Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr C 2025

Title

Love Your Neighbor as Jesus Loved You

Outline

Sometimes it seems that the way to life is obscure

If the point of life is seeking the Lord, as one Christian leader once told me, it can seem hard to seek the unseen.

But Jesus picks up on Deuteronomy and shows us that the way to life is nearer than we think

When asked about the way of life, Jesus made the questioner declare what Jesus the Word had already spoken in the Pentateuch: love God and love your neighbor. That was something that for a Jew one could say, “it is something very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” He had heard it from childhood. The word from the Word was close to him.

When he questions what this means, Jesus flips his categories. His example was not another Jew doing good to a Jew, but one Jews considered an enemy loving his enemy, an unknown Jew. The priest and the levite do not consider the unknown half-dead man a neighbor; and if he died on them they would be unclean and need purification. But the deemed enemy, the Samaritan, who also knew the Pentateuch, see the unfortunate man as his neighbor, not asking what the man might think of him. He takes risks, an inconvenience (in cleaning him up and putting him on his animal), and costs (his oil and wine, perhaps his lunch, the overnight stay in the inn (the only mention of an inn in Luke), and the blank check he gives the innkeeper. He lived the Torah, he loved as God loves, he sought the good of the other as other.

Paul brings the parable into post-resurrection life

It is not a Samaritan, but “true God from true God, begotten not made” who “created all things,” even those we cannot see, i.e. the ranks of heavenly beings. This one, who continues to love in that “in him all things hold together” so this universe would be gone without his love. This one who is now head to a body, which is the church (that often has trouble loving each other), was the one who came to us, sin-sick and beat up by evil in the world, and he reconciled us to the Father, making peace between us and the Father and among us, paying as the price, not a few denarii, but “the blood of the cross” (so we think of the blood of the peace offering or Passover, but now we drink it in the Eucharist so it is life in us). And all he expects from us is love, seeking oneness with him, and loving what he loves, which is everyone, those we think of as our neighbor and also our enemies, just as he sought the good of those crucifying him. “Father, forgive them . . .”

Now we see that the parable points to a greater way of life, a greater Torah, that of Jesus, now yet lived out when the parable was first spoken.

There is only one appropriate response: “Go and do likewise,” but if you follow him, unlike the Samaritan, you will not be alone, for he will be in you as you eat his flesh and drink his blood, and he will be with you, very near to you, nearer that you can imagine. so long as you give him your “Yes.”