I just wanted to briefly share an insight that the Lord allowed me this past Sunday. I was at Mass, hearing the story of the Good Samaritan for the umpteenth time in my life. Only this time, I heard something I had not noticed before...
There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test him and said,
“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law?
How do you read it?”
He said in reply,
“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.”
He replied to him, “You have answered correctly;
do this and you will live.”
But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus,
“And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-29)
Jesus goes on to tell the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan.
THEN, Jesus ends by asking the scholar of the law, “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”
Interesting! The scholar had actually asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” In other words, “Toward whom do I have to be loving?” The scholar sees the neighbor as the recipient of his love. Yet, in the parable, the robbers’ victim, the one who RECEIVES is not the one Jesus refers to as “neighbor.” Jesus asks who was neighbor TO the robbers’ victim. To Jesus, the “neighbor” is the subject of love - not the object. He is the one from whom the acts of love originate. To Jesus, the Samaritan is “neighbor.”
In His infinite wisdom, Jesus turned the question around to emphasize that the key here is not defining who we opt to spend our love on. The idea is not to clarify or limit the circumstances in which we are expected to love. Rather than identifying the persons deserving of my love, if I am the one who is called to “be neighbor,” the focus becomes more interior. I don’t need to worry about who my neighbor is - I need to originate love myself.
Doesn’t this make so much more sense for us, who want to be like Jesus? Did He look for the “right” people to love, or did He just LOVE? According to the scholars of the law, Jesus loved all the “wrong” kinds of people. Lucky for me, that’s the kind of God we have!
The scholar of the law, who was accustomed to delineating what was right and wrong according to the “letter of the law,” was no doubt looking for a black and white answer here. But he got a deeper, soul-searching, kind of question from Jesus instead.
WE got a soul-searching kind of question from Jesus, too.
