What must I do to inherit eternal life?

15th Sunday of Year C—2001

Homily, 6PC, 7-14-04

The lawyer asks Jesus: What must I do to inherit eternal life? He surely wanted to know the answer to this question, as we all do, so that he could be sure to gain everlasting life in heaven. But not only this for, as a lawyer, he was involved in explaining the Law of Moses to the people and they were surely asking him the same kind of question all the time.

The assumption is that there are things that you can do to inherit eternal life—that life is a sort of a coconut shy where if you aim correctly and throw the ball at the right spot and with the right speed you win the coconut of eternal life.

Jesus asks him what is written in the law and the lawyer correctly replies: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbour as yourself.

It is therefore shown that it is not what you do as such but how you are that is most important.

Loving is not an act of the will, it is an attitude of the heart, a basic disposition. We start with the basic attitude of openness to others and the more we get to know them the deeper our love grows. Most often we focus on one particular person whom we go on to marry but this action does not limit or restrict our love in anyway for it usually enhances it beyond measure.

Jesus is telling the lawyer that it is the basic relationship he has with God that is the most important thing of all. He says: do this and you will live. He uses the language of the lawyer by using the word do; but we know that loving is more about being than doing.

We then move on to the famous question: Who is my neighbour?  And Jesus replies with the famous, and to a Jewish lawyer quite shocking, parable of the Good Samaritan.

This parable has almost entirely lost its shock value today. We use the term Good Samaritan quite freely and we are highly aware of the organisation called The Samaritans dedicated to assisting those who are feeling desperate and suicidal.

So for us the word Samaritan has almost entirely good connotations but at the time this was far from the case. We think of the Samaritans as the good guys but then they were very definitely the bad guys.

The Jews hated them because after the fall of their northern kingdom they had intermarried with the natives and formed a new people called the Samaritans. They established a rival priesthood and a temple on Mount Gerizim and claimed that they were the true believers of Israel. They had once been part of the chosen people but to the Jewish way of thinking they were now traitors.

And their status as outcasts is even more pointed because in the previous chapter of Luke’s Gospel we heard how they rejected Jesus who was at that time heading resolutely towards Jerusalem.

The disciples wanted to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans but Jesus rebuked them and went to another town. The disciples must have been quite surprised and shocked to hear Jesus speak so well of a Samaritan.

Although the victim in the story is not named, the presumption of the listeners is that he is a Jew. The normal way to identify a person on the road is by his clothes or by his speech but this poor man is beaten up and they took all he had. So there was no way of knowing who or what he was, he is simply an unidentified man.

The victim waits for the arrival of a compassionate figure. The first to come along is a priest who is obviously returning to his home after a period of service in the temple but  he sees the man and passes by on the other side of the road.

No reason is given, it could be that he was afraid or in a hurry or simply didn’t want to get involved. Or it might be that he thought the man was dead and didn’t touch him because he would then incur ritual impurity and be defiled.

The second is another official of the temple, a Levite; he gets a bit closer as it says: he came to the place saw him and then passed by on the other side. So we presume that he saw that the victim was alive. But even if the man was dead the Levite would not have incurred the same ritual impurity as the priest; but again the reason why he does nothing is not given.

It is interesting, however, that both the priest and the Levite are attached to the temple and so the negative light in which they are cast is also cast on the temple. Jesus is  setting moral responsibilities over cultic values. And this is highlighted when we realize that the Samaritan uses two items—oil and wine—used in the liturgies conducted in the temple.

Then when the Samaritan arrives the whole tone changes and we are told how attentive he is and we are given all the details of how he cared for the poor victim to the extent of extending credit to the innkeeper.

We must ask who does the Samaritan represent today: the asylum seeker, the gipsy, the Moslems, the prisoners in Eastwood Park, the paedophiles, or even ironically perhaps the Jews?

This powerful parable of Jesus works on a whole number of levels. It challenges our cosy assumptions because all of us have the priest and the Levite within ourselves—hearing these words of Jesus we all become acutely aware of how often we have passed by on the other side.

But it also deeply challenges our racist and other attitudes which segregate the world into people we approve of and people we don’t approve of.  What right have we to approve or disapprove of anyone?

Who is my neighbour?—that is the question, and the answer is clearly that every single person is my neighbour.

And if the command of God is to love my neighbour then I had better get on with it. I’d better start ridding myself of my prejudices and start to show by my words and deeds that I really do love God and every single        human being he has created.