This has been an incredibly hot summer already, so unfortunately, we have already heard several versions of this same sad story happening in different parts of the country. There was a lady coming out of a Walmart in San Antonio, Texas one hot summer afternoon. She passed by a car and saw a small boy in a car seat, all alone in the locked car with the windows up. No parent or adult in sight. The boy looked hot and sweaty. He was having trouble breathing. The lady saw a security guard, alerting him about the situation, saying that they needed to break into the car to save the boy. The security guard did not want to get involved, saying that the police could arrest them for breaking into the car without permission. That didn’t matter to the lady. She got a tire iron from her trunk, broke the car’s windshield, climbed through it, and brought the boy to safety. He was very dehydrated and very hot, but fortunately he was OK. Video surveillance footage showed that the boy had been in the locked car for 40 minutes. When his father came out, he said that he had forgotten the boy was in the car. The police said that the lady would not be charged of any crime because of the Texas Good Samaritan law, which provides legal protection for those who assist a person who is injured or in danger from any unintended consequences that result from the help provided.
Today’s Gospel story is a part of our modern American consciousness, as we call someone who helps another in need a Good Samaritan. We can be a Good Samaritan in different ways. Being a Good Samaritan may entail helping someone pay a utility bill, driving someone to a doctor visit, or sending a note of encouragement when someone who is struggling in life. It may entail helping someone who might dislike us or praying for someone who has a lot of resentment toward us. Being a Good Samaritan can lead us to difficult, challenging, and uncomfortable situations.
We hear the phrase “Good Samaritan” in today’s Gospel, but who exactly were the Samaritans in Ancient Israel? The Samaritans were half-Jewish and half-Gentile. There was a great animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’ day. When the Assyrians took the Northern Kingdom captive in the 8th century BC, they intermarried with the Jews living there, settling in Samaria, north of Judea. Samaritans abandoned the Jewish faith, worshipping foreign idols instead. The Samaritans desecrated the Temple that the Jews were trying to rebuild in the 6th century BC; this act increased the animosity between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews tried to avoid entering Samaria at all cost, even when they had to go out of their way in their travels. The Samaritan in Jesus’ parable would have been seen as the least likely person to help out a Jew, since the hatred between them was mutual; hatred would not be too strong a word to use to describe this relationship.
The law of God that the legal scholar quotes in the Gospel states that we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves. But even after hearing the parable of the Good Samaritan, we might still ask, “Who is our neighbor?” Loving our neighbor does not mean just loving our next door neighbor, loving only someone who is just like us, loving a person who is easy for us to love. Our neighbor may be the stranger who needs our help or the person who needs our encouragement or the person in our community who has opinions or a lifestyle that is completely opposite of ours.
Last weekend, in my homily about what I would take on my missionary travels in Ecuador, I mentioned that I also worked for two years as a missionary in Canada in a soup kitchen and food bank in the inner city of Winnipeg. When I first went to Siloam mission soup kitchen in the dark days of the Canadian winter, when it could be 20 or 30 degrees below zero, I met the little tiny woman who ran the soup kitchen. Her name was Mrs. Dolly White. She was a little lady, all hunched over from a hard life, not even five feet tall. She ran a soup kitchen that served the street people who lived in this harsh Canadian climate. She was what they call Metis in Canada, a French word meaning “mixed,” meaning that her ancestry was native American, French, and Scottish. She would be in the soup kitchen with her family members and sometimes street people themselves making soup and sandwiches and getting ready to feed hundreds of people each afternoon. They would start in the early morning hours when it was still dark outside. A woman of very humble means, she did not get any pay to do this and she used any food that was donated to her. She was loved and appreciated by the street people beyond anything I could describe, which included street people who sniffed glue or paint to get high, heroin addicts, and prostitutes. Yet, they all felt loved and felt they had a place to belong at the soup kitchen. I saw her as a little Mother Teresa serving the people with such love and devotion. I did not her to describe to me her theology or her faith. I could tell her love of God and love of neighbor from her actions and the way she lived her life. She was like a mom to me and I visited her and her family many times after completing my work up there as a missionary. She passed away this past November.
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