The Gospel of the Good Samaritan is one of the most widely known and underestimated stories in the entire New Testament. This discourse between the lawyer and Jesus provides us an opportunity to enter more deeply into the reading and look more closely at our own hearts.

First, we should understand Jesus’ command to have a broad view of who counts as our “neighbor.”

Second, we need to try to grasp just how radical the idea of a “Good Samaritan” would have been.

Third, we can take these lessons and do a real checkup on our own hearts and minds.

Who is my neighbor?

Whenever the question is posed in today’s Gospel, I think of my friend and mentor Jim Wallis. Jim often jokingly accuses the questioner of not only being a lawyer, but “a Washington lawyer,” based on the nature of the question. He notes, “It is clear from the context that this lawyer was seeking to diminish or limit the scope of who counted as his neighbor.”

This question does not come from nowhere. Previous interpretations of the term “neighbor” often were limited to a specific community or nation. But Jesus provides an expansive view of “neighbor” that includes everyone. And as the story unfolds, Jesus surprises his audience by identifying neighbors that they never would have considered before.

Let us not restrict what God intends to expand. God is upending previous understandings of “neighbor,” to include all of us, and turns our focus especially to people who are in need.

The “Good Samaritan”

Jesus shocks his audience by saying who stops and helps and who does not. The priest and Levite would be respected members of the society—especially to the legal scholar who is questioning Jesus. The Samaritan would have been considered an enemy. They were deeply hated. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis writes that the “most offensive charge” that someone trying to discredit Jesus could hurl at him was the accusation that he was a Samaritan.

Wallis writes, “Jesus chooses the hated ‘other’ as his example of who our neighbor is. Jesus then describes the Samaritan taking actions that show us what it means to be a neighbor as the Samaritan reaches out to someone who was an ‘other’ to him with practical assistance, self-sacrifice, and risk on the dangerous highway of the Jericho Road.”

The term “Samaritan” and “Good” naturally go together in our language today; such a term would have been impossible to imagine in Jesus’ time. Jesus expanded the definition of “neighbor” in a radical way.

What does this mean for us?

What are we to do with this information? When Jesus tells us, “Go and do likewise,” it should come with a warning label: This will not be easy. When Jesus calls us forth, he is calling us to change. He is calling us to be bold and to take risks. So let’s journey together into the depths of today’s Gospel and into our own hearts and lives.

The Good Samaritan and Public Life

Living in the Washington DC area, I cannot help but think about the political implications of Jesus’ words. As Michael Wear often notes, there is no part of our life that is beyond the work of God—including our public life. By criticizing the passersby and elevating the action of the Samaritan he is telling us explicitly that we should prioritize the people who are in immediate need. In Catholic Social Teaching, we call this the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. Yet, our public life does not reflect this teaching very often. The dangerous competition to draw lines separating “us” and an unworthy “them” dominates our politics, and the public policy priorities of our leaders do not reflect an elevation of our neighbors in need.

In the past couple of weeks, Congress passed legislation that takes aim at the social safety net. As the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said, “The final version of the bill includes unconscionable cuts to healthcare and food assistance, tax cuts that increase inequality, immigration provisions that harm families and children, and cuts to programs that protect God’s creation. The bill, as passed, will cause the greatest harm to those who are especially vulnerable in our society.”

I am not making a partisan political point here, I am emphasizing the ways that we must rework our politics to be as inclusive as possible and to prioritize the people who are metaphorically sitting by the side of the road and have been robbed—this time by a system rather than an individual robber.

We have an obligation as Christians to speak out for—and stand with—the people who others might discard. The unborn, refugees and immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, people who are sick or nearing the end of their life—we cannot look away as our political system tries to pass them by.

We have a particular responsibility to speak out when our own political tribe takes actions that would restrict our sense of who deserves to be treated as a neighbor. We do great damage to the Christian witness if we do not speak out against dehumanizing language against immigrants and refugees. We cause great harm if we do not speak out against efforts to exclude the very youngest members of our human family from our definition of “neighbor.”

Systemic change is not enough

For his part, Pope Benedict XVI warned against relying on politics alone to provide care for our neighbors. We face the temptation to simply rest on having the “right” political solutions at a distance from the people whose lives are impacted, rather than being in community and solidarity with them. He wrote, “Love of neighbor cannot be delegated: the State and politics, though with necessary attention to welfare, cannot replace it.” He continued, “Love will always be necessary, even in the most just society,” this, “requires and will always require personal and volunteer commitment.”

We should take our political obligations seriously, but we should also recognize that the true work of building the kingdom of God and caring for all of our neighbors will always require person-to-person engagement, solidarity, and support.

Who are our Samaritans?

I want to close this reflection with two challenging questions. The first question is, “Who are your Samaritans?” Which groups of people in your life do you have trouble loving—as a group or individuals? Who do you think of as beyond God’s redemptive power, or unworthy of love? Is it a marginalized group—or a group that we struggle to understand? Is it someone who votes differently from you or worships differently from you?

Let us follow the words of Jesus here. Who is the one who treated the victim as a neighbor? “The one who treated him with mercy.” Our world is in desperate need of mercy and we, praise God, can be channels of mercy. We can move on from the “us” vs. “them” culture that dominates too much of the public and private spheres of our lives! We can do this by remembering the way that Jesus has laid out for us.

In his book Tattoos on the Heart, Fr. Greg Boyle puts this concept beautifully:

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”

Are we willing to stop along the way?

My final question is: Are we really willing to stop along the way?

In this story, Jesus is not actually presenting characters who have a choice between doing good and doing evil. The men who pass by the robber are not treating him with active disdain. In fact, they are faced with competing priorities. If a priest cared for this injured person, they may have become unclean and unable to carry out the religious services that they were on their way to perform. They actually made a rational—even defensible—decision by continuing on their way.

But Jesus is being clear: We are called to care for our neighbor in need—above other priorities. In a reflection earlier this year, Pope Leo said, “You cannot stay at a distance.” Compassion, he said, means being prepared to “even get dirty, perhaps take risks.” The Holy Father called on us to be “willing to feel the weight of another’s pain,” and to recognize ourselves in the wounded. Our compassion should drive us to disrupt our routine and re-prioritize our lives around our neighbor.

Pope Leo asked, “When will we, too, be capable of interrupting our journey and having compassion?” He continued, “When we understand that the wounded man in the street represents each one of us. And then the memory of all the times that Jesus stopped to take care of us will make us more capable of compassion.”

This is not as easy as it sounds!

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers a story from two Princeton professors who set up an experiment to mirror the story of the Good Samaritan. They interviewed seminarians about their motivations for their ministry and discussed different specific stories from scripture. Then they sent them on to another meeting in another building, telling some of the seminarians that they had some time before the meeting and telling others that they were running late and needed to hurry.

Gladwell writes, “Along the way to the presentation, each student ran into a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning.”

What factor best predicted whether the seminarian would stop and help? It was not their answers to questions on the questionnaire or their professed ministerial priorities. It did not even matter if they read the parable of the Good Samaritan before heading out the door. The greatest predictor was whether they thought they were running late.

Again, we have no evidence that any of these seminarians acted poorly toward the man. They were not manipulated into kicking him while he was down. They just had a choice to make: Get where they are going on time or help the person in need.

As Pope Francis reminded us repeatedly, indifference is the opposite of love, and a culture of indifference is a culture lacking mercy and dignity. “We cannot be indifferent to suffering,” he wrote in Fratelli Tutti. “We cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast. Instead, we should feel indignant, challenged to emerge from our comfortable isolation and to be changed by our contact with human suffering. That is the meaning of dignity.”

Pope Francis was right, and Pope Leo is right. When these teachings get hard, we can remember the love that God showed for us first. Jesus did not have to go out of his way to carry our wounded bodies out of the ditch; his journey’s purpose was to rescue us. He never, ever tires of meeting us in our own brokenness, our own loneliness, our own failures. As we approach the Eucharist this week, God is reaching out from beyond time and space to come into direct contact with us. He brings us to himself and carries us to safety.

What we have received, we should give freely to our neighbors. Let us “go and do likewise.”

Chris Crawford is our newest writer at Millennial.