There has recently been a flurry of articles about the parable of the Good Samaritan and the situation of undocumented immigrants. In an interview on Fox News, Vice-President JD Vance spoke about the ordo amoris and said that “there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Pope Francis wrote a Letter to the Bishops of the United States of America immediately after this interview. In it, he said that “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

A study of the parable of the Good Samaritan shows that it focused on essentials: it began with the question put to Jesus by a scholar of the law: “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him in return what is written in the law? As a scholar of the law, the man should know the answer, and he does. He replies with the first and most essential commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus approves this answer and promises him eternal life if he puts it into practice.

But then the man, “wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” As an answer, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan: “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.” A priest and a Levite both see him but avoid him and pass by. A Samaritan, also passing that way, stops and ministers to him, treating his wounds and then taking him to an inn and arranging for his further care.

Then, instead of answering the scholar’s question as to “who is my neighbor”, Jesus asks him this question: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

It is easy to miss the twist in the exchange of questions. The scholar of the law asks, “Who is my neighbor?” In other words, since I must love my neighbor as myself, how do I identify the person to whom I must show love? Jesus turns the question inside out: who was neighbor to the wounded man? In other words, who acted as a neighbor to the man in need?

In the scholar’s eyes, a neighbor is one to whom I must show love. In Jesus eyes, a neighbor is one who shows love to others. He then tells the scholar, “Go and do likewise.” We see here, first, that the essence of the law is not so much knowing the law, which the scholar of the law certainly does, but putting  it into practice.

More importantly, we see that the whole concept of “neighbor”  is turned inside out. The neighbor is myself in as much as I treat another with mercy. The other is whoever I encounter who needs mercy. So a neighbor is not the one who receives mercy, but the one who gives it.

When we consider the actual words of the parable, we see that Mr. Vance’s question is the same as that of the scholar of the law when he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In both cases, the question sees the neighbor as the one who receives mercy, and therefore any answer given will indicate to whom mercy should be shown. Unfortunately, this can be understood to mean that there are people to whom I need not show mercy.

Pope Francis, in referring to the parable of the Good Samaritan, causes us to recall that Jesus responds to the question in a way that shows that the neighbor is not the one who receives mercy but the one who gives it. Following the teaching of Jesus, instead of that of the scholar of the law, means that each of us is called to be neighbor to every person with whom we come in contact.

Image: Adobe Stock. By Volodymyr.

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Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D.

Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.