We celebrate Family Day this weekend. Today’s gospel is on the Good Samaritan. Does the Good Samaritan have anything to say to our Family Day?Let us begin by taking a glance at the First Reading. It is the farewell speech of Moses. In that speech, he encourages his people to commit themselves to the Lord through the observation of His commandments. A distinctive mark of the Lord’s commandments is that they are not found in heaven nor over the seas. Instead, they are weaved into every pulsating fibre of their hearts. This fact helps us to understand better the Samaritan for he embodied the commandment that the love of God must flow into the love for neighbour.
What makes for a Good Samaritan?
First, the parable lends itself to an anonymous interpretation of what it means to do good. We do not know who he was apart from the fact that he was a Samaritan. In a way, this restricts our thinking on doing good to some kind of anonymous applications. In the context of the family, often the result is we treat other people better. After all, that is one of the criteria of being a Samaritan—being kind to strangers. But, what about the spouse, the parents, the children or the siblings? We read a lot about violence in public places but we seldom hear of violence—usually the non-physical type—at home. Why? Familiarity. It makes us think nothing of what we do. When what we do becomes familiar, it has a way of receding into an unquestioned background. Thus, familiarity may make the practice of kindness a little more difficult because we generally become less tolerant of people whom we know or whom we take for granted. This is the basis for saying that a prophet is not accepted in his own country.
But, is the family not the primary place for the practice of love? The whole idea of doing good to strangers is quite appealing. It is certainly more glamorous to feed someone 10000 km away. The nameless soul who receives our aid is grateful and we get to feel good about what we have done. What is tougher is to feed the familiar good-for-nothing beggar who bugs us for the RM10 every Sunday. The “known” face becomes a challenge to our doing good because we have this idea that this “known” person can and should pull his or her life together. In a way, nameless charity is always easy but it is a challenge to do good when it is not appreciated, as in the known beggar who should appreciate that he is well-bodied and therefore should get a job and be less dependent. It takes a lot more out of us to be nice to an unappreciative person.
The whole idea of what makes for a Samaritan is now turned upside down. For Christ, when He described the Good Samaritan, He was speaking about love which was not restricted to just some nameless good deeds but instead challenged us in the way we think about doing good.
There is more to good than just being labelled a good Samaritan. Imagine he has been immortalised for this seemingly random act of kindness. In a way, his act of kindness is magnified when contrasted to the other two—the priest and the Levite, both men professionally associated with religion and naturally, they were expected to perform the obligated corporal act of mercy by coming to the aid of the injured man. While one would logically expect these two men to be the first to rush to the aid of the injured man, I believe that there is a loss in translation there.
Has it ever occurred to us, that the act of the Samaritan was good not because he attended to the injured man? Perhaps what he did was nothing compared to what he had been doing all his life. That, he had been a good man all his life and that was why he attended to the injured man.
Thus, we see that the goodness of the Samaritan knew no boundary. His goodness was not better or more magnanimous or generous because the Jews and the Samaritans were bitter enemies. He helped simply because the habit of a good man was to help. Some people fail to realise that goodness is a habitual discipline that requires practice.
So, we now enter the realm of the family. Why? The family is the playground of the good and as such, it is the basic unit of society for good. Now you understand why the Church stands so firmly on the definition of the family. Within the matrices of relationships at home, we learn what it means to be good and to embrace the good habitually. The Samaritan did not start his journey thinking about the good that he can do. We may think of him as a hero but to him, it was the right thing to do. A lot of times, people do good instinctively without giving it a second thought. And so, Moses was right in the First Reading. The commandments are not up in heaven nor are they over the seas but they are coded into the very DNA of the human heart. The family is the primary place for the commandments of God to be put into practice because the family is the natural home of the heart.
Our country is in such a dire strait and we lament the lack of good men and women. Where do good men and women come from? They certainly do not come from thin air nor do they grow out of trees. Remember 8th March when we were swept by the euphoria of change? But what have we now? Discouragement? The truth was we had frogs leaping from one camp to another and they brought with them their diseases. Should we be discouraged? No. But, it would be good to remind ourselves that good men and women usually [1] come from families where kindness is practised, respect is fostered, honesty is embraced and integrity is lived. Goodness comes from a long line of practice. And it has to start when we are young and from a good home. The anger we feel for our country going to the dogs will be misplaced if we do not look into the quality of our family life. The world is as imperilled as our families are… the more broken our families are, the more broken the world will be.
We understand the need for discipline when it comes to talents. In order to develop the talents of our young, we teach them to embrace sacrifices. Think of doing good as a talent. Teach our young to embrace the sacrifices that come with being good. There is no such thing as being good without sacrifices. Here, we need to make the distinction between feeling good and being good because they are not the same. Being good comes with practices and sacrifices and it usually does not feel good. So, if you think that Sunday School is the place for your children to learn to be good, then you will be disappointed. Today, the Good Samaritan invites us to re-look at our families and how we can make our home a potent place for good to come. The world is in serious need for this force of goodness.
FOOTNOTE: [1] I am careful with the choice of words. First, the word “good” does not mean that people who come from “broken” families cannot change. Second, the word “good” does not mean perfect… There is no perfect family. There are more or less dysfunctional families. In this spectrum, we hope to fall closer to the “functional” part of the continuum.
