Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Octave Day of the Ascension!

Today is the eighth and final day of the feast (at least by some old accounts of how such things are reckoned…and you know, Beloved, that old accounts of how such things are reckoned are precious to me!), and while it may not seem like our readings are festally oriented, I wanted to point out something very simple--so simple it’s easy to miss--in the story of the Good Samaritan that we encounter in our Office Gospel today.

I think we’ve talked about this before one way or the other, dear Friend, but you’ll notice that the context of the story of the Good Samaritan is a discussion of what is essential to living into (and also to living now, in accordance with-) the life of the age to come. Jesus indicates that love of God and love of neighbor are what’s essential, but his young interlocutor pushes back and says, “Okay, that may be so, but…who’s my neighbor?”

It’s not a terrible question. “Neighbor” is usually a term that indicates proximity, either in space or in affection. And Jesus doesn’t contest that in the least in telling the story of the Good Samaritan. What he contests are some subtle assumptions in the question. What the young lawyer’s asking is: who am I obliged to love given their categorization as “neighbor.” Or, to put it another way, the assumption the young man has is: those whom I’ve identified as neighbor are the ones to whom I owe love, therefore I need to know precisely who my neighbor is in order to love rightly and not neglect loving someone to whom my love is due. Leaving aside (or leaving for another exploration) the difficult idea here that love is a limited commodity that must be rationed only to the deserving, what Jesus does in telling the story of the Good Samaritan subordinates the question of who-is-neighbor to the question of what constitutes neighborliness...and it affirms that neighborliness creates neighbors. Being a neighbor to someone is what makes them a neighbor to us. The primary consideration is not: into what category does this person fall, neighbor or not-neighbor? It is not that a person is presented to me as a neighbor that requires me to be neighborly: it is that my neighborliness makes the person presented to me my neighbor. Because in the end, the wounded man wasn’t anyone’s neighbor until the Samaritan showed him love, showed him neighborliness, was a neighbor to him.

I could go on about how this suggests all sorts of things regarding human relationships, that how we are to each other creates us as the people we are in community. But in light of the feast of the Ascension that ends today, I want to point out something marvelous and mysterious. Jesus has not loved us because he was bound to love us given the sort of categories into which we fall. Indeed, given how far into sin we’d fallen, we were nothing close to neighbors by proximity; and given how much we rejected him, we were nothing near being neighbors according to affection. But Jesus loves us because he desires to make of us his neighbors. Jesus loves us because he desires his love for us (if we would receive it!) to transform us into friends of love, friends of his. Jesus loves us because he wants us to be part of the family of God. Jesus’ neighborliness to us, Jesus’ love for us, makes us his neighbors…both by proximity (because in the Incarnation he has brought what was far from him into greater intimacy with him) and affection (because in the Passion and Resurrection he has demonstrated his healing love for us). And even now, as Jesus sits on the throne of heaven, at the right hand of the Father, his love has made our humanity neighbor to his divinity.

Let’s not be concerned, Beloved, with who is worthy of our love. But let’s follow the example of our Lord who, by loving us, simultaneously (re)creates us as worthy and reveals our worthiness. Let’s be neighbors to each other so we can discover each other as neighbors.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+