the word Do mercy likewise The story of the Good Samaritan is the fundamental building block of Sunday school morality. Luke’s Jesus has posited compassion as the essential response of God to a world of misery and sin. If we face a fork in the road, our direction is simple: choose mercy. If we don’t know how to behave, be compassionate. When confronted with obstacles and enemies, there is only one route through, and that is to forgive. We feel a mortal tug toward self-righteousness, judgmentalism, prejudice, and pride, but none of those paths are available to us if we are using the Christian road map. The answer to life’s dilemmas is generally a simple one. It is the application that so far confounds us. Related scripture links Written on hearts of flesh: Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 11:19-2, 36:26-27 We are God’s letter: 2 Cor. 3:2-3 The word dwells in us: Phil. 3:16 You shall love the Lord and your neighbor: Lev. 19:18; Deut. 6:5, 10:12

Authors Alice Camille

mystery divine intentions divine will conscience neighbors Good Samaritan Compassion Forgiveness

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Homily stories

14 Jul 2019 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

“We had no time to grab anything. The water was rising and the current was already in the park. There were even some who had to leave without their pets. It was grab yourself and get.” That’s what Patti said in a video report after flooding devastated the rural area where she lived in a small trailer park off an interstate highway. “Emotionally, the people here lost hope—for a minute,” she said. But then the volunteers showed up—more than 600 of them from the small towns all around. “They literally wrapped their arms around us. Volunteers were lined up everywhere. Cars parked along the highway. I didn’t know we could hold this many people in here. They helped us clean up and start over. They brought in truckloads—truckloads—of stuff.” Patti was surprised to discover that she had all these neighbors, and maybe the neighbors didn’t realize it either—until the tragedy become an opportunity to come together and do a better job of being a community. Local groups formed a long-term recovery group and created a disaster relief fund. “If there’s a need, they’re reaching out,” Patti said. “It’s still been going on since the flood. Everybody is family now. The love that’s come out of this is amazing. God bless every single one of them. It will never be forgotten.”

Authors Jennifer Tomshack

neighbors disaster relief Good Samaritan

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Homily stories

14 Jul 2019 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

Late for an important meeting, I was running for a bus when I tripped and skid headlong on the sidewalk. I hopped back on my feet and caught up with the bus, huffing and puffing and embarrassed. The stares from people in the crowded seats and aisle tipped me off to the fact that my hands and nose were bleeding. I hid my hands in my jacket pocket after trying to wipe the blood from my nose. I felt uncomfortable, and in the age of blood-borne diseases, a pariah. A man I knew from church turned his head to look intently out the window. A woman reading her Bible kept her head down reading. A bag lady who everyone had avoided looked at me and reached into one of her shopping bags. She pulled out a fresh, pristine packet of facial tissues. Her face contorted into a chipped-tooth smile as she handed me the packet. I smiled at her, grateful for her kindness. I had made jokes about “bag women” in the past and felt guilty. And I’d slipped a few dollars to such women from time to time and felt secretly proud. Today, I finally looked at the woman and saw her for who she was—my neighbor.

Authors Tom McGrath

Good Samaritan

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Homily stories

14 Jul 2019 - Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

In the era before cell phones, a young professional woman was driving home late one night when she spotted a group of teenage boys all huddled together in a vacant lot just off a fairly deserted street. She had her window rolled up, but she could hear vague cries. As she drove past she was sure she saw someone crouched in the middle of the crowd. On a risky whim, she decided to go around the block and take another look. As she rounded the corner a second time, she now saw clearly that one boy was being severely beaten by the others. There were no other cars in sight. She knew by the time she found a cop, it might be too late for the boy. With no other means at her disposal, she started honking her horn and drove off the street up into the crowd. The gang bangers broke away from the boy and began pounding on the woman’s car. “O good Lord, don’t leave me now,” she prayed aloud, as she darted out of the lot and down the street till she was able to find a phone and call the police. She waited until she was sure it was safe and returned to the scene to see the boy being loaded into the ambulance. Later when the police told the boy about his rescuer, he sat staring in amazement: Of all the people he might have expected to save him that night, a little rich miss from the opposite side of town would never have crossed his mind.

Authors Patrice J. Tuohy

Good Samaritan

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