Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 9, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
July 9, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we ponder together one of the Gospel’s most famous passages.
• A lawyer asks Jesus one of the most important questions a man or woman, a boy or a girl, can: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” What do I have to do, in other words, to get to heaven? We don’t get to heaven simply by being born. We don’t get to heaven simply by being reborn in baptism as a child (unless we also die in that state). We don’t get to heaven by coasting there. It’s a choice, or more precisely, a series of choices, and the most important ones we’ll ever make. It’s precisely a choice to love.
• Jesus questioned the lawyer what he himself thought the answer was to his own question, and the lawyer gave what Jesus admitted was the right response. Putting together two parts of what God had revealed in the Old Testament, the lawyer said that to inherit eternal life we must love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind (Deut 6:5) and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Lev 19:18). On these two commandments, or better, this two-fold commandment, Jesus himself said elsewhere, “hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt 22:40). This two-fold commandment is a summary, in other words, of the entire Old Testament, which is all about God’s love for us and about how he calls us to love each other. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Jesus said, “Do this and you will live.” The whole Old Testament was God’s revelation to help his people enter into life and be prepared through love to embrace “life to the full” (Jn 10:10) when it finally was revealed in the person, words and deeds of Jesus.
• But as conceptually simple as Jesus’ answer is, there are obviously practical considerations. The scholar of the law, however, didn’t ask Jesus for help putting the love of God with one-hundred percent of our mind, heart, soul and strength, as well as one-hundred percent of our time, talents, and wallets, into practice. Instead, he asked him to make concrete how he was to love his neighbor, by querying, “Who is my neighbor?” We’ve heard Jesus’ answer so many times that to us the answer might seem obvious, but it wasn’t at the time of the lawyer. In fact the question of who is one’s neighbor was one of the most discussed and controversial debates among Israelites. A typical Jew was raised with an attitude to which Jesus referred in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’” (Mt 5:43). Therefore, if one were to love one’s neighbor and detest one’s enemy, it was crucial to determine who was one’s neighbor and who was one’s adversary. Almost all Jews admitted that one’s neighbor extended beyond one’s family or those who lived physically proximate. Most interpreters considered that one’s neighbor included all fellow Israelites and those gentiles who adhered to the Mosaic law. But no one was quite prepared for Jesus’ answer, which he gave in the form of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He basically said that everyone is in our neighborhood — even those considered enemies, as Jews and Samaritans deemed each other.
• In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus stressed that God’s love had no limits and that likewise there be no limitto our love for neighbor. The first point about God’s love is often missed, but the Fathers of the Church (the saintly bishops of the early Church) saw this as the necessary “background” for the proper understanding of the parable. They saw man as that person who had started to go down from the place of God’s dwelling, represented by Jerusalem, to Jericho, literally the lowest place on earth (1000 meters below sea level). His descent was sin. While walking in paradise, man was ambushed by the evil one, who left him at the brink of death because of sin. The priest and the Levite were, respectively, those who even though they knew the law and the prophets, chose to pass the nearly-dead sinner by, so that they would not be contaminated by his sins. Eventually Christ, the Good Samaritan, came. When he beheld this man half dead, he had compassion on him and for all his wounds caused by sin. So, as we read in the parable, “he approached.” Christ approached all the way from heaven, getting so close as to take on our nature, becoming “God-with-us” (Mt 1:23). He poured the oil and wine of his redemptive blood on man’s wounds to heal them. He brought him to the inn, which represents the Church, and gave the inn-keepers (all of us in the Church) the instruction to care for the human person until he returned and to help nurse him back from sins to the full health of holiness. The extremely generous two denarii and the promise for more upon his return were the treasure of Christ’s merits, especially the sacraments, which continue the healing process within man. Finally, the reference to his return was an allusion to the second coming, when Jesus will come to repay each of us according to our deeds (Rom 2:6).
• The parable of the Good Samaritan, therefore, is first a commentary on God’s love for us and, secondly, a clear illustration of Christ’s statement during the Last Supper, “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). Our love for each other is based not merely on our love for ourselves — “love your neighbor as yourself” — but on God’s love for us. Never in the Gospel did Jesus say, merely, “Do what I say.” He stated time and again, “Come, follow me!” He would set us an example and then tell us to imitate him. That is why Jesus was able to say at the end of the parable, “Go and do the same;” we were to follow his example of love. He was calling us to go out to seek those who have been ambushed by the evil one and left at the point of death in sin, and patiently take them to the Church to nurse them back to health. He was also explicitly calling us to cross the road and approach all those who have been mugged, bruised, beaten, victimized, and abandoned by others in this world and use our donkeys or cars or shoulders to bring them to safety, use our money to nurse them back to health. In other words, Jesus was giving us marching orders to love others — even those who seem to be our enemies, even those we find most despicable — to the point of sacrificing our lives, our goods, our time for them.
• To be a Good Samaritan means to behave like Christ and draw close to those who are in need, close enough to become their neighbor. To live in Christ’s kingdom is to see the whole world as our neighborhood and everyone in need as our neighbor. To be a Christian means to inconvenience ourselves for others, to draw near, to sacrifice. Now after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, all Catholics are called to become Good Samaritans with regard to whom who are in vulnerable pregnancies, having been abandoned rather than supported by their husbands, boyfriends, parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, as well as toward the helpless boys or girls growing within them. Throughout the culture of death, which is at the root of violence in our culture, others are viewed as dangers rather than people in danger, as threats rather than those who need to be treated with love. Christ wants that to change. He’s calling us Christians to be on the forefront in helping to bring about that change.
• And how urgent it is for us to start leading the world in this type of neighborly care, lest our neighborhoods ultimately become crime scenes and the whole world a ditch. Pope Francis has been saying that one of the biggest problems facing the world is a globalized indifference. We’ve become so anaesthetized to other people’s pain, which we see every day on the news — murders during parades and in schools, war in Ukraine, religious oppression in China and Hong Kong, Church massacres in Nigeria — that we don’t stop any longer even to weep, not to mention to help. In response to that indifference, that hardness of heart that makes us insensitive to the plight of our neighbors and even our family members, Jesus, the Pope says, is calling each of us anew to be a Good Samaritan, and make ourselves neighbor to those who need our care. Christ says that our salvation depends on it. “Do this and you will live,” he tells the lawyer in this Sunday’s Gospel, which clearly implies that if we don’t do it, we won’t inherit eternal life.
• Therefore, out of love for us, Jesus the Good Samaritan gives us his help at Mass, where we enter into his supreme act of love. Like the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, Jesus was ambushed in the garden of Gethsemane, then stripped, beaten and left for dead on a Cross. As he was dying, most of his disciples ran off in the other direction. Only a few faithful followers — the Blessed Mother, St. John, St. Mary Magdalene — drew close to him and proved neighbor to him. As we approach the altar this Sunday to receive Jesus’ body and blood, we ask him for the gift that, adoring him under the humble appearances of bread and wine, we might recognize him in all those in need and have the courage to love him in that disguise. Jesus tells us this Sunday, to do this in memory of him, to go and do the same. May the Good Samaritan help us from within to become his hands, feet, and compassionate heart, in the midst of an indifferent world that desperately needs us and the whole Mystical Body to become brothers and neighbors — other Christs — to those in need.

The readings on which the homily was based were: 

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