Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In the reading from Luke 10 appointed for the Daily Office today, we hear the familiar story of the Good Samaritan. It’s such a familiar story that there are likely some aspects of it that escape our attention…like the dialogue that frames it, which is the whole reason the story was told to begin with!

A lawyer (most likely an expert in religious law), looking to test Jesus asks him what needs to be done to inherit (to receive or live into) the life of the Age to Come. Jesus throws the question back at the lawyer: “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” A slightly more literal translation has, “How do you read it?” Jesus is asking, here, for the mature fruits of scriptural engagement, about what the man’s encounter with scripture has revealed to him…and more than that, Jesus is looking for how that encounter has formed the man, how the man has allowed scripture to read him, to interpret him. This’ll be important in just a brief moment.

The lawyer speaks confidently about loving God with total heart, soul, strength and mind—loving, that is, with all of one’s emotional life, all of one’s being and will, with the whole of one’s body and physical life, and with the full force of one’s intellect; in other words, he talks about the love of God providing the force and the ground of all feeling, being, willing, perceiving, acting and thinking—and talks about loving “your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus approves of the answer and sends the man on his way.

And here, all of a sudden, the man feels personally attacked, feels he needs to justify himself. He gets, in an instant, what Jesus is after.

It’s one thing to know what scripture says, and it’s another thing entirely to be formed by it, shaped by it, accountable to it. Suddenly, it’s the lawyer being tested, and he knows it! He realizes that the total love of God that he’s just talked about must look like something in the world; that love of God cannot be an interior or private activity; that love of God means a way of being-in-the-world that looks like love of neighbor; that love of neighbor flows naturally from love of God and isn’t separate from it; that if one’s whole feeling, being, willing, perceiving, acting and thinking is grounded in love, it means seeing every other person as a site and center of the love by which we’re meant to be shaped, informed and inflamed if we’re to say we love the God who is, in fact, Love! Our text says the lawyer wants to “justify himself” when he asks, “And who is my neighbor?” What he’s doing here, very subtly, is questioning our ability to know who our neighbor really is, looking (it would seem) to relocate proper love of God as a predominantly interior exercise given that its outward expression in love of neighbor is difficult to realize if the very concept of “neighbor” turns out to be a fuzzy one.

Jesus, of course, sees through the lawyer’s justifications, and he tells the story of the Good Samaritan in response. At this point it should be clear that what Jesus is after in the story isn’t an illustration of what it means to be nice to someone in need and how that’s very valuable: it’s an illustration of how love of another person proceeds from love of God; what it means for us to recognize our center, our life, our well-being as centered in the life and well-being of another; what it means to see the Love we love alive in the life of another and respond to that Love with love; what it means to become that Love through a way of loving that is grounded in Love’s own being and that recognizes and responds to that being everywhere.

The lawyer gets it eventually, in part because Jesus turns the lawyer’s question on its head—he doesn’t ask whose neighbor the injured man was, he asks who involved in the story was a neighbor to that injured man. What characterizes a neighbor isn’t a social or geographical location, but a way of being-in-relationship by which one behaves in a neighborly way—a merciful way, a loving way that in love transcends borders—to anyone that might be met along life’s way. A neighbor, in other words, is one who loves God, one whose love is grounded in God’s Love, grounded in the Love whose center—as many of the wise have said (most famously Nicholas of Cusa)—is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.

And Our Lord says to all of us, “Go and do likewise!”

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+