Our People

Homily for 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C

St Dominic’s Priory Church, East Camberwell

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
15/7/2007

The Story of the Good Samaritan is one of the favourites of the Christian Gospel. We love to hear it when it comes around every three years in the cycle of the Lectionary. But the risk is that it is so familiar that we have stopped really paying attention to it: we have heard it all before, we know the ending, we could almost recite it from memory. It is a warm, comfortable, almost sentimental tale. Yet scholars remind us that when first it was heard, it was far from comfortable: it was packed with shocking little jibes for its first hearers. In the first place, there is the implicit criticism of priests – for their unneighbourliness, ungenerosity, legalism, too careful avoidance of ritual impurity. Then there’s the shocking suggestion that lay people might be more neighbourly than clergy. Last of all, there’s the suggestion that the Jews’ traditional enemy, the Samaritans, could be good, indeed good to Jews, indeed better than Jews at being good to Jews. It is like telling Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel today that his most reliable neighbour in difficult times are the Palestinians!

This is typical, of course, of the reversals of common expectations which we meet so often in Jesus’ preaching. Next in Jesus’ story, the hero not only helps, he helps a great deal, extending his care beyond the immediate emergency, seeing to the man’s longer-term good as well. Once again, Jesus is proposing something shocking: a far less measured kind of justice or charity than even his most open-minded and charitable hearers would have thought possible, appropriate, let alone required.

Yet if it was intended to shock his Jewish hearers out of their comfortable certainties, their nice, homely, ‘we’re the chosen people’ security, what does it say to us, two thousand years later, in our very different world, with very different problems? Can it still challenge us? Jesus offers his tale in response to a lawyer’s interrogatories about eternal life and neighbours. If lawyers have stopped asking questions about the former, they still regularly ask ‘who is my neighbour’ in negligence cases even today. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus invites his hearers to expand their notions of neighbour and friend, kith and kin, until we see all Christians, indeed all humanity, as our own people, as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’. He is breaking down the tribalism, the ancient animosities, the in-groups and out-groups, challenging us to enlarge our moral imaginations and sensitivities, to put ourselves in the shoes of others affected by what we do or fail to do.

Exactly one year from today something extraordinary will happen to our country: somewhere around 150,000 young people from around the world will join a similar number of young Australians in Sydney for the Opening Mass of World Youth Day. By the end of a week of liturgy and prayer, catechesis and celebration, more than half a million people will join Pope Benedict at the biggest youth gathering, the biggest religious event, the biggest celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in Australia’s history. It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our Church and community in Australia to enable our young people to encounter Jesus Christ, his Holy Spirit and his Church, to give them ideals and hope for the future, and through them to touch the hearts of all Australians.

It will also be a chance for us to be hosts to the world, a chance for young Australian Catholics to see that they are part of something much bigger than themselves, their family, their school, their parish. One thing which World Youth Day returnees regularly comment upon is their profound experience of the universality of the Church, that there are people just like them in every country of the world, that their’s is a universal faith and that the arms of our Church are, like the World Youth Day Cross, wide open to all. That is not, of course, the idea of every religion: many think that their particular ethnic group are God’s favourites, or that their religion is a monopoly of members of their culture. But the faith and hope and love of the Good Samaritan goes out to people of every tribe, every nation. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost comes to people of every language and knits them together as one people under God.

World Youth Day will be an extraordinary opportunity and experience in so many ways, but one will be the opportunity to examine the in-groups and out-groups here in Australia, those bashed and left at the side of one road or another: the financially or spiritually poor, the abused, the asylum seeker, the grieving, the lonely, the marginal. At present our country is considering the plight of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, especially the victims of abuse or neglect. The Good Samaritan asks us: can we extend our moral imaginations and sympathies to them? Can we picture what they think and feel? The despondency, alienation, self-hatred? Does our notion of neighbours include them?

Recently a number of books have attacked religion. One thing these books all claim in common is that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has made no real contribution to human welfare. Though there is much to criticize in Christian history, this claim is certainly not fair. Inspired by the Story of the Good Samaritan and the other teachings and life of Christ, Catholics have, down through the ages, established orphanages, hospices, hospitals, soup kitchens, sainted individuals and whole religious congregations devoted especially to the needy, lay associations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, Caritas and so many other projects that genuinely contribute to human welfare. Each of these works is offered not only to ‘our own’, but to anyone in need; indeed each of these works makes anyone in need ‘our own’. And each of these works, as a lived, contemporary story of the Good Samaritan, challenges us to exercise more moral imagination and sensitivity and response towards those who suffer. Each invites our identification with the suffering person, our com-passio or fellow-suffering with them, and our immediate, active care.

It was precisely this gut-churning compassion that was the driving force of Jesus’ mission. He cared: not just in the abstract, like the reader of a novel sympathising with a fictional character; not like a bureaucrat devising a strategy; but as one who really laughs with those who laugh and mourns with those who mourn; one who feels with others, shares in their lives, has passion for their passions, suffers with their suffering, and is thus impelled to respond. Jesus identifies himself with those he meets, invests himself in them, makes their good his own, their salvation his purpose.

This was not merely a peculiar feature of Jesus’ psychology, as if he were a bit of an old softie, a bleeding-heart sentimentalist: it is replete with theological significance. The God described so often in the Psalms as “full of compassion and steadfast love” is the God Jesus knew in prayer, in liturgy, in his personal life as his Father-God. It was the God of love whose only love-child took flesh in Jesus. It was the love-God whom Jesus made known. The Good Samaritan is, of course, God in Christ himself, coming with healing balm and boundless generosity to a broken humanity, and to each and every example of broken humanity, every damaged and hurting person, every case of dire and desperate need. God in his Christ comes seeking no gratitude, no recompense, making no inquiry into how deserving the victim, how great their social contribution, how many others there might be in similar need, whether they have queued properly, whether they are too dependent, whether they brought their suffering on themselves…

Jesus’ call to moral imagination, to compassion, to let our minds be turned upside down and our stomachs inside out, in care for others, is every bit as challenging today as it was in ancient Palestine. And so is his call to immediate action. It is not just to first century Jews and Christians he speaks, but to twenty-first century Camberwellians that he says this morning: "Go now and do the same yourselves!"