Monday of the 27th
Week in Ordinary Time
October 5, 2015 8:30am
So, a brother Jew who is a
scholar of the law asks Jesus, “Who is my
neighbor?’
He wants an answer to that so
that he knows whom he has to love and whom he doesn’t have to love.
Jesus then tells a story, what we
call “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,”
and then asks: “Who was neighbor to the
robber’s victim?”
Jesus shifts the thought process
from object to subject, from looking outside myself at others to determine my
behavior to looking within at myself to determine my behavior.
It is an amazing twist and I
think it is quite profound.
I want to try to state this in
today’s, maybe more contemporary terms.
Jesus is calling us to be
inner-directed, not outer-directed.
He wants us to determine our
behavior by what is within us, by our beliefs and values.
He does not want us to determine
our behavior by what happens outside of us or by what others do or don’t do.
Jesus calls us to respond and not
to react.
He wants us to act and speak from
that inner core of ourselves where God abides and allow the Spirit to shape
what we say and do.
Jesus does not want us to react
to a personality type or a statement or an action simply with unprocessed
emotion, in a thoughtless and probably hurtful or destructive way.
That’s how I see the impact of
what happens in this gospel incident.
For our thinking and living,
Jesus takes us from object to subject – from “Who is my neighbor?” to “Who
acted as neighbor?”
