Paying Attention To The Sky

Van Gogh was staying in an institution for the mentally ill when he painted this work, in May 1890.

  

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Luke 10:29-37

A Portrait of Christ by Fr. Robert Barron:

THE STORY OF the Good Samaritan is probably the best known of Jesus’ parables. And the moral lesson contained in this narrative — that one should reach out to the suffering person, no matter what social, racial, or religious animosities might exist between helper and helped — is perennially pertinent. But something that both the fathers of the church and the Protestant theologian Karl Barth have taught me is that all things in the New Testament — stories, moral exhortations, letters, and parables are finally descriptions of Jesus, portraits, however indirect, of the Lord. In one of the great painted windows of Chartres Cathedral, there is depicted the intertwining of two biblical stories: the account of the fall of the human race and the parable of the Good Samaritan. This artistic juxtaposition reflects a connection that was made from earliest centuries of the church between the figure of the Good Samaritan and Jesus the savior. It is this provocative symbolic suggestion that I should like to explore.

Jesus’ story begins as follows: “There was a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jerusalem is a symbol of heaven, Mt. Zion — the place where, as Isaiah predicted, all of the tribes of the Lord will go up. Read mystically, therefore, Jerusalem signals the state of friendship with God. And as any attentive reader of the Hebrew Scriptures would know, Jericho evokes the city of sin, for it was the place that the invading Israelites had to conquer as they moved into the Promised Land. The journey from Jerusalem to Jericho is thus a symbol of the fall, the downward progression of the human race from unity with God to alienation from him. As the parable unfolds, we hear that “the man fell in with robbers.” This is a realistic detail, since that road was notorious in Jesus’ time as a haunt of bandits, but there is also a symbolic resonance. Sin effectively robs us of friendship with God and thereby corrupts all that is good in us. When we know the world apart from God, we know it less truly and less well; when our wills function in alienation from God, they do so errantly and awkwardly; when our passions are divorced from God, they become disordered and fall into a kind of civil war. Now all of this debilitation robs us of our dignity and corrodes the image of God according to which we were created. Those who have been the victims of a robbery often say that the worst part of the experience is the humiliation of it — and this same dynamic holds when the robbery is a spiritual one. Next we hear that “they stripped him, and then went off, leaving him half-dead.” What a perfect description of sin. In its wake, we are alive, hut barely, for the divine life in us has been compromised; we are like the Gerasene demoniac, alive hut wandering among the tombs, half-dead.

The parable is a tightly scripted drama, and now we turn to act two. “A priest happened to he going down the same road; he saw him, but continued on. Likewise there was a Levite who came the same way; he saw him and went on.” To be sure, this is a sharp criticism of our unwillingness to take care of people in need; there is certainly a moral lesson to he learned here. If we pursue our Christological reading, however, unexpected dimensions open up. The priest and the Levite symbolize official religion, pious practice, the works of the law — all of the efforts of Israelite religion to affect salvation. These disciplines are not, of course, bad in themselves, but in accord with Paul’s constant observation, they are, in their fallen state, unable to save us. Walking from Jerusalem to Jericho, the two pious figures stand for religion that has itself been compromised by sin, devolving into an exercise in self-justification. Those who have been beaten up and left half-dead by sin should, therefore, not expect aid from that particular quarter.

Now comes the hinge upon which the parable turns:

“But a Samaritan who was journeying along came on him and was moved to pity at the sight.” Samaritans were half-breeds, the descendants of those Jews who remained behind at the time of the exile and allowed themselves to mix sexually and culturally with non-Jewish tribes. Their very presence, therefore, was repulsive to Jews of pure blood. Jesus was a Jew, hut he mingled so prodigally with sinners, outsiders, the morally suspect that he became, in the course of his public ministry, an object of suspicion. Finally, at the close of his life, all of polite society turned away from him. He is, therefore, the Samaritan. What does this despised traveler do? “He approached him and dressed his wounds, pouring in oil and wine as a means to heal.” In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says of Jesus, “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to he grasped at, hut rather emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” The Son of God was not pleased to remain in his heaven, but rather took to himself a human nature by which he could enter as radically as possible into the condition of the fallen human race. He approached us, even in our repugnant state, stooping down in order to raise us up. What is more, he healed us. One of the earliest titles given to Jesus is Soter (healer, in the Greek), rendered in Latin as salvator (bearer of the salus, the salve, the healing balm). Christ is the great healer, And how does he heal? Once more the symbolism of the parable is striking: he pours in oil and wine. The alert Christian reader immediately interprets these as evocative of the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and orders (all of which involve anointing) and Eucharist (wine consecrated to be the blood of Jesus). The author of the Gospel of John makes much the same sacramental point when he tells us that from the pierced side of Jesus there flowed water (baptism) and blood (the Eucharist),

We then hear that “he hoisted him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, where he cared for him.” In his dying, Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world; in Paul’s even more dramatic language, he became sin on the cross, bearing in his own body the suffering of the human race — hoisting us, as it were, upon himself. And then he brought us to the church, a place of rest and recuperation, where he continues, through the word, sacraments, and the community itself, to care for us. The narrative closes with a sharp symbolic detail: “The next day, he took out two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever you spend.’” A word frequently used to describe what Jesus accomplished in his dying and rising is “redemption,” from the Latin redemere, which means simply “to buy back.” Christ Jesus paid the price for sin; he redressed the imbalance that it caused; he reestablished justice in God’s cosmos. And thus we live as debtors no longer; we’ve been paid for.

We recall that the telling of this parable was prompted by the question of a man who “wished to justify himself” and asked, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus turns the table on him by asking, at the close of his narrative, “Which of these three was neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?” When the answer comes, “the one who treated him with compassion,” Jesus says, with devastating simplicity: “Go and do the same.” Having been saved by Christ, who became a neighbor to us, we must spend our lives becoming neighbor to those in need, scouting the road for those who have been brutalized by sin, and then endeavoring to pour in the wine and the oil. Having read this story as an icon of Jesus, we must become what we have seen.

From Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI):

What Are The Parables?
There is one vexed saying of Jesus concerning the parables that stands in the way: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’” [Mark 4:12] …In saying these words, Jesus places himself in the line of Prophets – his destiny is a Prophet’s destiny…In the book of Isaiah it says “Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” [Isaiah:6:10] Prophets fail. Their message goes too much against general opinion and the comfortable habits of life. It is only through failure that their work becomes efficacious. …Prophets are the way that to reach the point where “they turn and God will forgive them” It is precisely the method for opening the eyes and ears of all. It is on the Cross that the parables are unlocked. …The parable has a two fold movement. One the one hand the parable brings distant realities close to the listeners as they reflect upon it. On the other hand, the listeners themselves are led onto a journey. The inner dynamic of the parable, the intrinsic self-transcendence of the chosen image, invites them to entrust themselves to this dynamic and to go beyond their existing horizons, to come to know and understand things previously unknown. This means , however, that the parable demands the collaboration of the learner, for not only is something brought close to him, but he himself must enter into the movement of the parable and journey along with it. At this point we begin to see why parables can cause problems: people are sometimes unable to discover the dynamic and let themselves be guided by it. Especially in the case of parables that affect and transform their personal lives, people can be unwilling to be drawn into the required movement. …He (Jesus) has to lead us to the mystery of God – to the light that our eyes cannot bear and that we therefore try to escape. In order to make it accessible to us, he shows how the divine light shines through in the  things of this world and in the realities of our everyday life. Through everyday events, he wants to show us the real ground of all things and thus the true direction we have to take in our day–to-day lives if we want to go the right way. He shows us God: not an abstract God but the God who acts, who intervenes in our lives, and wants to take us by the hand. He shows us through everyday things who we are and what we must therefore do. He conveys knowledge that makes demands upon us; it not only or even primarily adds to what we know, but it changes our lives. It is knowledge that enriches us with a gift: “God is on the way to you.” But equally it is an exacting knowledge: “Have faith, and let faith be your guide” The possibility of refusal is very real, for the parable lacks the necessary proof.

Parables Are An Expression Of God’s Hiddeness
We have developed a concept of reality today that excludes reality’s translucence to God. The only thing that counts as real is what can be experimentally proven. God cannot be constrained into experimentation. That is exactly the reproach he made to the Israelites in the desert:

Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
[Psalms 95:8-9]

God cannot be seen through the world – that it is what the modern concept of reality says. And so there is even less reason to accept the demand he places on us: To believe in him as God and to live accordingly seems like a totally unreasonable requirement. In this situation, the parables really do lead to non-seeing and non-understanding, to “hardening of heart.”

This means, though, that the parables are ultimately an expression of God’s hiddeness in this world and of the fact that knowledge of God always lays claim to the whole person – that such knowledge is one with life itself, and that I cannot exist without “repentance.” For in the world marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the “I” and the “self.”

The Samaritan
And now the Samaritan enters the stage. What will he do? He does not ask how far his obligations of solidarity extend. Nor does he ask about the merits required for eternal life. Something else happens: His heart is wrenched open. The Gospel uses the word that in Hebrew had originally referred to the mother’s womb and maternal care. Seeing this man in such a state is a blow that strikes him “viscerally,” touching his soul. “He had compassion “ – that is how we translate the text today, diminishing its original vitality. Stuck in his soul by the lightening flash of mercy, he himself now becomes a neighbor, heedless of any question or danger. The burden of the question thus shifts here. The issue is no longer which other person is a neighbor to me or not. The question is about me. I have to become the neighbor, and when I do, the other person counts for me “as myself”

If the question had been “Is the Samaritan my neighbor, too?” the answer would have been a pretty clear-cut “No “given the situation at the time. But Jesus turns the whole matter on its head: The Samaritan, the foreigner, makes himself the neighbor and shows me that I have to learn to be a neighbor deep within and that I already have the answer in myself. I have to become like someone in love, someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another’s need. Then I find my neighbor, or – better – then I am found by him.

The Samaritan: The Risk Of Goodness
We always give too little when we just give material things. And aren’t we surrounded by people who have been robbed and battered? The victims of drugs, of human trafficking, of sex tourism, inwardly devastated people who sit empty in the midst of material abundance. All this is of concern to us, it calls us to have the eye and heart of a neighbor, and to have the courage to love our neighbor, too. For –as we have said – the priest and the Levite may have passed by more out of fear than out of indifference. The risk of goodness is something we must relearn from within, but we can do that only if we ourselves become good from within, if we ourselves are neighbors” from within, and if we then have an eye for the sort of service that is asked of us, that is possible for us, and is therefore also expected of us, in our environment and within the wider ambit (scope) of our lives.

The Samaritan In Terms Of World History
The (Church) Fathers see the parable (The Good Samaritan) in terms of world history: Is not the man who lies half dead and stripped on the roadside an image of “Adam,” of man in general, who truly “fell among robbers”? Is it not true that man, this creature man, has been alienated, battered and misused throughout his entire history? The great mass of humanity has almost always lived under oppression; conversely, are the oppressors the true image of man, or is it they who are really distorted caricatures, a disgrace to man?

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho thus turns out to be an image of human history; the half-dead man lying by the side of it is an image of humanity. Priest and Levite pass by; from earthly history alone, from its cultures and religions alone, no healing comes. If the assault victim is the image of Everyman, the Samaritan can only be the image of Jesus Christ. God himself, who for us is foreign and distant, has set out to take care of his wounded creature. God, though so remote from us, has made himself our neighbor in Jesus Christ. He pours oil and wine into our wounds, a gesture seen as an image of the healing gift of the sacraments, and he brings us to the inn, the Church in which he arranges our care and also pays a deposit for the cost of that care. …The great theme of love which is the real thrust of the text, is only now given its full breadth. For now we realize that we are all “alienated,” in need of redemption. Now we realize that we are all in need of the gift of God’s redeeming love ourselves, so that we too can become “lovers’ in our turn. Now we realize that we always need God, who makes himself our neighbor so that we can become neighbors.