Homily for 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 14, 2019

Luke 10: 25-37
St. Theresa, Bronx

On Sundays when I don't have a new homily to post, I often pull up an old one that I delivered at St. Theresa's Church in the Bronx in the 1990s.  Today I was really there and offered the parishioners this new homily.

“Go and do likewise” (Luke 10: 37).

The reading from Deuteronomy, the gospel story, and the Collect (what we used to call the “opening prayer”) this morning all urge us to “heed the voice of the Lord” (Deut 30:14), to keep to “the right path,” to “strive” for behavior that honors “the name of Christ” (Collect), by loving God thru practical love of our neighbor, loving our neighbor as ourselves—concretely and not just theoretically.

Moses tells the Israelites that God’s command is neither mysterious nor remote (30:11); it’s near us, and we can recite it easily—we have only to do it (30:14).

The scholar of the law—also known as a scribe—who questions Jesus knew the right words.  In the words of the Collect, he “professes the faith.”  But Jesus places on him, and on us, a command to live rightly, to walk on the right path.  It’s not necessarily an easy road.  Sometimes loving our neighbor is hard.  Answering the scribe, Jesus makes that point thru one of his best known parables.

From the church of

St. Eutrope, Clermont,

France

We have numerous gospel references to the hostility that governed relations between Jews and Samaritans.  One commentary tells us that the Jews regarded the Samaritans as “half-breed heretics,” as “stupid, uncouth, and lazy.”[1]

Yet it’s this “heretic” who faithfully fulfills God’s command—at personal risk and personal expense.  Pausing to help the wounded man on the notoriously dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho leaves the Samaritan vulnerable to the robbers, too.  He has no idea whom he’s helping—a Jew, a Samaritan, an Arab, a Roman—for the man has been stripped and beaten unconscious.  He uses his own oil, wine, and bandages to tend the victim, and his own money to lodge him at an inn.

Jesus directs the scribe, and us, to “go and do likewise,” i.e., to care for our neighbors in need without regard to their identity or even our own convenience.  We’re usually very ready to do that.  Americans are probably the most generous people in the world, and certainly people of faith are the most generous, when some natural disaster or great human tragedy strikes.

Yet one of the terrible stories of our contemporary world is how unwelcome we—Americans, Europeans, Australians—have made migrants and refugees.  We seem to regard them as “heretics, stupid, uncouth, and lazy,” as well as dangerous.

It’s true that laws, including immigration laws, generally should be respected.  It’s also true that our immigration laws—our system—needs a major fix, one that responds to the real needs of real people, as the Samaritan does in Jesus’ parable; a fix that makes laws deserving our respect because they’re directed toward the common good and aren’t directed by prejudice, fear, or our personal self-interest.

Closing our borders to refugees from war, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East is a disgrace and is the direct opposite of Jesus’ command to “go and do likewise.”  Our attempts to seal off our southern border, certainly some of the specific practices there, likewise are disgraceful and contrary to Christ’s teaching.  Our politicians’ refusal to compromise on adjusting our immigration laws to today’s realities, instead of those of the 1980s, is unconscionable.

You and I can’t change the laws, of course.  We can call upon our elected officials—whom we call public servants—to change the laws, to find a balance between legitimate national security and good order, and the needs of migrants and refugees.  We can do our part to treat everyone as our neighbor—with respect and concern, regardless of color, ethnicity, gender, age, or other characteristics.  So Jesus tells us.

[For further reading: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2019/07/saint-john-paul-the-illegal-migrant-comes-before-us-like-that-stranger-in-whom-jesus-asks-to-be-recognized/]

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[1] John P. Kealy, CSSp, Luke’s Gospel Today (Denville, N.J.: Dimension, 1979), p. 279.