July 14, 2025
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) on July 13, 2025 at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Psalm 69; Colossians 1:15-20; and Luke 10:25-37.
Today, we hear a familiar parable. If we find it to be a comforting story, we may be missing the point. Jesus challenges us to vastly expand our ideas of who in the world is worthy of our love.
When most of us hear the word “Samaritan” in any context, we immediately think of the good guy in today’s parable. But in Jesus’ time, Jews hated Samaritans. And by the time of Luke, things had gotten worse: Samaritans had massacred Jews, and Jews had massacred Samaritans. Jews would have bristled at the idea that a Samaritan could be good, let alone someone worthy to be loved.
So, when we get right down to it, the parable of the Good Samaritan is about confronting prejudice. Let us open our hearts widely today, trying to match the compassion of God. May God grant us mercy, even when we struggle to grant mercy to our neighbors!
For the members of Jesus’ audience, their Jewish identity was much more comprehensive than many of us realize. Their religious identity was Jewish. Their ethnic identity was Jewish. Their political identity was Jewish. So, Jews would have been upset to hear that a priest and a Levite – two people who embodied that triple-identity of Jewishness – did not treat a fellow Jew as their neighbor. But then to hear that an enemy Samaritan would take the time, endure the physical risks, and put his own money on the line because he was moved with compassion for a Jewish man? They would have been shocked, and perhaps even outraged, that Jesus would suggest that the Samaritan was the true neighbor.
Who would Jesus Christ say are our neighbors today? We can list whole categories of people who’d we prefer to think as being too different from us to be our neighbors: those who are struggling with homelessness, pain, illness, loneliness, or hunger, those who are discriminated because of their sexual orientation, or those who adhere to other world religions. In as multicultural a parish as Old St. Mary’s, we may harbor unspoken biases about the proper way to behave at Mass. But today, I’m thinking especially about the 43 million refugees who have fled their homelands and the 74 million refugees displaced within their countries of origin.1 This is not intended as a “political” homily: wherever we sit on the political spectrum, I intend to make us all uncomfortable!
Our immigration system has been broken for decades… but our government has failed to muster the political will to try to address the fundamental problems in all their complexity. The last serious attempt at comprehensive immigration reform was headed up by Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who died in 1996.
There are more than 123 million forcibly displaced people in the world,2 so there is no solution to this crisis that is going to make us feel good. On one hand, as the Church has affirmed since at least 1891, people have the right to cross international borders to better provide for their families.3 On the other hand, there are genuine concerns about people entering our country without undergoing a security screening and about the limits on how many people we can reasonably take in. Nor can we expect our country to singlehandedly resolve all wars, religious persecutions, or government breakdowns around the world that continue to displace people.
It is unreasonable to tell desperate people “to come here the right way, like our grandparents and great-grandparents did.” It’s unreasonable to compare today’s immigration system with that of the earlier times in our nation’s history. Today, unskilled people with no close relatives in the United States have no pathway to citizenship here. Those who cross into U. S. territory and then request asylum have always struggled to provide the necessary physical evidence to prove that they have been threatened by gangs or persecuted for their faith. It’s also unreasonable to say that these desperate people have the resources to fix the problems in their own countries without outside assistance. Lastly, it is unreasonable to say that we shouldn’t allow anyone to immigrate to the United States until after we build a 30-foot tall, 2,000-mile border wall, house all of our homeless veterans, or solve the American opioid crisis.
It also seemed unreasonable that Jesus made a Samaritan the hero of his parable, but that’s what he did. Our nation will never effectively address the immigration crisis until we see everyone involved as our neighbor: refugees desperate to provide safety to their families, unemployed U. S. citizens who feel threatened by the influx of new workers, politicians frightened of being perceived as being “soft on crime,” school teachers overwhelmed by over-crowded classrooms, and law-enforcement officials flummoxed by contradictory directives.
If we asked Jesus who is our neighbor today, I can imagine him responding to us with a parable. An Illinois farmer came to Chicago and was robbed, beaten, and left for dead in a dangerous neighborhood. A city alderman came by and saw the farmer, but she told her driver to keep going. A young businessman visiting town saw the farmer, but he told his rideshare driver to keep going. But a Salvadoran immigrant who had entered the country improperly, walking back from his night-shift janitorial job, saw the farmer, ran to get the help of his friends, loaded him in their truck, and took him to the Northwestern Hospital emergency room, knowing that such action would lead to a police investigation that could reveal their immigration status. Who was neighbor to the farmer? Does the answer to that question shock, and perhaps even outrage, us, as Jesus shocked and outraged his audience 2,000 years ago? Jesus’ parable makes it clear: God’s compassion has no bounds, and our own compassion should expand to include all of God’s children.
Can we solve all the challenges of immigration? No, but we as a nation could be much more compassionate than we have been over the past several decades.
As Moses proclaimed to the people in our first reading: “this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you…. No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts.” God commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. We have only to carry it out.
Thumbnail photo credit: NAKASEC under CC BY-NC 2.0 license
Notes:
- Statistics from UNHCR, the United Nations’ Refugee Agency. Accessed 12 July 2025. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- From Rerum Novarum, the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII considered to be the “Magna Carta” of Catholic Social Teaching. Promulgated 15 May 1891. ↩