The lawyer in the Gospel asks Jesus one of the most important questions a man or woman can: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus questioned the lawyer what he himself thought the answer was, and the lawyer gave what Jesus admitted was the right response. Putting together two parts of what God had revealed in the Old Testament, the lawyer said that to inherit eternal life we must love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind (Deut 6:5) and love our neighbor as ourselves (Lev 19:18). On these two commandments, Jesus himself said elsewhere, "hang all the law and the prophets" (Mt 22:40). These two commandments are a summary, in other words, of the entire Old Testament. It's no surprise, therefore, that Jesus said, "Do this and you will live." The whole Old Testament was God's revelation to help his people enter into life and be prepared to embrace "life to the full" (Jn 10:10) that Jesus would reveal.
But as conceptually simple as Jesus' answer was, the lawyer still had practical difficulties with it. There are obviously practical considerations in loving God with 100% of our mind, heart, soul and strength — as well as 100% of our time, talents, wallets. But the scholar of the law asked Jesus to be more specific about the commandment to love one's neighbor. "Who is my neighbor?," he queried.
This was one of the most discussed and controversial questions among Israelites. A typical Jew was raised with an attitude to which Jesus referred in the Sermon on the Mount, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy'" (Mt 5:43). Therefore, if one were to love one's neighbor and detest one's enemy, it was crucial to determine who was neighbor and who was enemy. Almost all Jews admitted that one's neighbor extended beyond one's family or those who were physically proximate. Most interpreters considered that one's neighbor included all fellow Israelites and those gentiles who adhered to the Mosaic Law. But no one was quite prepared for Jesus' answer, which he gave in the form of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He basically said the everyone is in our neighborhood — even those considered enemies, as Jews and Samaritans deemed each other. Jesus said essentially that there could be no limit to our love for neighbor.
Jesus had previously taught that same truth in other ways. During the Sermon on the Mount, right after he alluded to their common wisdom about loving neighbors and hating enemies, Jesus exclaimed, "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Mt 5:44). He then gave the reason for it: "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors and sinners do the same? … Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:46-47). God's own unlimited love toward us was to be the standard of our love for each other.
But in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus made even clearer that God's love had no limits and that likewise our love should have no limits. The first point about God's love is often missed, but the Fathers of the Church (the saintly bishops of the early Church) saw this as the necessary "background" for the proper understanding of the parable.
They saw Man (as in all mankind) as that person who had started to go down from the place of God's dwelling, represented by Jerusalem, to Jericho, literally the lowest place on earth (1000 meters below sea level). His descent was sin. As he left paradise, Man was ambushed by the evil one, who left him at the brink of death because of sin. The priest and the Levite were, respectively, the law and the prophets, who chose to pass the nearly-dead sinner by, so that they would not be contaminated by his sins. Eventually Christ, the Good Samaritan, came. When he beheld this man half dead, he had compassion on him and for all his wounds caused by sin. So, as we read in the parable, "he approached him." Christ approached from heaven, getting so close as to take on our nature, becoming "God-with-us" (Mt 1:23). He poured the oil and wine of his redemptive blood on man's wounds to heal them. He brought him to the inn-keeper, who represents the pastors of his Church, and gave them the instruction for them to care for sinners until he returned. The extremely generous two denarii and the promise for more upon his return were the treasure of Christ's merits, especially the sacraments, which continue the healing process within Man. Finally, the reference to his return was an allusion to the second coming, when Jesus will come to repay each of us according to our deeds (Rom 2:6).
The parable of the Good Samaritan, therefore, is first a commentary on God's love for us and, secondly, a clear illustration of Christ's statement during the Last Supper, "love one another as I have loved you" (Jn 15:12). Our love for each other is based not merely on our love for ourselves — "love your neighbor as yourself" — but on God's love for us.
Jesus calls each of us to be a Good Samaritan, and make ourselves neighbor to those who need our care. Every time we take care of someone else, we take care of Christ in disguise, who will be able to say to us one day, "I was ill and you took care of me" (Mt 25:36). And Christ says our salvation depends on it. "Do this and you will live," he said to the lawyer in the Gospel, which clearly implies that if we don't do it, we won't inherit eternal life.
Jesus is saying to us that for us to inherit eternal life there is a two stage process. The first is that he needs to be the Good Samaritan to us, to save us from the state of our being at the point of death due to sin; the second is that we need to be Good Samaritan to others, out of love for God and love for neighbor as God has loved us. Christ saves us, in other words, not just by coming down from heaven and binding our wounds, but by sending us out with similar love to bind others' wounds. Every needy person we encounter along the way is a bridge to heaven, provided that we are "neighbor" to that person and love him or her as Jesus has shown us.
