Guest Column
The connection between conduct and salvation
- Through the parable of the Good Samaritan, God challenges us to think, meditate and act with kindness, mercy and love. It means that we will support institutionalizing our virtues by supporting laws that eliminate today’s class structure and the greed upon which it was created. God gives us the choice to act like the priest, Levite or Samaritan. If we choose to act like the priest or Levite, then we choose to side with the privileged. On the other hand, if we act like the Samaritan, we choose to side with the underprivileged and act authentically Christian, which puts us on the path to eternal life.
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- Fr. Paul Kasun, OSB can be contacted at: FRPAUL@BENEDICTINEMISSIONHOUSE.COM
By Fr. Paul Kasun, OSB
The Priest. The Levite. The Samaritan. Jesus tells this parable in answer to a simple question. The scholar of the law hopes to inherit eternal life, but has a nagging question about who really is his neighbor. The question is probably more important for us today, than it ever was for that scholar of the law. In today’s homily, I begin with the principle of love – and then give three modern examples, showing who is acting like the priest and Levite or Samaritan. The highly acclaimed Biblical scholar Carroll Stuhlmueller, who died a few years ago, wrote about this parable, saying that salvation, in part, comes about through our conduct. The parable helps us, he says, “To measure the unlimited nature of the duty of love (JBC 144a).” The love I talk about today focuses on our individual love for each other just as much as the kind of love we show as a society by the institutions that we create and participate.
Jesus’ teaching today gives us a sober sense of reality. He breaks myths. He reveals our fault lines and he challenges us to look deeply into our true desires and to examine our motivations and way of life. Just as Jesus does not want to crush the scholar of the law, but lead him in the right direction and thus to eternal life, he too desires to lead us in the right direction and thus to eternal life. Jesus never wants to crush the bruised reed by saying something that will cause the scholar of the law to loose eternal life. At the same time, Jesus knows that some form of pain, criticism or suffering must take place so as to stop the scholar of the law from actually loosing eternal life – and thus Jesus “corrects” him. Jesus forcefully answers the scholar of the law to break with the ranks of privilege and to stop seeing himself as somebody special – or somebody more important than the Samaritan. These kinds of thoughts and feelings actually take one further from God and closer to losing eternal life.
Let me take a modern day example of what I see in this dynamic, and how I hope to shift our understanding of the parable from a personal exhortation to a social exhortation -- to be loving, kind and merciful. It seems that almost everywhere you hear that the richer are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class in America is shrinking. One of the books that I recently read is titled: The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? The book, written by two professors from Indiana, analyzes exactly the problem of our class society. It dissects this problem, showing how our society has created a worsening class system and how this is dangerous for our future. To say the least, it is a very interesting book.
They open their book with a tragic story of Jim Farley. He worked at Federal Mogul Corporation, a company that made roller bearings in Detroit. The workers called him “Big Jim—not so much because of the size of his body, they said, as because of the size of his heart. They liked the soft-spoken yet tough manner in which he represented them as a union committeeman.” He listened to the workers. He had moved to Detroit from Kentucky, where he was born, rather reluctantly because the good mining jobs were no longer there. Thinking that he had a lifetime job, the company announced it was closing its doors. Jim had been working there for 20 years. The company found a cheaper labor source. A month after the announcement Jim had a heart attack. He recovered physically, but mentally he never did. At 41 years old, no company wanted to hire him because of his heart condition. His wife took another job to have income. Not finding a job himself, he lost hope and he committed suicide.
The authors write that some might view his death as a personal tragedy, but they see it another way: it is “a long chain of life experiences that produce patterns of predictable hardship and limited opportunities. Farley’s chances in life are powerfully shaped by his social-class location, which constrains opportunities. … Yet, just as the class structure constrains the lives of people like Jim Farley, it confers numerous advantages and opportunities on others.” In this example, the owners and managers of Federal Mogul Company are acting like the priest and Levite, or worse. Not only did they walk passed Jim Farley on the side of the road, but they put him there.
So I am focusing our attention on the social nature of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Let me take another example from our authors. The authors compare the dependency of the privileged class on the defense budget with the underprivileged class on the welfare budget. In 2002, for example, the government spent 319 billion dollars on defense and 16.5 billion dollars on cash assistance to poor families (155). Most of the defense budget did not go to our soldiers, however, but to high paid scientists, engineers and civilian employees. Today the defense budget if over 500 billion dollars, but the welfare budget has stayed the same. Poor families work hard throughout their lives with low and lowering wages, but get less than 1% of the federal budget. This is an example of how our politicians and the privileged class have acted like the priest and Levite, leaving the Samaritan for dead on the side of the road. Even more so, they put the Samaritan on the side of the road.
My last example focuses on the delicate situation in the Middle East, where we encounter the locus of our so-called War on Terror, in the oppression of the Palestinians. Until we see the underprivileged Palestinians as our neighbor, there is little hope for peace. For example, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, in 2006 the Israeli military killed 660 Palestinians, including 322 bystanders. In that same period, the Palestinian militants killed 23 Israelis – that is a difference of nearly 3,000%. Jesus’ message of “who is my neighbor” is a powerful insight into how we might find peace. It shows that we are not yet committed to diplomacy to solve the problem. In this scenario, the Israelis are acting like the priest and Levite, while the Palestinians find themselves in the role of the man, half-dead on the side of the road.
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