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abla-soso · 3 years

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I'm sending you this ask because I saw this post and I think this might be a case of a cultural misunderstanding? The entire conversation was very disconnected; almost nobody understood what the other was attempting to say.

I think witchesofcolor did assume about mimiwrites2000 originally but they did correct themselves pretty quickly.

They warned mimiwrites2000 about the language they were using and then explained it to them. In the U.S. if someone saying says something incredibly offensive (part of the statement they made most certainly was) then it's considered good manners to correct them immediately (particularly foreigners) so that they don't accidentally offend others. However this might be offensive in wherever you're from.

I also don't particularly believe you're anti-black either.

But, your overall behavior was (by western standards) super aggressive and you've mistaken some things as well.

When referring to AAVE that is not a 'Westerners' issue. AAVE is a specific dialect native to only Black Americans. It's words have become quite popular on the internet but they're often used improperly (as you mentioned); however because Black Americans still use the words as they were meant to be this leads to confusion and irritation (particularly the latter for Black Americans). Both you and mimiwrites2000 use it quite a bit so be there might be more confusions in the future.

Throughout the post no one called mimiwrites2000 a racist or anti-black; they said the language used was. The action was anti-black; no one said anything about the person. There's a big difference.

It was said/implied that both witchesofcolor and visibilityofcolor attacked mimiwrites2000 which again isn't accurate. To attack is imply they were purposely malicious; which they weren't. In reality, they were relatively polite. That of course doesn't mean that mimiwrites2000 didn't feel hurt; but they weren't attacked.

Honestly, you sounded really dismissive? It almost seemed like you didn't care that something offensive was said? You appeared more offended that someone corrected mimiwrites2000 and you then that something harmful was said? Like, as long as you're suffering in Palestine damned be anything else; even if it's hurtful to other marginalized communities.

Also, you claimed that you were being tone policed but you really weren't. Tone policing is when someone refuses to help/support a movement because they didn't like your tone (or attitude/words/etc.). While your tone wasn't liked; all involved still support Palestine regardless.

Overall, everybody made accusations and assumptions.

I believe neither you nor mimiwrites2000 are native English speakers (or from a western country) and language is really tricky (especially English!) so certain things are maybe lost or aren't understood but it's lost on me how you are so confident you've said or done absolutely nothing wrong. Especially since most of that entire post is in regards to something most non-Americans (including those from western countries) would have a lot of trouble understanding.

Anon, I appreciate your compassionate effort to fix this mess, but I’m really over it, and I highly doubt we can see eye to eye on this.

It’s not just a language barrier, there is definitely a huge difference in culture clues/values.

What I found incredibly offensive in my culture (ignoring a grieving person’s cry for help and focusing on how their wording offends me) doesn’t seem to be a big deal to you. Where I'm from, if a person is in desperate need of help, you don’t get to make it about yourself instead. Even if that person deliberately insults you, you listen and help them first and then deal with the insult. And it’s more outrageously rude when that person who was asking for your help was obviously clueless and never meant to offend but you still prioritized your hurt feelings anyway.

You can’t imagine the level of shame and humiliation a person from an Arab culture feels when a person ignores their cry for help and tries to nitpick the words they used to ask for help, especially if they were subjugated to constant silencing and dismissive attitude before (and mimiwrites2000's private messages to me expressed how terrible she felt).

That’s why I was angry and aggressive.

And I’m not gonna apologize for it.

Because while I listened and honored those guy's wishes and vowed to never again use that word that they found offensive (because I was NOT dismissive of their complaint itself), they - on the other hand - never listened.

They demanded that a grieving victim who was crying for help be held accountable for an innocent mistake she made, but they completely absolved themselves of their own gross western-centric bias.

They choose to call me all kinds of nasty names over and over and bombarded me with really vile, hateful messages for days.

So sorry, but I don’t owe them shit.

But I will answer the rest of your points:

I had no idea what AAVE is, and neither did mimiwrites2000. Assuming we should have known anyway is a classic example of western-centric bias.

Even if mimiwrites2000 wasn’t directly accused of racism, the mere fact that her cries for help were ignored and she was forced to defend herself - because of an unintended offense that was caused by nothing but innocent cluelessness - was outrageous enough to me as an Arab. That post was about uplifting Palestinian voices - who were actively silenced right now - and allowing them to express their outrage and grief freely, regardless of how westerners feel about it. It was NOT the time or place to nitpick and police Palestinians voices. If someone was offended by a Palestinian’s choice of words; they should have approached them privately and respectfully, but not in my fucking post.

Mimiwrites2000 felt hurt because she felt ignored AND attacked. You don’t get to decide that for her. I already explained why an Arab victim would feel greatly humiliated in this situation, so I won’t repeat myself.

Excuse me, but I’m too busy caring about my people being killed and colonized. I don’t have enough emotional energy to ignore my own deep pain and grief and focus on catering to other’s hurt feelings (which were caused by an unintended mistake and nothing else). We’re already deeply suffering and utterly emotionally exhausted, so have some freaking empathy and don’t demand that we should prioritize your feelings. And the most fucked up thig is: even AFTER I swallowed my own deep grief and pain and catered to their feelings; I was still called a racist bigot who didn’t really care about my own people’s suffering!!! I truly can not fathom this disgusting level of entitlement and lack of empathy.

Tone policing has many examples and it’s not limited to the one you mentioned. Also; claiming to “support” Palestine doesn’t mean shit when you nitpick and derail posts made by Palestinians and prioritize your own feelings over theirs. Don’t police, derail, or silence Palestinian voices. If you find something offensive; you can speak up, but keep the discussion in the DMs.

#Anonymous

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mikhalsarah · 3 years

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RIP Open Orthodoxy, eaten alive by parasitic “Wokeness”...

There are already three streams of Judaism where women can be rabbis (Conservative/Masorti, Reform, and Reconstructionist), I should know, I belong to one of them. I’ve never entirely understood the Orthodox commitment to sidelining women in this day and age, but the simple fact is, people who are unhappy with Orthodox halakhah in this area have other places to pray, and the stubborn refusal to pray in any of “those places”, yet fighting tooth and nail to make their own shuls become just like them, smack of a weird sort of snobbish attachment to the word “orthodoxy”....even though the rest of Orthodox is but a hair’s breadth from considering them a treif liberal “fake” Judaism like the rest of us already.

As difficult, but possible, as the issue of female rabbis would be to bring about, (seeing as it is a rabbinic prohibition based largely on cultural attitudes no longer in play in western society), the issue of getting the Orthodox to accept gay couples is another matter. Again, not an insurmountable issue, Centrist Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has written quite openly about the need to find a place in Orthodox shuls for gay and lesbian Jews. However Orthodox culture is never going to let them hold hands during service or kiddush, for the simple reason that public displays of sexual/romantic affection, even between heterosexual married couples, are frowned upon everywhere from the sanctuary to the grocery store, due to the strong feeling that sexuality should be put aside, or sublimated, when encountering certain kinds of holiness (engaging in prayer etc). Of course, that does not mean that in Judaism sex is the opposite of holiness in some way, or else it would be forbidden to have sex on Shabbat. Since marital sex is a mitzvah (commandment, meritorious act) on Shabbat, better to understand it as a different kind of holiness, one that is not compatible with some other mitzvot (like prayer) or with public life in general. Sexuality itself is a sort of holiness surrounded by taboos and necessitating the utmost privacy in Judaism, so this is ironically probably the hill Orthodoxy would die on, not figuring out how to tolerate the gays.

I heartily agree that it’s time to stop being racist to the Palestinians. Strange though that a “Woke” rabbi still can’t bring himself to call them what they call themselves, and in typical Israeli/Zionist fashion emphasizes their Arab otheness, rather than their indigenousness...thus making it seem rather like a favour being granted to them out of the goodness of his Woke heart, rather than an acknowledgement of their intrinsic belongingness. (This kind of stuff is typical for Woke social justice, which consistently cares far more about virtue-signalling and screaming at “white people”, or whomever else is deemed an Oppressor in the situation, than listening and paying attention to those who are actually oppressed.)

I spent decades of my life as a vegetarian, years of that as a vegan. Even though for medical reasons I had to adopt a diet which relies on meat for sufficient protein, I still try to limit my meat consumption. I am very pleased that so many people are seeing the value of vegetarian and vegan diets, and that even regular omnivore folk are adopting “meatless Mondays” and so forth. I’d be even better pleased with governments helping to encourage it by working to make it less expensive if/where possible. I’d nod my head approvingly if rabbis suggested meat-eating be reserved for Shabbat, if one didn’t feel able to give it up entirely. However, even when I didn’t practice (Judaism) and was secular it would never have occurred to me to ban it wholesale. I’m just not Puritan enough for banning things, I prefer the Quakerly ways of “convincement”. The Woke, on the other hand, are full-bore Puritan, convert-the-heathen-masses.

This is perhaps the strangest part of entire essay. This newly minted “rabbi” is publicly expressing the desire to not just overhaul a big chunk of halakhah in order to make Judaism less restrictive and bring it further into line with the mores of the gentile world... a process that has been going on forever, whether excessively quickly (Reform) or excruciatingly slowly (Haredi)... but is calling to make Judaism more restrictive in other ways, by banning things permitted by halakhah which happens never or so infrequently that I can’t recall an instance offhand. And he’s willing to use secular governments to achieve it by force.

I recall hearing conservatives decades ago saying “Inside the heart of every liberal is a fascist screaming to get out” and laughing derisively at how they could think that. I laugh no more, though I contend that it is a particular species of illiberal liberal, known as the progressive activist, that is to blame rather than liberals in general. Still...there it is, and the regular liberals are generally no help opposing their own extremists because deep down they harbour that intrinsic liberal guilt that they are never doing enough or being enough to be truly authentic and useful. For authenticity and “real change” they look ever to the fringes, on the assumption that the more wildly opposed to society in general an ideology is, the better it is, if only they weren’t too cowardly and comfortable to join up and suffer like the “real” activists.

I have to add here, how nice it is despite not having set foot in any shul in over a year, to still have something of the religious Jewish mindset, which makes impressive demands on your time, money, and moral fastidiousness, but at the same time reminds you constantly that you’ll never be perfect and will never accomplish everything you want or that God asks of you and God already accepts that as a given. “It is not yours to complete the task (of repairing the world), but neither are you free to desist from it.” -Pirkei Avot 2:21. Despite the reputation Judaism has for being guilt-inducing, at least we are free from the overwhelming and psychologically destructive levels of guilt induced by secular liberalism, which now has decided, via Wokeness, that merely existing in a society that is imperfect is a damnable offense, even if it is, on balance, one of the least imperfect societies around. This is how Jews like me know that Wokeness is not just a new religion, it’s an offshoot of Christianity, where just being born damns you to a state of perpetual sin.

This authenticity-of-the-extremists mindset blinds them to the fact that while the fringes are the birthplace of some excellent critiques and paradigm-changing ideas that have been of great benefit, those benefits most often only come when those ideas are tempered by counter-critiques and more pragmatic people who can tolerate the loss of ideological purity required to make them work in practice. Also invisible to the liberal mind are those historical moments when progressives have backed ideas that were...well, the term “clusterfucks” springs to mind.

Progressives less than a century ago were enamoured with ideas ranging from Eugenics to Italian Fascism (less so with Naziism, but even that had its adherents until the war and the atrocities of the camps coming home to roost). They backed Communism to such a degree that it took Kronstadt to shake most of them loose, and they still idolize Che Guevara, the gay-hating, probably racist, illiberal who put people to death without trial and “really liked killing” (his words) and can’t hear a word against Communist China (”That’s racist to the Chinese!”) or Islamic extremists (”That’s Islamophobic!), despite the fact that Communist China is “re-indoctrinating” the Muslim Uighers and using them as slave labour (in part for the profits and in part because keeping the men and women separated prevents them breeding more Muslim Uighers), and despite the fact that the Islamists throw gay men off roofs in public executions. When you do get a left-liberal to admit something on the Left has gone wrong at all, they immediately shift to rationalizing it as somehow really being the fault of conservatives all along...even in a case like Eugenics where religious and other conservatives were fighting it tooth and nail.

(NB: This is not an endorsement of conservatives, who have their own sets of problems but who, when they finally do change their mind on an issue, don’t try to rationalize their former wrongheadedness by claiming it was really the fault of left-liberals that they ever believed such things in the first place)

And that brings us back to Zionism and the Woke. The Woke cannot for the life of them admit that it was secular, and often quite far left, Jews that birthed Zionism directly out of the leftist “liberation” traditions of the day (albeit with a healthy side of pro-Western colonialism-admiring fervour for being “an outpost of the West” shining the light of rationality on the barbaric, backward, religiosity of the Middle East). They don’t want to see it. It disturbs their comfortably simple narrative, which prefers to maintain that it was the “whiteness” of the original Zionist Jews and their early followers that was the problem, not their politics.

But Zionism is merely the predictable result of what happens when you take an oppressed people and tell them that their oppression entitles them to do whatever they need to in order to end their oppression and that violence is not violence when perpetrated by the oppressed. That the world owes them, and their descendants, something in perpetuity for having oppressed them, some sort of special treatment, and that it must never withdraw that special dispensation because that itself would be oppressing them again. The fact that what the Jews would feel like they needed to do was ethnically-cleanse their former homeland of people who had once shared it with them (both Jews and Palestinians can be traced to a shared ancestry in the region going back about 50,000 years) and necessitating a whole new liberation movement to free them was an unintended consequence of th\e liberation movement, but a consequence nonetheless.

The Woke cannot admit that Zionism is, in large part, a direct consequence of the leftist liberation project, and Woke Jews (who are almost invariably “white”) can’t admit that the rest of the Woke movement hates them. They truly deserve each other.

Ah, well, at least this “woke” rabbi isn’t trying to qualify for the cognitive dissonance finals by being Woke and a Zionist at the same time like the current rabbi of my (rapidly sinking) former synagogue. We’ve had rabbis that horrified the congregation by being too right-wing (mostly on halakhic issues rather than politics), and we’ve had rabbis that horrified (the older portion of) the congregation by being too left-wing and running off to march in Selma. Thanks to this rabbi haranguing the congregation daily about LGBTQ issues to the point that even the LGBTQ Jews got tired of hearing him (our sexuality is NOT our whole fucking existence...no pun intended) and marching around the Sanctuary with the Israeli flag on Shabbat (an honour reserved for the Torah even by the most fervently Zionist among us, none of whom are yours truly) we now have the dubious distinction of being a congregation horrified by a rabbi being both too left-wing and too right-wing simultaneously.

Apropos of nothing, there is now a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn of my former synagogue and the membership at the Orthodox synagogue has grown with astonishing rapidity. We can extrapolate from this that in 4 years time, should the U.S. Republicans run any candidate remotely sane, they will sweep the election.

#judaism #woke #wokeism #zionism #sjw nonsense #sjws ruin everything #open orthodoxy #militant vegans #woke is a religion #puritan #vs #quaker

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frmartinshomiliesandreflections · 5 years

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14th July >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Luke 10:25-37 for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C: ‘Go and do the same yourself’.

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Luke 10:25-37

The good Samaritan

There was a lawyer who, to disconcert Jesus, stood up and said to him, ‘Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? What do you read there?’ He replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ ‘You have answered right,’ said Jesus ‘do this and life is yours.’

But the man was anxious to justify himself and said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of brigands; they took all he had, beat him and then made off, leaving him half dead. Now a priest happened to be travelling down the same road, but when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite who came to the place saw him, and passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan traveller who came upon him was moved with compassion when he saw him. He went up and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them. He then lifted him on to his own mount, carried him to the inn and looked after him. Next day, he took out two denarii and handed them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said “and on my way back I will make good any extra expense you have.” Which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbour to the man who fell into the brigands‘ hands?’ ‘The one who took pity on him’ he replied. Jesus said to him, ‘Go, and do the same yourself.’

Gospel (USA)

Luke 10:25–37

Who is my neighbor?

There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test him and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”He replied to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”

But because he wished to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn, and cared for him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’ Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers’ victim?” He answered, “The one who treated him with mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Reflections (4)

(i) Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

When Jo Cox, the local political representative, was gunned down in a West Yorkshire town in England three years ago, there was a tremendous outpouring of sadness and anger. She was well known for her passionate commitment to people who were vulnerable and in greatest need, such as refugees from the Syrian conflict. At a service in her local church on the Sunday after she was shot, Rev. Paul Knight spoke of her as a 21st century good Samaritan who had grown into a fervent advocate of the poor and oppressed. Everyone understood the reference to her being a 21st century good Samaritan, because the parable in today’s gospel reading that Jesus first spoke two thousand years ago has continued to speak to us down through the centuries since then.

The Samaritan in the story Jesus tells is portrayed in a very striking way. He stops by the victim on the roadside when the priest and Levite pass by. He was truly present to the injured man, when the others kept their distance. He truly saw the man by the roadside when the priest and Levite merely glanced at him. The quality of the Samaritan’s presence evoked the strong feeling of compassion within him and his compassion flowed over into a whole series of actions. There was nothing half-hearted about what he did for this injured man. He not only attended to the man’s wounds, he took him to an inn and paid for his care. He then told the innkeeper that he would call back on his return from his journey and pay any expenses that might have been incurred in the meantime. This was service of a very thorough kind. He was going to see this through to the end. Jesus is giving a very graphic portrait of what genuine love looks like, the love that was earlier mentioned in the two great commandments, ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself’. Jesus is saying, ‘this is what love looks like’. In one sense the story is a portrait of Jesus’ own love for broken humanity, a portrait of God’s love present in Jesus.

Yet, the fact that the person who shows this quality of love in the story is a Samaritan gives the parable another layer of meaning. As Jesus was telling this story about a man who fell among robbers who was then approached by a priest followed by a Levite, his listeners would have expected the third person to come along to be a faithful Israelite, a lay person. The story would then have had an anti-clerical tone. The story Jesus told was much more subversive than that because the third person to come along turned out to be a Samaritan. It is difficult for us to understand today the antagonism between Jews and Samaritans in the time of Jesus. The Samaritans, from a Jewish perspective, were the enemy. A contemporary Jewish biblical scholar attempts to place this parable in a modern context in her own country. She says, ‘I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I am attacked by thieves, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead in a ditch. Two people… pass me by: the first, a Jewish medic from the Israel Defence Forces; the second, a member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of a Christian church. The person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas, a political party whose charter… anticipates Israel’s destruction’. By means of this parable, Jesus invites us to recognize the humanity and the potential for good in our enemies. He is suggesting that the mercy and compassion of God can be revealed to us through those we would usually regard as alien and hostile to all we stand for.

According to the gospel reading, Jesus spoke this parable in answer to the question of the expert in the Jewish Law, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The very question presupposes that some people are our neighbour and some are not. If it is the neighbour that is to be loved, the lawyer wanted Jesus to define ‘neighbour’. The parable Jesus spoke shows that this is the wrong question. The Samaritan in the story did not ask that question. The victim of the robbers by the roadside was presumable a Jew, the enemy of the Samaritans. That didn’t matter to the Samaritan. The injured man was a fellow human being in desperate need of help. That is all that mattered. At the end of the parable, the question Jesus asks the lawyer was, ‘Which of these three was a neighbour to the man who fell into the brigand’s hands?’ What matters, Jesus suggests, is to be a neighbour, and the true neighbour does not ask the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The one who is a true neighbour knows that love can have no boundaries and that all of humanity is our neighbour, including, even, our enemy.

And/Or

(ii) Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

When individuals or groups are in conflict, it can be difficult for the conflicting parties to see any good in each other. In times of war, in particular, the warring parties often demonize each other. In the case of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, it is probably very difficult for many Palestinians to bring together the noun ‘Jew’ and the adjective ‘good’, and equally difficult for many Jews to associate the noun ‘Palestinian’ with the adjective ‘good’. A pastor working in the Middle East confessed that never once was he even tempted to tell Palestinians a story about a noble Israeli.

However, Jesus does the equivalent of that in today’s gospel reading. We have become used to referring to the story Jesus tells as the parable of the good Samaritan. We can forget that in the Jewish world of Jesus the words ‘good’ and ‘Samaritan’ would never have been found together. Whatever about the question, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ most Jews would have asked, ‘Can anything good come out of Samaria?’ The attitude of Jews and Samaritans to each other was not unlike the attitude of Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims to each other in today’s Iraq.

When Jesus was telling this parable, after stating that the priest and the Levite passed by, his listeners were probably expecting that Jesus would then go on to say that a Jewish layman came along and did the decent thing. The story would then have had an anti-clerical tone, and it would have been appreciated as such. However, the story turned out to be much more subversive than that. It was not a Jewish lay person who responded to the broken traveller, but a despised Samaritan. A member of the group traditionally demonized by Jews showed what the keeping of God’s law really meant in practice. When the Jewish lawyer was asked by Jesus, ‘Which of the three do you think proved himself to be a neighbour?’ he could not bring himself to say ‘the Samaritan’. He simply said, ‘the one who showed compassion’.

The story Jesus told, like all his parables, can be heard at many levels. One of the ways we can appreciate this story is to hear it as a reminder to us that those we are tempted to dismiss and look down on can often teach us what it means to live as God intends us to live. The Samaritan in the parable was an image of Jesus - just as Jesus is an image of God, as Paul reminds us in today’s second reading. In drawing a picture of the compassionate response of the Samaritan to the wounded traveller, Jesus was drawing a picture of his own compassionate ministry. The parable suggests that Jesus figures can be found in unexpected places. It invites us to recognize goodness wherever it is found, especially when it is found among those we are prone to dismiss or reject.

The parable also reminds us that help can come to us from unexpected quarters. The wounded man in the parable was presumable a Jew. He would not have expected help to come from a Samaritan. We can sometimes make the same discovery in our own lives. At crucial moments we can receive help from people we would not have expected to help us. In our hour of need we can discover that our assessment of someone was unfair, that our expectations of others were far too ungenerous. The parable suggests that God can sometimes come to us in unfamiliar guises, and that his compassionate love can be revealed to us by the outsider, the stranger, the one we would normally have considered alien to us. There can be a resistance in us to receiving God’s service at the hands of those from whom we feel estranged. When people with whom we are at odds reach out in us in our hour of need, we can be tempted to keep them at bay. The Jewish lawyer struggled to accept that God’s compassionate presence could be revealed through the despised Samaritan. The parable calls on us to allow God to come to us in and through those of God’s own choosing.

The stories that Jesus tells invite us to find our own place within the story, to identify with one or other of the characters there. In the story of the good Samarian we might be inclined at times to identify with the half-dead traveller. Life has a way of leaving us half-dead at times. If we are drawn to find ourselves there, by the roadside, we can make our own the prayer contained in today’s responsorial psalm, ‘Lord, answer, for your love is kind, in your compassion, turn towards me’. We might also need to pray for the freedom to accept God’s compassion from whatever direction it comes.

Yet today’s parable more directly invites us to identify with the Samaritan. What Jesus said to the lawyer, he says to us all: ‘Go, and do the same yourself’, in other words, ‘Go, and be the Samaritan’. We all have the potential to make tangible God’s compassionate presence to others. The first step in doing that is to notice. It is first said of the Samaritan that he saw the traveller, he noticed him. Noticing is a small but very significant first step. Yet, it is not enough. The priest and the Levite also noticed, they too saw. What distinguished the Samaritan from them was that he allowed himself to be deeply moved by what he saw. Compassion involves that deep inner movement which comes from allowing ourselves to experience something of the pain of the other. That inner movement will lead to some form of outer movement, some appropriate action on behalf of the other. Such, according to the gospel reading, is the path to life.

And/Or

(iii) Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Children can be great at asking questions, as I am sure every parent here in the church knows. At a certain age, as they begin to think about what they are experiencing, one question can follow hot on the heels of another question. Endless patience can be called for before the barrage of questions. As we move from childhood into adolescence and into adulthood we do not cease to ask questions. The character of our questions can change. We may not ask as many questions, but the questions we do ask tend to be more probing and more significant. We often discover that the answers that we get to our questions generate more questions and set us out on a further search. A good teacher is someone who leaves people asking questions, who leaves them hungering to find out more, wanting to continue the voyage of discovery.

In today’s gospel reading, an expert in the Jewish law puts a question to Jesus, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Here was a question whose horizon was both this earthly life and the life beyond. The lawyer was asking, ‘What must I do now in this life to be sure of life beyond death?’ This is one of those fundamental questions that are asked, in one shape or form, in all of the great religious traditions. Yet, it is a very practical question, ‘What must I do?’ Being the good teacher that he was, Jesus pushed the lawyer to try and answer his own question, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ The lawyer’s own Jewish tradition contained the answer to the question that he was asking. However, the answer he found there generated yet another question that he again put to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ This second question the lawyer asks is just as probing and thought-provoking as the first question.

In day to day speech we tend to use the term ‘neighbour’ in a restricted way. Our neighbours are those who live alongside us. We consider ourselves fortunate to have good neighbours, people who will keep an eye on the house when we are away or to whom we can turn if we need help. We know the value of having good neighbours. We may also know the misfortune of having what are often referred to as neighbours from hell. Such neighbours can take a variety of forms, whether it is the neighbour who plays loud music until all hours of the morning or keeps dogs that bark morning, noon and night, or constantly blocks our driveway with their car. You are familiar with the saying, ‘good fences make good neighbours’, which betrays a rather suspicious view of the neighbour. Very likely, the lawyer who asked Jesus the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ would have understood the term ‘neighbour’ in a broader sense, as referring to all other members of God’s people, the Jewish people. The command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ was probably understood in that way originally.

In response to that second question of the lawyer, Jesus speaks the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the most striking of all Jesus’ parables. Having spoken that parable, Jesus gets to ask a question of his own. He asks the lawyer, ‘which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbour to the man who fell into the brigands hands?’ Jesus was asking, ‘Which of the three was a neighbour?’ This is a different question to the one asked by the lawyer, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Jesus is subtly suggesting to him that the more important question is, ‘What does it mean to be a neighbour?’ That is the question which is answered by Jesus’ parable. The Samaritan exemplifies what it means to be a neighbour. The neighbour is someone who gives himself or herself to the person in need, whoever that person is, without counting the cost. In a sense, Jesus is saying to the lawyer, the true neighbour never asks the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The Samaritan in the story who came upon the broken body of the Jew by the roadside did not pause to ask ‘Is this the neighbour I am now being asked to love?’ He simply did what was needed for this broken and vulnerable human being.

In the words of the parable, the Samaritan ‘was moved with compassion’, and the compassionate heart does not discriminate between neighbour and non-neighbour. The Samaritan is an image of Jesus himself, who, as the second reading tells us, is an image of God. Jesus, as God incarnate, is the compassionate one who befriends the broken, whoever they are, regardless of their race or creed. This is what it means to be a neighbour. The true neighbour does not make distinctions between people; the true neighbour does not consider some people more worthy of compassionate service than others. The true neighbour does not ask the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ because he or she considers every human being as potentially a neighbour. It is to such indiscriminate loving compassion that this morning’s parable calls all of us.

And/Or

(iv) Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

As you probably know, a group from the parish were in the Holy Land last month. On one of our trips we travelled down from the city of Jerusalem towards Jericho. We didn’t go into Jericho but bypassed it, as we were heading for the Dead Sea. I was reminded of that journey by the parable in this morning’s gospel reading. That parable speaks of a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. It was very obvious to us on that trip that you literally go down from Jerusalem to Jericho, as Jerusalem is 2,500 feet above sea level and Jericho is over a 1,000 feet below sea level. Shortly after we left Jerusalem, the landscape became more and more arid. Very quickly we were into what the gospels call the wilderness of Judea. This was not a desert in the sense in which we usually imagine the deserts of Arabia, but, rather, a hilly, rugged landscape devoid of vegetation. In Jesus’ time the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would have been no more than a fairly basic track. Going through rugged and inhospitable terrain, it was an ideal road for robbers to launch unsuspecting attacks on unfortunate travellers. Jesus’ parables were always true to life; they reflect the life-situation in which the people of that time and place lived.

The life-situation, in which we find ourselves today, 2,000 years later, is very different from that of Jesus and his contemporaries, and yet this evening’s parable can speak just as powerfully to us today. The parable Jesus speaks is in answer to a question posed by an expert in the Jewish Law, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ He wanted some help in defining who his neighbour was and who was not his neighbour. Who is the neighbour that he is expected to love? Most of Jesus’ contemporaries in Israel. would have understood the term ‘neighbour’ in the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself as referring to one’s fellow Israelite. They would have thought to themselves, ‘Every member of the people of Israel is my neighbour. We can draw a line around the people of Israel, the descendents of the twelve tribes, and say, “these, and these alone, are my neighbours”’. The story Jesus told really challenged that rather narrow view of neighbour. When the priest and the Levite passed by the broken man on the side of the road, the listeners probably expected the next person to come along would be a Jewish lay person. However, the third person to come along, and the only one to show compassion to the broken traveller, was a Samaritan. Jews would never have considered Samaritans as their neighbours; they would never have thought that loving the neighbour included loving the Samaritans. Yet, it was the Samaritan who showed what loving the neighbour really meant. The Samaritan did not ask where this broken traveller was from, what religion he was. He was simply a needy human being, crying out for a compassionate response from another human being. When Jesus finished the parable, he asked a question of his own of the lawyer, ‘Which of these three proved himself a neighbour?’ It is as if Jesus was saying, ‘who is my neighbour?’ is the wrong question. What matters is to be a neighbour, and those who live as good neighbours don’t ask the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The Samaritan was not preoccupied with the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ When he came upon the broken traveller, he did not ask, ‘Is this the neighbour I should love or not?’ It is likely that a man left half dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would have been a Jew. This likelihood was neither here nor there in the eyes of the Samaritan; he was a human being in need and that is all that mattered.

The expert in the Jewish law was concerned to make distinctions – who is my neighbour and who is not? Who am I obliged to love and who am I not obliged to love? The Samaritan in the story made no such distinctions. To that extent he was very much a Jesus figure. Jesus did not make distinctions either. He shared table with whoever invited him to share table; he offered God’s hospitality to all of humanity, within distinction. His love, his mission, was indiscriminate. In the words of the second reading, it embraced ‘everything in heaven and everything on earth’. In telling the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus put himself into the story in and through the figure of the Samaritan, the outsider, the other. Just as the Samaritan is a Jesus figure, we are all called to be Jesus figures. In the words of Jesus at the end of the gospel reading, we are all called to ‘go and do the same yourself’. Clearly, we have a special love for our family and our closest friends; there are emotional bonds there which cannot easily be replicated. Yet, beyond those bonds of natural affection, Jesus is calling us to be indiscriminate in the way we relate to others, especially to those in great need. The parable seems to be saying that the common humanity that unites us is a much more significant reality than the differences of nationality, race or religion that may distinguish us. If that simple but profound message was taken to heart by all, there would surely be less people left for half-dead by the roadside of life.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

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