We moved to the Village from Houston and there it was pretty common to see a homeless person begging on a street corner. If you are unlucky and get a red light and have to stop next to them you learn very quickly the rules of survival.  Look straight ahead, if you have a passenger with you, talk to them but never, ever, under any circumstance turn your head and look at the homeless person.  Everyone knows that.  One day the other deacon at our parish told me when he was driving home from work, he stopped at a red light and sure enough a homeless man came up to his window and he turned and looked at him.  The man smiled and said, “Hi man, my name is Charlie.”  All of a sudden he wasn’t a homeless man, he was Charlie.

That is the whole point of today’s Gospel:  the lawyer asked who was his neighbor but Jesus turned the question around to who acted as a neighbor, who showed compassion.  The lawyer began with the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life.”  What is the minimum, not what should I do, not how can I love like God loves.  No, what do I have to do.

And if we are brutally honest with ourselves, sometimes that is our question also, what must I do to make it to heaven.  When Jesus agrees with the lawyer, love God and love your neighbor as yourself and you will have life eternal, the man thinks, hey, that’s pretty wide open, let’s try to narrow this down a little.  Who is my neighbor?  If we can define our neighbor then that tells us who we have to care about and care for and everyone else is on their own.  If it is just my family or maybe church members, okay.  Then I don’t have to worry about that family whose trailer burnt down or the lady down the street whose daughter is sick.  Or Charlie.

Once again, Jesus tells a story to let the lawyer answer his own question.  Now don’t be too hard on the priest and the Levite.  If they touched a corpse, other than preparing a member of their family for burial, they were unclean and could not enter the temple or perform any liturgical rites. Sure, the man might be alive, or barely alive, but what if he dies in their arms.  They can’t help him and they can’t help anyone else because now they are unclean.  These men probably loved God with all their heart and being.  Both of them were active in the temple.  But, love of God does not automatically produce love for a neighbor.  However, love for one’s neighbor is a mirror of love of God.  Sometimes we fall into that same trap.  We go to church every Sunday, maybe even an hour of adoration.  We love God, isn’t that enough?  Isn’t that what we must do?  Can’t we just pray for Charlie?  Do we have to also talk to him, give him a dollar, smile, listen?

Along comes the Samaritan, someone who is unclean, someone who could never go in the temple in Jerusalem, an outcast, a foreigner. Despised.   No better than a beggar on a street corner.  And immediately the story moves from who is your neighbor to who is a neighbor to someone, anyone in need.  And we learn there can be no love of God that does not express itself in love of neighbor.  St. Ambrose said, “Mercy, not kinship, makes someone a neighbor.” 

What about us?  How do we move from what we must do to what we should do?  Our first reading said it is not all that difficult, it is not something mysterious or remote.  It is in our mouths and our hearts, we only have to do it.  Every day we have the opportunity to be a neighbor to someone.  It might be with a phone call, an email, a visit, a kind word, a smile, a willingness to listen to someone’s pain and by listening to help them heal. 

Who was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?  He answered, the one who treated him with mercy.  Jesus said,Go and do likewise’.”