“But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ ” — Luke 10:29

One thing that has never been in question when it comes to Gospel teaching is the commandment — part of the “greatest commandment” — to not only love and care for our neighbors, but to love them as we love ourselves. It’s not easy to live out day to day. It requires a sacrifice that sometimes pushes up against our human tendency toward self-preservation and comfort. I speak from the personal and not just the universal here. Caring for and loving strangers, those in the shadows of our society, is part of what makes the Gospel so radical. It was radical when Jesus preached it; it is radical today.

Jesus answers the above question in the Gospel of Luke with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, an impossible-to-ignore story about the righteous who choose to do the wrong thing and the one who is despised by society but does the right thing. We like to imagine ourselves in the role of the Good Samaritan, remembering times we may have donated to a food drive or helped out at a soup kitchen or maybe even literally helped someone up off the ground. But we don’t have to dig too far to uncover the fears and built-in biases that often prevent us from committing ourselves fully and without condition to what Jesus demands.

In our society today, we can look around our own towns, cities and larger country and see the many men, women and children who are figuratively — and in many cases quite literally — on the side of the road in need of mercy. We take cover in the broad brushstrokes that attempt to cast all of the marginalized as criminals and cheats. We convince ourselves that our willingness to look away is grounded in preservation of orderliness. Like the priest and the Levite in the parable, we rush by, clutching our convictions and hoping someone else will fulfill the Gospel mandate for us. But what if we are the people we are waiting for?

Pope Francis, in a recent letter to the U.S. bishops, said: “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. …The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ‘ordo amoris’ (order of love) 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.”

The pope’s powerful message calls us back to who we are not just as individual Catholics but as a universal Church, as the Body of Christ at work in our broken world today.

We take comfort in Jesus’ shared humanity with us, in his understanding of our suffering. For many of us who live with the privilege of security and relative safety, it’s often easy to overlook Jesus’ experience, along with Mary and Joseph, as a refugee fleeing violence, as displaced people dependent on the kindness of strangers in a foreign land. If we see that as just a story and not a fundamental truth in our history, it allows us to look away from those who are similarly persecuted.

What would Jesus do? Well, we don’t have to imagine; we know. And not only do we know what Jesus would do, we know what Jesus expects us to do:

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:36-37)

This column first appeared in the Feb. 20, 2025, issue of The Evangelist.
Photo copyright Mary DeTurris Poust, Rome 2010

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Jesus understands that the Way can be challenging, which is how we get to the apparent non sequitur: “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” We might read that line, wonder at its meaning and placement, and simply move on, but it has meaning for us today. If we say that we will follow Jesus wherever he leads, do we understand that it will not be easy, that we too may find ourselves with nowhere to rest our heads?

We don’t get salvation without sacrifice, without embracing the radical—letting the safety nets drop away and trusting that God is the only security measure we need.

Mary DeTurris Poust, “Jesus Asks for Radical,” from the June 2022 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021). Used with permission.

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Jonah’s anger and attitude sound all too familiar. He is beside himself with frustration over what God has not done for him, his rage so intense he says he’d be better off dead. Even if we’ve never said it out loud, there’s a good chance we’ve felt that kind of desperation at some point in our lives.

Maybe our rage was warranted to a degree—a loved one claimed by cancer, a job claimed by downsizing, a home claimed by flood. For far too many people, anger and rage, even against God, seem reasonable in light of the hand they’ve been dealt. And yet the people who’ve been put to the greatest test are often the ones least likely to make a fuss. Faced with monumental loss or suffering, they cling to God, knowing the only way out is through.

For many of us, however, desperation grows out of far less dramatic life events, maybe even minor daily annoyances. We shake our fist at God’s unfairness, like Jonah railing over the withered gourd plant. But do we have reason to be angry?

We cannot reap what we do not sow. Until we recognize God as “gracious and merciful” during both the joys and sorrows of our lives, we are likely to be beaten down by the burning winds of our daily struggles. The choice is ours: arid desert or life-giving waters, seething anger or boundless love, living death or life without end.

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The deacon who preached the homily at Mass this weekend used a story told by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to make his point. It was the story of a prophet who, of course, preached what people needed to hear but what they didn’t always like to hear — repentance and reformation and righteousness — and little by little his audience disappeared. Some even turned on him.

One day someone asked the prophet why he continued to preach when it was clear that no one was listening. He replied that although at first he preached in hopes that he would change others, now he preached in hopes that others would not change him.

Whammo! That got my attention. That’s exactly where I feel I am these days. Much of my “preaching” feels like nothing more than the conversations I have with myself in my own head or, on many occasions, in my own office or kitchen as I’m padding around checking emails or washing dishes.

I try to share my journey here whenever I can. Sometimes that means photos of kids doing silly things or close-ups of my latest cooking creations, but often it means divulging a little piece of my soul, which is never easy and always scary. I feel a bit like that fuzzy caterpillar in the photo at the top of this post, inching his way along the gravel road of a horse farm. Talk about putting yourself out there. But sometimes that’s what you’ve got to do.

Like over the past two weeks. Several times I inched my way out into a sometimes-hostile world to talk about my political position of “independent” and what it means to me, to discuss the obvious connection between vegetarianism and being pro-life, and to “let my pro-life freak flag fly,” the most scary of all my posts because I knew how much some would hate it. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Squish.

And I have to admit there was part of me that wondered why I would do that to myself. Why open myself up for the inevitable backlash — whether through nasty comments or the silent treatment? What’s the point?

When I heard our deacon tell the story about the the prophet (And, trust me, I know full well I’m not a prophet, so, please, no nasty comments about that!), it really hit me like a ton of bricks because I think that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been preaching my message, letting my freak flag fly in order to keep myself from being changed by the world around me. Even if I am preaching for no one but myself, I guess that’s enough.

So I’m willing to take the occasional criticism, silence, or outright unfriending if that’s what it means to be true to myself and to remember what it is that guides my core and keeps me centered in a world increasingly off balance.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” — John 1:5

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