Monday of the
Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
(Galatians 1:6-12; Luke 10:25-37)
Along with the parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable
of the Good Samaritan has always been one of the most favored readings of the
four gospels. Normally it is interpreted
today as a lesson on loving one’s enemies.
Jews and Samaritans were distrustful of one another as Blacks and
Whites, Hindus and Muslims, Russians and Ukrainians are today. The Samaritan’s more than generous care of
the wounded Jew shows us that to gain eternal life – the issue motivating the
story – one must love her supposed enemies.
In Patristic times this same parable was given a very
different reading. Church Fathers did
not see it as a story to be contemporized but as an allegory of Salvation
History. The man going down the road was
Adam, the symbol of all humans.
Jerusalem, as the name implies, is the heavenly city of peace. Jericho,
which evidently means moon, indicates human mortality. The thieves are the devils who entice the man
to sin and then leave him far from God or “half-dead.” The priest and Levite, according to this
reading, represent the Old Covenant which is unable to save the sinner. The Samaritan is Jesus himself who ministers
to the wounded by binding him, that is symbolically restraining him from
sin. The animal represents Christ’s own
flesh which carries the wounded man to the inn, a symbol of the Church where
people find comfort from the crazed and often dangerous world.
However one reads it, the parable of the Good Samaritan
demonstrates Jesus’ mastery of both as story-telling and prophecy. The passage begins by saying the scholar wants
to test Jesus. That’s like testing Yo-Yo
Ma on the cello. Jesus is the
master. He tests the scholar and the
rest of us. But his testing is not meant
to put us down. Just the opposite, he
means to lift us up to the possibility of achieving true happiness.
