HOW CAN ONE achieve the
good life? In a secular society where
people value wealth more than any other, it might be said that it is important
that one has to be included in the small circle of friends who have access to
the corridors of Malacañang, owns a mansion in a beach resort, is in possession
of a good number of dollar accounts in several banks both here and in
Switzerland, has investments abroad, and has a beautiful wife and kids studying
in Boston or in London. That would
probably be heaven on earth.
But first-century
Jews did not have that outlook. In the
Jewish social world at the time of Jesus, what was most important was to be
included in the new age, when the Messiah would come to establish a reign of
justice and love; in other words, to be part of God’s people. That is the sense of the lawyer’s question in
today’s Gospel (Luke 10:25 -27):
“Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v 25). In answer, Jesus pointed to him what was
contained in the Law. (The law was the
Five Books of Moses.) Of course, Jesus
and the lawyer were familiar with the Torah, and there was nothing in their
conversation about it that was unknown to them.
For the Jews, the Torah was the fundamental law of existence. It was the foundation of the entire Jewish
social and legal system, and of the way of life of the individual and
society. Understandably enough,
Josephus, the well-known Jewish historian, said that the whole life of every
Jew was dominated by law. The Torah
defined his Jewishness, gave him a system of values, and a sense of integrity. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the
Gospel, Jesus referred the lawyer to some injunctions in the law: “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ; Deut 6:5).
But is the observance of the Torah sufficient for one to
be part of the new age of the Messiah?
From the point of view of Luke’s community, such a claim cannot be
sustained. Following the Law is not
enough for the new age. To stress this
point, Luke tells us the vignette on the Good Samaritan. The Jews would have found the story stunning
because the hero is their hated enemy.
The Samaritans, who had bitter tension with the Jews, were descendants
of a mixed population occupying the land after its conquest by the Assyrians in
722 BC. They opposed the rebuilding of
the Temple Jerusalem Mount
Gerizim
But Jesus told
the story about a certain man who, on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, was
stripped, beaten and left half dead by bandits (Luke 10:30) precisely to bring
to the fore the insufficiency of merely knowing and obeying what the Law
commanded. He likely wanted to stress
that the priest and the Levite, who were religious and knew the Law, did
nothing for the man not because they were heartless or insensitive to human
misery, but because they were following the injunction that says: “Everyone who
touches a dead person, whether he was slain by the sword or died naturally or
who touches a human bone or a grave, shall be unclean for several days” (Num
19:16). They probably thought that the
poor man was dead, and the law, which required ritual purity of priests,
forbade them to touch a corpse, if they were to take part in the temple
service. In other words, these
privileged members of the Jewish society were observing the law by having nothing
to do with the man lying on the road.
With this parable Jesus says to us in effect that the Law
is not enough for one to be part of the new age. Only God’s word is. Though the Torah is a concretization of the
word of God in which the Law finds its roots, yet the word is not exhausted by
or confined to the law. To obey the word
of God, there are times when one has to transcend the law. God’s word—hearing and doing which
constitutes one’s real happiness (cf Luke 11:28 )—is present in the events of our life, in women and
men in the world. It is also present in
the man in need. Hence, one’s acceptance
or rejection of the needy is also his acceptance or rejection of the word of
God.
The parable of
the Good Samaritan gives us an example of what it means to go beyond what the
law says. Though he was regarded as a
person who does not properly observe the law, and for that very reason was
despised and ridiculed, yet his action on behalf of the man in need—dressing
his wounds, hoisting him on a beast, bringing him to an inn and caring for him
(Luke 10:34)—was a loving response to God’s word. He proved to be the neighbor of the man in
need. Unlike the lawyer who wanted to know
who, from the point of view of the Torah, was his neighbor, the Samaritan was
not interested in the fine points—the minutiae—of the law; he was more
interested in responding to God’s word in the man in need, which is the spirit
of the law. He went beyond the narrow
legal definition of neighbor. Luke is
thus giving us the impression that the lawyer’s question “Who is my neighbor?”
is entirely wrong. For a man who listens
to the word of God, the correct question should be, “To whom can I be a
neighbor?”, for every man in need is a neighbor, and God’s word to him. As D. Bonhoeffer puts it, “neighborliness is
not a quality in other people; it is simply their claim on ourselves. We have literally no time to sit down and ask
ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbor nor not. We must get into action and obey; we must
behave like a neighbor to him.” Thus,
this despised Samaritan is presented as a moral paradigm of one who lives the
word of God and, hence, who is truly part of God’s people.
In effect, contrary to the thinking of many Christians
that following rules will ensure one’s place in God’s kingdom, achieving
eternal life—which Christian religion is concerned with—is far from being all
about laws. God’s word cannot be wholly
identified with them. God’s word is
rather about life, about people in need who are our neighbors because God’s
word is uncomfortably present in them.
People in need—those who are wounded psychologically, who have no power
to lean on, who are forgotten by the dominant society, or who are even our
enemies—they are God’s word to us, inviting our response that does not issue
from the pressure of law’s demand. We
must therefore go beyond legalism. We
must transcend the thinking of our law-oriented institutions. If not, then we will feel comfortable even in
face of uncomfortable situation, because we rest on the mantle of law. If not, we can always assure ourselves that
we remain respectable and good people without doing anything concretely
commendable simply because we do not transgress any law at all. That is why the word of God challenges us to
look beyond the system we are confined to by seeing the word of God in other
people, places and things. Like the
person in need we encounter in the ordinary event of our lives.
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