Readings (Year C):
Deuteronomy 30:10 – 14
Psalm 69:14, 17, 30 – 31, 33 – 34, 36, 37
Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11
Luke 10:25 – 37
Reflection: The faith is not complicated
If there’s one lesson we can take from today’s readings it’s that our faith is simple. Jesus patiently fields these Jesuitical questions from a lawyer cross-examining him about the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. But Jesus goes on to tell a long story to underline this point: stop for everyone. It’s that simple.
If you stop for anyone who’s on the road, your world becomes a lot clearer. Your conscience lighter, your life, your faith more truthful. It’s when you try to make up elaborate rules for why you stop for some people on the side of the road, and not others, that life gets confusing. That’s when we start living in the darkness of our own two-facedness.
There’s a long-running internet joke: “Every lifelong Catholic I’ve ever met is like ‘I think we’re supposed to give this food to poor people’ and every adult convert is like ‘the Archon of Constantinople’s epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the Eucharist clearly states women shouldn’t have driver’s licenses.’” That’s just a joke, of course, but it points to something. Our faith is quite simple: stop for everyone.
But if it’s so simple, why do we complicate it so much? Why is this saying so hard to accept?
Decades of studies have shown that nature has compassion at its root. Studies at the University of Chicago demonstrated that rats will go out of their way to help another rat that is suffering. If even rats have empathy, can’t we?
The Good Samaritan is the only one in Jesus’ story who is honoring his instincts: the commandment written not just on stone tablets or in a book in the clouds, but on our hearts. He loves his neighbor the way that he hopes others would love him. And neighbor means everyone, not just family members, the person who looks like you, who goes to the same kind of school, has the same passport or skin color or native tongue.
We seem to be surrounded today by clever scholars and pharisees who want complicated answers that excuse our callous hearts. But Jesus says that it’s really not that difficult to comprehend: love God and love your neighbor. Don’t overthink this too much.
Servant of God Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, was fond of quoting St. John of the Cross: “”Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.”
You know the answer, Jesus says. You don’t have to go on elaborate quests to find the truth, it’s not in some inaccessible holy place far across the ocean or up in the sky, revealed only to mystics and saints. It lives deep inside of us, programmed into our hearts. It’s our deepest instinct. We have only to carry it out.
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