Lord Grant me Peace......
The way life seems dark,
And yet,within my heart i know,
Though i stumble and might fall,
The light of truth will guide me on my way,
If i but heed its call.
Laura Stahl
Sunday July 11th Gospel Reflection
Here is one of the earliest interpretations of this story about the Good Samaritan. The writer was Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 AD - c. 254): “The man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is Adam. Jerusalem is Paradise. Jericho is this world. The thieves are the forces of the enemy. The priest is the Law. The Levite is the prophets. The Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience. The horse is the body of Christ. The inn that is open to all who wish to enter is the Church. The two denarii are the Father and the Son. The inn-keeper is the pastor of the flock, whose duty is to care. The Samaritan’s promise to return indicates the Saviour’s Second Coming.” Origen was the father of the ‘Allegorical Method’, and this is an example of it at full strength. It may seem rather strained at times, but it represented a determination that the Scriptures would not remain dead on the page but would come alive in the present.
An even earlier writer, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 AD - c. 215), also sees the Samaritan as Jesus: “Who can this neighbour be but the Saviour himself? Who but he has had pity on us as we lay almost dead from the dark forces of this world, with so many wounds, so many fears and passions, so much anger, so much sorrow, so much deception, so many deceptive pleasures? Jesus alone can heal these wounds.”
Left to ourselves we might have interpreted this story in a purely moralistic way: here was a good model for us of practical charity. But by putting this reading with others that are directly about Jesus himself, the Liturgy holds this ancient interpretation before us. The first thing about the Good Samaritan is that “he came near,” while the priest and the Levite “passed by on the other side.” In Jesus, the divine Person, the Word, came near to us, took on our flesh and lived among us. This is the only possible connection with the first reading: “The Word is very near to you.” Likewise the second reading is about God coming near us in Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God.”
In the moralistic interpretation of this story the Good Samaritan would be oneself. We would see ourselves called to reach into our inner resources and produce the goods from there; we would be on the giving end. But in this deeper interpretation the Good Samaritan is Jesus, and we are the traveller fallen among robbers; we are on the receiving end. God in Christ has reached out to us. Leo the Great (pope from 440 - 461) said, “Christ is the hand of God's mercy stretched out to us.”
We are told to “Go and do likewise.” But we are told this at the end of the story, not at the beginning. By the end of the story we have seen what our real resource is: it is not ourselves and our ambiguous generosity, it is God's bounty in Christ.
There is nothing so humiliating as to be the object of cold charity: the skimmed milk of human kindness. I had to share space for a number of years with an 18th-century fresco that showed some saint dispensing charity to beggars. He looked much more fixed in his role than the beggars did in theirs. I often wondered what he would do if there were no beggars. He needed them more than they needed him. Their luck might change, and one day they might feed themselves. Then he wouldn’t know who he was. Charity always has a sick twist in it if it doesn’t flow out through us from the heart of God.
