In this beautiful parable, we realize that we are all the wounded man, alienated from God and in need of redemption and healing.

Luke 10, 25-37. Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. July 11th, 2010

We have been looking at the demands of the Gospel, such as our call to holiness, and our call to go out and evangelize. We are to make everything else in our lives secondary as we answer our Blessed Lord's call to be great saints in order that we can bring Him and His love to others, saving them and ourselves in the process. If we turn to Jesus, draw near to Jesus, trust and love Him, Jesus will help us and be with us, just as He was with the seventy-two He sent out in last week’s Gospel,

There is no doubt we need Jesus’ help before we can bring His love to others. So before we can go out, we must first come, come more deeply to Jesus. We must come to Jesus through deep conversion and deep prayer, especially prayer before His very Person truly present in the Holy Eucharist; all in order that we can begin to live a more intimate life with Him; He living in us and us in Him.

United to Jesus we can love everyone with the very love of Jesus, because we have Jesus Himself alive in our heart and soul. Again, this is what it means to be a saint, this is what it means to be holy and to evangelize. The greatest failure in this life, is to fail to become a saint; for to fail to become a saint is to fail to live and love fully. It is a failure to love God above all things and our neighbor as our self for love of God. This is the very reason for our existence; we have been created for a life of love by the God who is Life and Love.

In our parable today all of this is brought out very beautifully. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho turns out to be an image of human history; the assaulted man lying half-dead by the side of the road is an image of fallen humanity--of you and me in our brokenness. We are so much in need of the healing of our inability to love as we ought, as we desire and have been created to love. Not to love fully is not to live fully; in other words, to be lying on the side of the road dying.

In the parable, both Priest and Levite pass by; they symbolize that human beings merely on their own power can not heal the brokenness of our world, much less the brokenness of the human heart. Politics, the efforts of man of alone, cannot heal and save us. But, then along comes the Samaritan. The Samaritan then, can only be the image of the God become man in order to save and heal us, the God-Man--Jesus Christ, still among us as a man in the Holy Eucharist with His healing and saving divine power.

God who in the mystery of His divinity is very distant to us, and even more distant to us because of our sin, has now in His Divine Mercy become very, very near. So near in fact, that He has made Himself our neighbor by becoming one of us. In Jesus, God has now become our neighbor. He has come into the world in order to take care of His wounded creature, assaulted and separated from Him by sin.

And so Jesus, the God-man, pours oil and wine into our wounds, a gesture which is symbolic of the healing gift of grace available to us through the sacraments. Jesus brings us to the inn, which is the Church, in which he arranges our care and also pays a deposit for the cost of that Care. The deposit is paid with nothing less than the outpouring of His own precious blood, which we have access to, in and through the Holy Mass.

In this beautiful parable, we realize that we are all the wounded man, alienated from God and in need of redemption and healing. Each one of us is in need of the gift of God’s redeeming love so that we too can love God and others as God has loved us. And so, as a result of Jesus great act of Agape sacrificial Love, there is a great reversal in our understanding of this parable. We, who at first, are the wounded beaten man found along the road, once healed, are now to, in Christ, become the Samaritan. We, in imitation of Christ the Good Shepherd, are to become like Him so we can follow Him by loving our neighbor, even if our neighbor be our “enemy”.

In fact, no one is our enemy for we are call to be neighbors to all and to realize that everyone is our neighbor, no exceptions. And when we see each man as our "neighbor, we begin to live rightly; we begin to love rightly because we become like Jesus, who loved us first; we then become Jesus for others. Then we become saints because we love our neighbor with an agape sacrificial love (as Jesus did for us) pouring out our life in union with Jesus, so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.

How do we begin to do this practically speaking? By first desiring it and then deciding to love others by first respecting them in a divine way and then living for their sake, not just our own. This includes forgiving, in a divine way, those who have assaulted us, injured us. Jesus the good Samaritan Himself would later become the assaulted man. What the robbers did to the man, the world would do to Jesus, stripping him, beating Him, going off to leave Him die on the cross. But he for His part forgave them, and even gave His life for them to heal them; we are to do the same.

Our Lord Jesus suffered and died for love of all, yes even for those who are the most difficult in our life in our families and in our parish. Jesus loves them in a unique and special way just as He loves us in a unique and special way; He expects us to love them like He loves us, even more He expects us to love them as if they were Him. In fact He said as much, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.”

Today we are being called to take a good look at and rethink the way we approach our neighbor, especially our difficult neighbor. We must cool our passions with the truth which comes from Christ and leave our feelings and emotions aside and decide to love them regardless of how we feel. Once we do this, we can forgive them and do acts of kindness toward them. Yes, this takes considerable effort, especially with those who are not kind in return, but we can do it anyway with God’s grace.

There are people that even the slightest gesture of kindness towards them actually offends them. Sometimes all we can do for these people is to love them in prayer only.” Praying for people whom we don’t like does take considerable effort; too often our thoughts and feelings can quickly turn to ways we can in justice, “get even” with them, in this they become our enemy instead of our neighbor. It is here we have to again surrender our passions to our Lord in order to be healed so that in mercy, we can truly seek to love these people and yes, even wish God’s abundant blessings and graces upon them.

Remember we as Christians are to do good to everyone, even “to bless those who curse us, pray for those who abuse us,” expecting nothing in return; that is humanly speaking. We will have the grace of the friendship of Christ as our reward-and this is of course, greater than any other gift. Look at the Samaritan- the poor Jewish man could not pay him back- he just was robbed. He may have been too weak to even say “thank you.” Yet, the Samaritan did it anyway- loving the man who hated him. Remember the Samaritans and the Jews were enemies of one another.

We are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind and then our neighbor as ourself.” Mother Theresa of Calcutta put it this way, we are called “To give our all for love of Jesus who thirsts for souls, who thirst for their love. She described evangelization as taking the Jesus that is in my heart and putting Him in your heart, you who are my neighbor. For her, this, even more than providing for one’s material needs, is what it means to “feed” the poor. The poor are those who have beaten up by life, left to die spiritually by the side of the road. They may be materially speaking rich or poor, but spiritually they are starving to death for the love of God and for the knowledge of His Truth which subsists in its fullness in the Catholic Church.

Let us in our Mass today especially ask for the grace to live this Gospel- to love those who may not love us in return. We are all called to be the Good Samaritan, we are called to be the saint who like Christ, always loves the poor man left for dead on the side of the road, no matter who He may be. But first, we must draw near to Calvary made truly present for us on this Altar, and to the Good Samaritan who here continues to offer Himself for us so that we are able to offer ourselves as well for the love of God and of our neighbor.

May our adoration and proper reverential reception of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist heal us and grant us the grace to be all for Jesus and to offer our all in sacrificial love for Him and for our neighbor. Let us like Mary, with simple and humble hearts, show our neighbor by our actions, that Jesus is everything for us. Let us do this today, so that life, eternal life may be ours because in our own holiness we will have led others to Jesus and to His love.