Sunday, July 13 2025

15rd Sunday During the Year – Year C

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1st reading: Deuteronomy 30,10-14

Psalm: 68,14, 17,30-31,33-34,36ab.37 or 18b (19),8,9,10, 11

2rd reading: Colossians 1,15-20

Gospel: Luke 10,25:37-XNUMX

Click here to download and print the text in pdf

“Obey the voice of the Lord your God, keeping his commandments and his decrees that are written in this book of the law, and return to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” These words proclaimed by Moses, collected in the Book of Deuteronomy, express the whole vocation of the people of Israel, which is to listen, to keep the Word of God and to live it. But if this word is powerful, it does not yet allow us to change the heart of man, and it is not enough to want to do good to achieve this. Saint Paul will explain this at length in the Letter to the Romans. It is not enough to want to love in order to love rightly. And even today, we are capable of perverting the word love in many ways, to the point of claiming that it is through love that we bring death. What then is love?

A doctor of the Law comes to Jesus and asks him what he must do to have eternal life. This suggests that there is an action that will allow us to acquire eternal life for ourselves... As if we had to give something in exchange for what is in fact a free gift. Now, what must we do to receive a free gift? We must receive it freely. And so the question is not first “what must we do?”, but “how to receive?” And yet, this man responds correctly to Jesus by taking the two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God; you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”And the man, Saint Luke tells us, wanting to justify himself, asks the question: “Who is my neighbor?”.

We can see that if we give a positive definition to this question, we lose its meaning. If we answer: your neighbor is everyone… We are approaching 8 billion human beings on earth: it will be difficult and in a certain way, it no longer makes sense. If we say: your neighbor is those who… This means that “those who don’t,” I don’t need to love them. As soon as I give a positive definition of a group, all those who are outside this definition are excluded. And so Jesus will respond with a parable.

(For those who are tired of listening, I will ask Mario to project a performance of Aimé MOROT's The Good Samaritan in 1880. This way you can avoid listening to me and contemplate this reading of The Good Samaritan which is very surprising.)

So there is a man who fell into the hands of robbers. This man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho. This parable is entirely symbolic: Jerusalem is the city where God makes his dwelling place. Jericho is below sea level; we are on the road that goes to the Dead Sea. The road that goes from Jerusalem to Jericho is symbolically a road that leads from life to death.

This man has fallen into the hands of the robbers, he is left half dead. A priest and a Levite pass by. We can argue for a long time about what the Gospel says precisely, the Greek verb used which is translated both in Latin and in French, “he passed to the other side”, can also mean — in any case, we find a mention of it in the Book of Wisdom in this sense (16,10) — “to bring help”. Whether it is to avoid the man because he is half mort : if he is dead, by going to touch him, the priest and the Levite will contract a ritual impurity and to be able to perform their service at the temple, they will have to make numerous ablutions to regain a state of ritual purity which will allow them to officiate; this may be a reason for their detour. If we translate: he seeks to help him, we can also understand that the priest and the Levite, with the institutions of the first Covenant - the sacrifices of the temple and the Law of God - are powerless to restore life to this dead person.

Something different, something new, is going to happen with the Samaritan. It seems that the word Samaritan comes from the Hebrew root, shamar, which means guardian, the Shomer Israel, he is the Guardian of Israel and no doubt this figure of the Samaritan can evoke the Lord as Guardian of Israel. The Samaritans are a Jewish dissidence; they are the Jews of the ancient Northern Kingdom, who are regarded as heretics by the Jews of Judea, but they are still members of the people of the first Covenant. He can approach and he can heal this man. He pours oil and wine on the wounds, he loads him onto his mount and he takes him to the inn. He entrusts him to the innkeeper, he leaves leaving the innkeeper 2 coins for expenses and if there are more expenses, he will reimburse upon his return.

Here we have a kind of evocation of the figure of Christ, who comes to join every man wounded to death by sin, who comes to entrust every man to the Church and who in his Ascension now sits at the right hand of the Father… We await his coming in glory; and until then, we spend our lives in the service of the Lord and our brothers. Who is my neighbor? That was the question. What is Jesus' answer? We must agree to be logical in our reading of the parable. The question Jesus asks at the end of the parable is: “Which of the three, the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan, became neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The answer approved by Jesus: "He who showed mercy to him", so the Samaritan. Who is the neighbor of whom? The Samaritan became the neighbor of the man who fell into the hands of the robbers. The figure of the neighbor in the parable is not the man who fell into the hands of the robbers, it is the Samaritan. What becomes of the commandment "You will love your neighbor as yourself", if I replace tu et the next by the characters in the parable? It becomes: the man who fell into the hands of the bandits love the good samaritan like himself. This is Jesus' answer. And he completes by saying: “Go and do likewise.”

That is to say: make yourself the neighbor of the man who fell into the hands of the robbers. But if the Good Samaritan is the figure of Jesus and the man who fell into the hands of the robbers is the figure of each one of us... "You will love your neighbor as yourself" becomes: “You will love Jesus your Savior as yourself. And go, you too do likewise, do as Jesus did.”

In a way, Jesus does not answer the question completely, but rather reverses the perspective: Love the one who saves you and do as he does. That is, enter into the dynamic of mercy, enter into the dynamic of charity concretely lived.

Therese in manuscript C, when she tries to meditate on charity, says this:

When the Lord commanded his people to love their neighbor [12v°] as themselves, He had not yet come to earth; therefore, knowing well to what degree one loves one's own person, He could not ask of his creatures a greater love for their neighbor. But when Jesus gave his apostles a new commandment, HIS COMMANDMENT, as He says later, it is not to love one's neighbor as oneself that He speaks of, but to love him as He, Jesus, loved him, as He will love him until the end of time...

Ah! Lord, I know that you command nothing impossible, you know better than I my weakness, my imperfection, you know well that I could never love my sisters as you love them, if you yourself, O my Jesus, did not still love them in me. It is because you wanted to grant me this grace that you made a new commandment. – Oh! how I love it since it gives me the assurance that your will is to love in me all those whom you command me to love!… (Ms C 12) Yes, we are no longer only before a commandment that leaves us to our own strength. The Lord Jesus came to save us, to transform our heart of stone into a heart of flesh by the gift of the Holy Spirit, and thus to make us capable of loving as he loves us. Always remember this verse from Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans chapter 5 verse 5: “ the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. » We can therefore love as Jesus loved us! We can therefore fulfill this double commandment: we can therefore make ourselves the neighbor of every suffering person who crosses our path.

This painting by Aimé MOROT that I have put before your eyes is very disturbing, because without doubt this painter was inspired by the Pieta by Michelangelo. When we see the man who fell into the hands of the robbers, abandoned in the arms of the Good Samaritan, we think of Christ at the Descent from the Cross. Now in the parable, the Good Samaritan is the figure of Christ, and who is represented in this painting in extreme poverty. And in fact, the Lord is both the one who approaches every man to heal and save him, and Christ, at the same time, identifies himself with every suffering man: " whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me. » (Mt 25,40:XNUMX).

It is not a question of asking the question: who is my neighbor? It is a question of entering into the dynamic of mercy, into the dynamic of charity. It is a question of allowing oneself to be dazzled and touched by the fact that “Christ Jesus loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2,20:XNUMX), that he came to pick me up where I was to take me to the inn of the Church and that in this inn, I would be restored to be able to continue my journey into the Kingdom. And being touched by this, here I am led to do as he did: “Go and do likewise.”

This is what the Lord invites us to live today, to enter into this inexhaustible dynamic of God's charity.

Amen

Father Emmanuel Schwab, Rector of the Shrine