Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
But listen to Leviticus 21:1-3: “The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the priests, Aaron’s sons, and tell them: None of you shall make himself unclean for any dead person among his kindred, except for his nearest relatives, his mother or father, his son or daughter, his brother or his unmarried sister.” It continues in verses 10-11: “The most exalted of the priests, upon whose head the anointing oil has been poured and who has been ordained to wear the special vestments…shall [not] go near any dead person. Not even for his father or mother may he thus become unclean.” All of the sudden, with this in mind, the priest and the levite don’t sound quite as bad, or, at least, there’s a question as to what they were supposed to do.
Of course, our Lord’s point is quite obvious: we are still supposed to help those in need. Love of neighbor, which is part of inheriting eternal life, means caring for others. The man was left for dead, and if the priests were truly living out the law, then they should have helped the man who had been robbed.
We learn, then that there is a kind of hierarchy of laws. The levitical laws were important. God gave them so that the priests could offer worthy sacrifice, and obtain mercy and blessings for God’s Chosen People. But there was a more basic law, also found in Leviticus, two chapters earlier: “The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. […] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love of neighbor is part of the way that the Israelites were to be holy, like God. And it was a law for all Israelites, not just the priests or levites.
It reminds me of the scene from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Aslan, who has risen from the dead after he sacrificed himself on the Stone Table, says:
…though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.
Yes, the priests and levites were supposed to stay ritually clean, but they had a previous commitment to love as God loves, and to care for the most vulnerable. And they didn’t even check to see if the man was dead. They simply walked on by.
Ironically, it was the priests and levites who could not distinguish, though they were well-educated, between the letter and the spirit. I know this dichotomy is often abused to mean that anything goes. And I’m certainly not advocating that position. But Christ came to help us understand what it truly meant to live as children of our heavenly Father. Elsewhere he condemns the fact that a person could free their beast of burden from being entrapped on the Sabbath, but He could not liberate a person from demonic possession or from illness on the Sabbath. Again, some had lost sight of the point of the law: to help the People live as God’s own possession, and to witness to His life and love by their own actions and words.
And Christ could make this point, because, as the Church Fathers say, the parable of the Good Samaritan is really an allegory for what God did for us. God displayed His holiness by seeing us beat up on our path. We were walking the wrong way, away from Jerusalem, the city of the Temple, to the city of Jericho, the city cursed by Joshua after they destroyed it. Satan and his horde had accosted us, taken away from us our rightful inheritance by tempting us to sin, and then left us for dead after we caved to sin. The law and the prophets were sent to us, but they could not fully help. But then our Savior, who was both one of us but also God, came to our rescue. He put us on His shoulders as He bore the weight of the cross, and made sure that we could be healed at His own expense, even promising to do whatever was necessary for healing even after He departed from earth.
Strictly speaking, God had no need of us. He didn’t need to save us. He would lack nothing if all of humanity were damned to Hell. But, because He loves us, He descended to hell so that we wouldn’t have to. He came to our rescue through no merit of our own. And so God desires that we do our best to live in imitation of Him. God desires that we participate in and share His holiness with others. And that is part of evangelizing. When we demonstrate the love of God in our actions and words, especially when others know that we are Catholic, they can be drawn, even if only little by little, to a relationship or a deeper relationship with God.
The parable of the Good Samaritan seems obvious. In some ways it is. But at the end, the point is that, in order to inherit eternal life, we must do our best to demonstrate the holiness of God. Sometimes, perhaps most often, the laws help us demonstrate God’s holiness. But any law that exists always draws its authority from how it helps us to be holy as God is holy. May we be helped each day to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to love with all of who we are God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
