FIFTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME C

[cappie]

We have all been asked by God through circumstance to expand our vision of what it means to be neighbourly. Like the people who would have heard today’s gospel story in Luke’s community, we have boundaries and rules that we live by. In the Jewish culture of that time, there were rules about how men should treat women, parents should treat children, Jews should treat foreigners, Jews should treat gentiles and Samaritans, and so forth. For the Jews Inheritance meant tangible goods back then – land, wealth, herds. It was the promised reward to Abraham and his descendants who belonged to God’s covenant. The Israelites were a covenanted people, and over time, the message of inheritance also included a future age to come.

These systems set up a social order where certain positions of power and privilege were well maintained. Their society was not so different than ours is now over 2,000 years later. We have those systems in place, and they are difficult to escape or transcend.

Yet, this is precisely what Jesus was calling the people of his time to do, and it translates to ours.

But Jesus has a different message. Eternal life was congruent to living a life in God’s kingdom, with its boundaries and not societal ones. Jesus turns the lawyer’s challenge around to show that God’s sovereignty is over one’s whole life. Reading and knowing the law is not enough. Loving God, your neighbour and yourself characterizes someone who is already living life in the kingdom. The promise of inheritance is now attached to a demand: “Go and do the same yourself.”

The lawyer told Jesus that the one who showed mercy was the injured man’s neighbour. How do we go about showing that kind of mercy in our own lives? The kind of mercy that does not expect any kind of reward, which has no boundaries. The kind of mercy that often has a steep price:  we must ask ourselves if we are willing to pay the price of mercy or just walk on by.

Being a true neighbour means that we are living actively and not passively in the kingdom of God.

We are asked to proclaim by word and example the good News of God in Christ, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself. To justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.

We cannot do this alone, and it is clear our work is never done. We continue to ask Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?” and Jesus continues to answer with results that should not surprise us, knowing how Jesus works, but they always do: the marginalized one, the different-coloured one, the one with a different culture, the old one, the young one, the one missing all her teeth, the one with the flashy car, the one who is us.

What is surprising is how difficult it is to show mercy to those who do not fit in our boundaries, despite what we know Jesus is asking of us.

Living a merciful life is not defined as helping someone once. Instead, it is a life in which a person’s character is formed by the basic premise that they love God, love their neighbour, and love themselves. To put it another way, Mahatma Gandhi was once quoted as saying:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”

 We are to love like the singer of this week’s Psalm—like those whose prayers have been answered, like those whose lives have been saved, who have known the time of His favour, have seen God in His great mercy turn toward us.

This is the love that leads to eternal life, the love Jesus commands today in the Gospel of the lawyer and of each of us: “‘Go, and do the same yourself.’.”