This Week in Focus

As peoples, Jews and Samaritans despised each other. Common ancestry or shared scriptures did not lessen, but rather deepened, the animosity. Following the end of the Babylonian captivity, two temples were built over the years (some five centuries before Jesus told today’s parable). One in Jerusalem and another in the Samaritan heartland at Mount Gerizim, these temples set in stone and mortar the great schism between these two peoples.

Five centuries after Jesus, Christians and Samaritans also fought. We don’t need to be reminded of the awful history of Jewish and Christian relations. In the face of this sad human saga, we have today’s parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus, when questioned on what is needed to inherit eternal life, asks “What is written in the law?” The lawyer answers succinctly. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

The universal nature of this moral law is plainly visible for all. These are not faraway words. The Samaritan and Jew of our gospel parable epitomize the literally innumerable religious, cultural, linguistic, or other divides that have split humanity apart since our collective story began. With the grace of God, may we strive to follow the law that Jesus and the lawyer so wisely praised.

Michael Dougherty