Friends
Peace be with you.
This past week, our Muslim brothers and sisters started their great pilgrimage festival called the hajj. It is a pilgrimage all muslims are expected to make at least once in their lives to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the place Muslims believe Abraham encountered the one true God. A pilgrimage is a common experience among world religions. For Buddhists, there are four sites in Nepal and India that are considered sacred pilgrimage sites. Even in Christianity, it’s kind of common to make pilgrimages. A group of parishioners left to go to Germany, Austria and, of course, Luxembourg on pilgrimage this past week. Christian Pilgrimages are so common, in fact that we have built one into our architecture. In almost all Catholic Churches, you can see the stations of the cross which was created as a kind of local pilgrimage when it became too dangerous for people to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to the actual walkway that Jesus took from being condemned to being placed in the tomb.
For Jews, the great pilgrimage they would have made from the time of King Solomon to the year 70 A.D. was to the Temple. It was the place of encounter with God and receiving forgiveness through the offering of sacrifice. It was a place of prayer and healing and debate. No other place in the world is as important to the Jewish people as the Temple.
That’s what makes our first reading, from the Book of Deuteronomy, so surprising. Now, at this point in history there is no Temple. This book is written when the chosen people were on their 40 year pilgrimage through the desert from Egypt to their promised land. Moses is conveying to the chosen people the message that God has for them; which is that they need to remain faithful to the law. Yet, what is surprising is how they are meant to learn the law. Actually, it’s even a bit of a misnomer to call it “the law”, as we can kind of tell from this passage. When we think of the phrase “the law”, we probably think about law enforcement pulling us over for speeding or driving on the wrong side of the road. That’s not really the point of the law in the Bible, especially as it is conveyed in the first five books of the Bible. The law is God’s way of being in a relationship with his people. It’s his way of passing on to them the ways he expects them to live if they intend to live in his land. It’s a way of life as much as anything and, it’s not something, as it said in the first reading, that is extrinsic to us, not something that is imposed on us. It is very much intrinsic, very much something inside of us. But how do we get in touch with it? If it is, indeed, something very near to us, already in our mouths and in our hearts, we have only to carry it out”, how do we do that?
Let’s look to the gospel. Jesus talks about a scholar of the law who approaches him and asks for a summary of the law. Jesus, being a good rabbi, gives what we tend to refer to as the Great Commandment, which comes from two passages, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus, wherein we are called to love God and neighbor. However, kind of like the rich young man, this scholar asks a follow up question of who is our neighbor. It’s a good question, when you think about it. If, as I’ve heard some preachers contend, our neighbor is someone of our same religion or someone to whom we are related, it shapes the Great Commandment one way.
However, Jesus doesn’t answer that way. He answers with a story, the story we’ve come to know as the Good Samaritan. A man gets beaten up and left for dead along what is, at the time, a very dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho. A priest and a Levite see the man but pass by out of fear of ritual condemnation. In both cases, had they helped, they wouldn’t have been able to carry out their sacred duties because of the rules associated with their professions. However, a dreaded Samaritan stops and saves the man, even going so far as to pay for his recovery. Now, remember that Samaritans are like the Jehovah’s Witness neighbors to the Jews. They were a group created by the Babylonians in an attempt to water down Judaism to make it more amenable to other religions. They believe in one God but have their own Bible, their own temple, their own rules, though many of them are at least similar to Judaism because they’re sort of based on it. But, Jews do not trust them. So, the idea that a Samaritan was the one to take care of an injured Jew would be impossible for them to face. I love how this story ends. Jesus asks the scholar of the law who is the neighbor. Now, you’d think he’d say all three because the Levite and the Priest were just doing their best to live according to the law. But, instead the scholar says, “the one who treated him with mercy”. And the response that Jesus gives, therefore, is “Go and do likewise.” He calls this scholar of the law and ourselves to go and do likewise, to live a life of mercy.
This is, in many ways, quite a challenge Jesus is offering us: to live a life of mercy. But, I think it is related to the first reading because in living the life of mercy we can see the face of God. Mother Teresa used to talk about how she could see the face of Christ in the face of the poor and lepers. St. Damien of Molokai said the same thing when he was ministering in Hawaii. The late Cardinal John O’Connor, much maligned because of his strong pro-life views, used to go into AIDS wards late at night and empty the chamber pots of the men there because he felt he was serving Christ in doing so. This is what the Lord means when he says we don’t have to go on a pilgrimage, we don’t have to look for something mysterious in the sky or sail across the sea in some Indian Jones type of search for the truth that will reveal the hidden mysteries of God. It is in our mouths and in our hearts. It is revealed in mercy, in forgiveness, in helping those who are in need, in reconciling. For too many people, being religious means perfectly following a set of rules. But, the truth is that being a Christian means being merciful, forgiving even when we don’t have to. Pope Francis, the pope of mercy, has this beautiful quote from 2013, “I think we too are the people who, on the one hand, want to listen to Jesus, but on the other hand, at times, like to find a stick to beat others with, to condemn others. And Jesus has this message for us: mercy. I think - and I say it with humility - that this is the Lord's most powerful message: mercy.”
Who is the beat up person in our life who we have left by the side of the road. We may even think they deserve to be beaten up. They may have wronged us in some way or may have said something that hurt us in such a way that we basically wrote them out of our life. If mercy means being the Good Samaritan, allowing the mercy that God put into our hearts and minds to affect us toward them, what does that mean? How can we be people of reconciliation, of healing, and of mercy?
