“How precious in the sight of God, and all people,
is a person who tries to live always from love." - St Thalassios the Libyan (648)
is a person who tries to live always from love." - St Thalassios the Libyan (648)
But oh how hard it is to live by love…
A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But oh how hard it is to live by love…
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
Jesus then gives his parable of the Good Samaritan – probably the most important parable that Jesus gives in the Gospel of Luke for it answers the question of how we are to love our neighbors – the man who was left to die by robbers, is passed by two religious men, but a Samaritan, an outsider, takes care of his wounds and takes him to an inn and is praised by Jesus for showing mercy.
Inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson conducted a experiment in the 1970s on time pressure and helpful behavior. They studied how students of the Princeton Theological Seminary conducted themselves when asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The students were to give the sermon in a studio a building across campus and would be evaluated by their supervisors. The researchers were curious about whether time pressure would affect the seminary students’ helpful nature. After all, the students were being trained to become pastors; As each student finalized his preparation in a classroom, the researchers inflicted an element of time constraint upon them, randomly. They either were told that they:
· had plenty of time, and were early.
· were on-time, but should head over now so as not to be late.
· were running late and needed to leave immediately.
As each student walked by himself from the preparation classroom to the studio, he encountered a ‘victim’ in a deserted alleyway just like the wounded traveler in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This victim (actually an associate of the experimenters) appeared destitute, was slouched and coughing and clearly in need of assistance. The seminarians were thus offered a chance to apply what they were about to preach.
Researchers were interested in determining if their imposed time pressure affected the seminarians’ response to a distressed stranger. Only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations helped the victim.
The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable… Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behavior, but being in a hurry decreased it… It is difficult not to conclude from this that the frequently cited explanation that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases is at least an accurate description.” (https://www.rightattitudes.com/2015/06/16/people-in-a-rush-are-less-likely-to-help-themselves/)
Oh how hard it is to live by love…
1) Time Constraints play such a role… are we too busy for our own & others good? Always rushing from one thing to another? Missing what lies before us?
2) Empathy also plays a role – do we see others through the eyes of mercy?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports on a real-life, modern-day version of today’s Gospel:
Theresa Todd is the single mother of two teenage boys, 15 and 17. She works as a lawyer for a city and county in West Texas. Theresa was driving home on a Texas highway one cold night in February when she saw three desperate Central American migrants waving frantically. At least one car hurtled by them. But for Theresa, compassion overrode fear and she stopped. The three were siblings: two brothers, ages 20 and 22, and their sister, Esmeralda, 18. The three escaped the violence in their native El Salvador, and then Guatemala, where friends were murdered and a gang leader wanted to make Esmeralda his “girlfriend.”
When Theresa found them, Esmeralda was suffering from starvation, dehydration and a potentially fatal syndrome affecting her kidneys. Theresa invited the three to warm up in her car and then began frantically texting friends for advice on how to get medical care for Esmeralda. As she texted, a sheriff’s deputy and a Border Patrol officer pulled up behind her car. Theresa was detained in a holding cell for three hours, her possessions confiscated. Esmeralda was hospitalized for four days, and she and her siblings are now in ICE custody.
By stopping to help a stranger, Theresa Todd may have saved a life — but her compassion got her arrested. It’s unclear if she will face federal charges for assisting undocumented immigrants, but Theresa has no regrets:
“I’m a mom, and I see a young man who looked the same age as my teenage son. And if my son was by the side of a road, I would want someone to help.” The whole experience “was totally surreal — especially for doing what my parents taught me was right, and what I learned in church was right, which was helping people. So finding myself in a holding cell for that, it was hard to wrap my head around . . . I’m simply a mom who saw a child in need and pulled over to help . . . ” [The New York Times, May 15, 2019.]
Oh how hard it is to live by love…
The Good Samaritan dwells in our midst in the selfless kindness and unheralded generosity of good people — people like us — who put humanity ahead of self-preservation (and, in Theresa Todd’s case, even arrest), who see beyond labels and stereotypes to recognize anyone in need as a child of God, who believe that it is God calling them to cross the road to help someone lying in the ditch.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is the embodiment of the Gospel vision of humanity as a community of “neighbors” — male and female, rich and poor, able and challenged — sharing the same sacred dignity as sons and daughters of the God of all that is good…
The priest and levite passed on by, but the Samaritan, the other did not. Who will we be in the parable? Will we show mercy and love or are we too rushed (or too blind) to help those in need?
“How precious in the sight of God, and all people,
is a person who tries to live always from love." - St Thalassios the Libyan (648)
is a person who tries to live always from love." - St Thalassios the Libyan (648)
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment