FORTY THIRD ANNUAL
FAST FOR THE TRUTH OF
GOSPEL NONVIOLENCE
(July1–August 9)
FAST FOOD AD2025: Thirteenth Helping
We all know Jesus’ famous parable of the Good Samaritan. I, probably like you, have heard many sermons on it and read numerous commentaries. Most of these reflections were quite acceptable and focused on loving one’s neighbor as need requires, even if the person is an enemy—as Jews and Samaritans were. So as is often said from the pulpit and written about in essays, in this parable Jesus extends the Old Testament notion of the neighbor that God desires to be loved from exclusively Jews to include the enemy. This, of course, is absolutely in accord with Jesus’ explicit teaching by word during His Sermon on the Mount, “Love your enemy” and His teaching by deed during His Sermon from the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is then a marvelous story creatively constructed by Jesus, the Messiah, to illuminate an utterly unique and central piece of His teaching regarding God’s holy will.
What I have not heard very often from the pulpit or seen in written interpretations about the Good Samaritan parable is that it was spoken by Jesus in answer to a very precise question that He was asked.
Luke 10:35-37 reads as follows:
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers, etc.”
How many times have you rightly heard from the pulpit or read in a book of meditations that the parable of the Good Samaritan means loving a neighbor who is in need of help by giving him or her that help, even if the neighbor is the enemy who needs help. Perhaps you may even have heard or read that what Jesus taught in the Good Samaritan parable is exactly what Jesus did when He healed the severed ear of the armed servant of the High Priest, who had come to Gethsemane to take Him to His death. But, have you ever heard in a homily or seen in a reading that the Good Samaritan story with its enemy-love is in fact Jesus’ concrete response to the specific question, which is also a universal question in the human community, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!
Hosanna in the highest!
Blessed is He, Who comes in the Name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!”
