Tag: Good Samaritan

Neighbor

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Charity, Community, Faith, friendship, Gospel, inclusivity, Jesus, spirituality2 Comments

Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
October 9, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/100923.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, get ready for a three-day cruise with Jonah and a radical journey down the Jericho road with the Good Samaritan.

The message of Jonah is clear: all people, even hated Ninevites, are children of God’s Mercy. Resisting that understanding can be catastrophic to our spiritual life.

Patricia Tull, Rhodes Professor Emerita of Old Testament at Louisville Seminary, summarizes the Book of Jonah like this:

A postexilic book, Jonah’s story is atypical for prophetic works. Not only is it a narrative about the prophet rather than his speeches, but it also rebuffs Jonah for his refusal to preach to foreign enemies. Jonah’s story portrays foreigners as more than ready to repent and turn to God. The book uses humor, hyperbole, and irony to make its parabolic point.

Our Gospel gives us one of the most beloved yet challenging parables of Jesus – who is our “neighbor”. The infinite dimensions within this parable continue to unfold for us as we deepen in our mercy spirituality.

God does not see anyone as a “foreigner”. Every human being lives with the breath of God. We are “neighbors” because we share that breath, that “neighborhood” of God’s boundless Love.

But, oh my God, how we have forgotten or rejected that common bond of reverence for one another! Just yesterday, one of our sisters brought up the subject of a recent hit-and-run accident in Philadelphia. It now seems to be the common practice to leave the scene of such an occurrence, abandoning the victim to his fatal circumstance. She wondered, incredulously, how anyone could be that callous.

Our Gospel parable describes that callousness. Notice that both the priest and the Levite pass the victim by “on the opposite side“. The phrase implies that if I can build a wall to make you invisible to me, I can more easily ignore your claim on my merciful neighborliness.

The Samaritan lived without those walls. He did not see a Jew, or a foreigner, or an expendable “other”. He saw a human being, like himself – a neighbor who was struggling to live.

The Good Samaritan (1880) by Aimé Morot

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is a clear example of the call of the Gospel to neighborliness. In the story, such a call is an inconvenient truth because it summons outside the comfortable community to find the neighbor among the not-well-regarded “others.” 

Walter Brueggemann, Health Progress, January – February 2010

We don’t want to be like resistant Jonah, nor like the prejudicially blinded priest and Levite of our parable. But it is hard. The world conspires to separate us into the haves and the have-nots, the deserving and the undeserving, the winners and the losers, the sinners and the saints. Mercy not only resists but dismantles such walls. Do we have the courage to examine our own prejudices and to step across from “the opposite side” for the sake of our neighbor?

Poem: Neighbor – Iain Crichton Smith

Build me a bridge over the stream
to my neighbour’s house
where he is standing in dungarees
in the fresh morning.
O ring of snowdrops
spread wherever you want
and you also blackbird
sing across the fences.
My neighbor, if the rain falls on you,
let it fall on me also
from the same black cloud
that does not recognize gates.

Music: JJ Heller – Neighbor

Sometimes it's easier to jump to conclusions
Than walk across the street
It's like I'd rather fill the blanks with illusions
Than take the time to see
You are tryna close the back door of your car
You are balancing the groceries and a baby in your arms
You are more than just a sign in your front yard
You are my neighbor
I can get so lost in the mission
Of defending what I think
I've been surfing on a sea of opinions
But just behind the screen
You are grateful that the work day's finally done
You are stuck in miles of traffic, looking at your phone
You are tryin' to feel a little less alone
You are my neighbor
When the chasm between us feels so wide
That it's hard to imagine the other side
But we don't have to see things eye to eye
For me to love you like you are my neighbor
My neighbor
Oh, to fear the unfamiliar
Is the easy way to go
But I believe we are connected more than we might ever know
There's a light that shines on both the rich and poor
Looks beyond where we came from and who we voted for
'Til I can't see a stranger anymore
I see my neighbor
May my heart be an open door to my neighbor
You are my neighbor

Alleluia: Be Mercy

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, Mercy, spiritualityLeave a comment

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 10, 2022

Today’s Readings

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071022.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings take us on a centuries-long journey from Sinai nearly to the foot of Calvary. 

Our guideline for the pilgrimage is the Word:

  • given first to Moses
  • cherished in Psalms
  • and finally revealed in the full glory of the Incarnated Christ.

Throughout the ages, each of us receives the same direction to holiness as that given by Moses thousands of years ago:

If only you would
heed the voice of the LORD, your God…

The young man in today’s Gospel requests such direction straight from the mouth of Jesus. And he receives it in the form of an iconic story which holds in simplicity all the ponderous theology of the ages:

Which of these three, in your opinion,
was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?”
He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.”
Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

With this story, Jesus translates into action that age-old Biblical Word:

  • Hear Mercy
  • Love Mercy
  • Do Mercy
  • Become Mercy

Poetry: Ramadan –  Erik K. Taylor

It was the month of Ramadan, 
the month when Muslims fast. 
From the day’s first light, 
when they could tell a white thread from a black one, 
until evening hid the difference again, 
they did not eat, did not drink, and 
– here in rural Liberia – 
did not even swallow their own spit.

We were three thousand miles from home 
when the telegram came. 
My mother’s father had died. 

From Gbapa, three miles away, 
five dark-skinned Mandingo men 
came walking to our house. 
Students from her English class, 
a class in a building with mud-brick walls 
and a tin roof that pinged in the rain. 
She drove to them several nights each week, 
teaching them to write “hut” and “mat” and “cat,” 
drawing little pictures beside the words. 

But this day, they came to her, 
walking over dusty, rust-colored roads, 
under the African sun. 
They came to sit with her, 
to offer what comfort they could.

We could not offer them water or coke or tea. 
For a few hours they sat, talking in soft voices, 
stepping out occasionally to spit. 
Then home again… 
waiting for black and white to merge back into one.

Someone once asked Jesus 
what it meant to love our neighbor. 
He said it was to be those men.

Music: Kyrie ( Lord, have Mercy) – Robert Gass

We Belong to One Another

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Discipleship, inclusivity, Mercy, spirituality1 Comment

Monday, October 8, 2018

Readings: http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/100818.cfm

Today, in Mercy, our Gospel gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is a story in which we can all find ourselves, maybe changing roles in the changing circumstances of our lives.

IMG_6600

Have we ever been the robbers, the bullies, the outlaws who in some way used force or subterfuge to gain their own advantage? We don’t have to be a criminal to do this. We can do it by our prejudices, our preferential treatment, our secrets and our cliques. We can do it by our uninformed or willful choices which deprive others of their needs and rights.

Have we ever been the Levite, the one who claims a special religious place by family heritage? Have we ever, like the Levite in the parable, bypassed someone because of her religion or ethnic origins – because she isn’t “like us”?

Have we ever been this pathetic priest who so completely misunderstands the role of minister – who ignores God’s suffering creature for fear of some imagined contamination?

Have we ever been the victim, the one set upon by the meanness of others, the one unable to heal himself from injury? Has the memory made us more like the Samaritan or like the robbers once we were healed?

And finally, have we ever been the Samaritan? Do we even want to be? Or do we think him foolish to have given his own time and treasure for a stranger?

This parable is a study in differences and how we respond to them. Some use differences to separate rather than enrich their world. They fail to understand that we all belong to each other and will live forever as one family in heaven. If we don’t learn to do it in this life, we won’t be part of it in the life to come.

Realizing this may change how we might have responded on that ancient road – or the road right now where we’re all just walking each other home.

Music: Take All the Lost Home ~ Joe Wise