10/8/2012 – Monday of 27th week in ordinary time – The Good Samaritan – Luke 10:25-37

        On a very practical & common sense level, the story of the Good Samaritan probably makes a lot of sense to us as it affirms the everyday reality of the world as we know it.  All around us, we see those who reach out to help others like the Good Samaritan & we see those like the Levite & the priest who confine themselves to their little spot of the world, not seeing part of their calling in reaching out to help. 

         The portrayal of Levites, priests, & Samaritans in this story would have had the greatest impact on its original Judean listeners. The Judeans looked down at Samaritans as an inferior race. The Samaritans were presumably descended from the Israelites who had remained behind when the Assyrians deported the leading families of the region following their conquest in 722 B.C.E. The Israelites remaining behind intermarried with foreign settlers brought in by the Assyrians in the years that followed, although the Samaritans, the new ethnic group, continued to regard the Torah as their law.

         The Judeans regarded the Samaritans as Gentiles, as outside the scope of God's chosen people, in spite of the fact that the Samaritans claimed Moses as their teacher and ancestor. In fact, the Samaritans believed that they were descended from the Jewish patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Galilean pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem for festivals often went through the region of Samaria, which separated Galilee in the north from Judea in the south.

The Judeans, the original listeners to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, would have expected the 3rd person along that road to be a Judean. The hero of the story would naturally have to be one of them. How shocked they must have been when that figure turned out to be a Samaritan. At the mention of the Samaritan as the hero of the tale, Judean listeners would have bristled.

         As 21^st century Catholics living in Mississippi, how is the story of the Good Samaritan speaking to us today?  Are there certain people we expect to be the heroes of our stories, & others we expect to be villains?  May God open our hearts, our minds, & our souls to see all as our brothers & sisters in God’s kingdom.  May we reach out to others in the context of the Catholic faith which we profess.