I love the passage in that first reading from Deuteronomy where Moses reminds everyone that our faith is not reallyvery mysterious. I mean yes, there are things about God, and his plans, and about eternal life, that we will never know, at least in this life. But when it comes to what we really need to know to understand God’s love, and about how to live lives pleasing to God, it’s not that mysterious. In fact, Jesus was able to summarize a lot of it in just a handful of simple stories that we should all know by heart. And today’s gospel of the Good Samaritan is one of them.
Of course the key word in today’s reading is compassion. The good Samaritan is the one in the story who feels it. I think probably too often when we picture compassion, we think of it as pity, feeling sorry that something is happening to someone. It’s not that that is a bad thing to feel. It’s just that the compassion in this story is something different. The word that’s used here for compassion in the original language has the same root word as the Greek word for intestines, or guts. It’s a feeling of pain for someone else’s pain, literally of feeling punched in the gut by the impact of what you are seeing someone else go through. It’s a feeling of another person’s humanity in a way that means you’re not separated from that person by all the usual boundaries we place around ourselves. For some reason, seeing this beaten-up man triggered that compassion in the Samaritan. It meant he couldn’t see that sight and do nothing. Not because he was supposed to do it because of religious obligation, it’s just that the churning around in his insides wouldn’t have permitted him to do nothing.
We know there are two people in this reading who don’t feel this compassion. The two devout Jews who pass by on the road and don’t do anything, of course they are in the story to make a point because they are literally on their way home from doing their religious duty by worshipping God. And yet their worship didn’t do what it was supposed to do for them. It did not open them up, it did not fill them with a sense of God’s compassion. They might have felt sorry for the man on the side of the road, maybe they even said to themselves, the poor guy, it’s terrible these things happen to people. But the sight doesn’t cause that punch in the gut, give them a feeling that I can’t simply ignore this, there’s something very wrong here, this is for me to do something about. This person lying here could be me, or someone I know. It was only the Samaritan who felt it.
We call him the good Samaritan, but it’s not that all Samaritans were good. Plenty of Samaritans were not like this one. In Jesus’s lifetime, there were Samaritans who found a way to desecrate the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in a particularly disgusting way, just to express their hatred and disapproval of the people they thought were a problem. In return, Samaritans were considered heretics or worse by devout Jews. So this man is tied up in the middle of a world of division and scapegoating other people that is as common today as it was then. And yet somehow all this has not turned him into someone who can turn off his feelings for people outside of his private world.
If we’re supposed to be like the Samaritan in this story, what does that really mean for us? We can admire the fact that he was willing to travel on this dangerous road in the first place, to go somewhere where there might be problems. We can also admire his risk-taking — the generous act that he decided to do here might very easily not have worked out. This whole scene could all have been a trap, a faked injury. The man who was beaten up might himself have been a criminal of some kind. The Samaritan took that risk.
But really, all this was possible because he was the sort of person who permitted himself to feel someone else’s helplessness. Apparently we humans can all turn off compassion if we want to, or we think it’s right to turn it off for groups of people we decide aren’t worthy of it; maybe it’s some kind of survival mechanism, we have to place ourselves at a distance, or place certain groups of people at a distance, to somehow simplify things. And yet the compassion of God is not like that; God literally does not turn compassion off, and doesn’t draw any lines. Jesus didn’t either. That strange word for compassion in this gospel is the same word used when we hear about how Jesus felt when he saw great crowds of the poor like sheep without a shepherd, it’s what Jesus said the father of the prodigal son felt when he saw that unworthy son coming home.
A great theologian said that feeling pain is human; feeling the pain of others is Christlike. We all know that there are countless demands on our compassion. I have no idea who the person for you is who is your person on the side of the road that others are walking right by. All we know is that our neighbors are literally everywhere if we allow ourselves to feel it right here.