Teacher, What Must I do to Inherit Eternal Life?”


Today's Mass Readings

Today’s first reading is one of the most well-known and most beloved of our tradition. Poor Jonah, swallowed up by a large fish, only to be spewed on the shore three days later…and led back to God’s work that he was trying to avoid. And why did Jonah wish to avoid the Ninevites? Was it because he did not think they would actually repent? Or was it because he thought they might actually repent and he didn’t think they deserved the blessings of God? From either perspective, Jonah wished to avoid the Ninevites because they were not like him in ethnicity or religion. When we juxtapose Jonah with today’s gospel, it brings out the theme of otherness found in this other very famous Bible story: the Good Samaritan. Here Jesus proposes that the true “neighbor” is not defined simply in terms of similarity, but, rather, in terms of familiarity. The Samaritan, although technically an “other,” is willing to be acquainted with the suffering person, to offer the victim mercy when his own people will not. In the case of Jonah, he knows God’s will and studiously avoids doing it – even taking a ship in the opposite direction. In the case of the priest and the Levite, they know God’s rules for ritual purity and allow those to take precedence over God’s more important requirement of mercy.

In both cases, there is a subversion of God’s will regarding the care of his people. As regards the story of the Good Samaritan, however, we might notice that it is precisely a story – a parable told by Jesus to a legal scholar. Perhaps this is someone initially more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit. But by the end of the story, we see that he does comprehend Jesus’ message; he is able to recognize the Samaritan as the one who acts as a neighbor despite his knowledge of the law. Hence Jesus complicates a conventional understanding by challenging the scholar of the law to act as the Samaritan in the story. In the same way, God’s command for Jonah challenges him to act as neighbor to people he does not like.

Let us examine in our own lives the times that we tend to draw boundary lines that exclude the “other” – to neglect those that we dislike or those that are unlike us. Instead, let us embrace God’s will that includes extending his family to all people, and may we begin to do this by living lives that witness to God’s own mercy to us. For, like Jonah, and like the victim on the side of the road, we need deliverance. God gives us this in his Son, and, as he saves us, he also calls us.