Neighbour

 

Iso-mandala No. 152 (October 2020)

 Neighbour 

Reflections for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, the 13^th of July 2025, in the pew notes at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.  Written by Philip Harvey. 

Americans have been in the news lately. Their Vice President, a self-proclaimed recent convert to Catholicism, has shared his ideas about who is our neighbour. "There is a Christian concept,” he contends, “that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world." This concentric, even solipsistic, vision of our relationship with others went viral, with many prompt and effective antidotes soon on offer for such a virus. 

Perhaps, like the lawyer in today’s story of the Good Samaritan, the Veep wanted to justify himself. Hard to say. In his hierarchy of compassion, a neighbour appears to be someone who lives next door. Loving such a person would be more important than loving anyone else in the community, or the general vicinity, to follow his logic. Charity begins at home, but doesn’t seem to leave the front gate. Priority is given to ‘fellow citizens’, which we construe to mean Americans but not Canadians, or other people. Way down the list is “the rest of the world”, which is a lot of people, including the Good Samaritan. After all, he is the other, outside the pale, the one no one mentions.

 Meanwhile, another American has recently been proclaimed the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIV, when this worldview was declared last January, took no time rebuking the recent convert, albeit as simply one Robert Prevost: ”Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” He provided a link to Pope Francis’ response to the statement, written in the first instance to his bishops: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” Francis said that the true ordo amoris must be informed by meditation on the parable of the Good Samaritan and built as “a fraternity open to all, without exception.” 

 Viral means thousands of words, good, bad and indifferent. While the common sense in Luke’s parable, in the New Revised Standard Version, takes a small 289 words. It is Jesus who inverts our conditioned thinking. The two who would, you’d think, rescue the victim and care for him, don’t; while the one who should not, even must not, does. Which is where we might find ourselves, any one of these characters, heading off down our own Jericho road.