ANOTHER GOOD SAMARITAN

ANOTHER GOOD SAMARITAN

Last week’s Gospel, you might remember, involved the parable of the Good Samaritan.  For the Jews listening to our Lord, the very idea of a “good Samaritan” was somewhat of a contradiction.  Samaritans were the people who lived in the neighboring country of Samaria.  They maintained a breakaway religion from the Jews, a religion with its own traditions and holy places.  According to the Jews they were apostates and were supposed to be shunned.  How could there be such a thing as a “good” Samaritan?  And yet, our Lord uses a Samaritan in his parable to show how an apostate was a better neighbor to the poor man left to die in the street than the Jewish priest and Levite who passed him by. 

In this week’s Gospel, another “good Samaritan” makes an appearance.  In this case, he’s a leper, one of the ten lepers our Lord healed and the only one of them to say thank you.  Our Lord answered his act of thanksgiving, saying, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?  There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.” So again, the Jews are put to shame by the better behavior of a schismatic foreigner.  Our Lord then makes the extraordinary declaration that “thy faith hath made thee whole.”  After all, he was a Samaritan, he didn’t have the true Jewish faith.  So how could his false faith in the Samaritan religion make him whole?

The answer to this paradox lies in the true meaning of faith.  Ultimately, it’s faith in the true nature of God and the truths that he has revealed that is important, not a belief in any corrupted beliefs that a particular institution may have acquired.  This fact is of particular relevance to us who sit here today.  Time and again since Vatican II our Church leaders have given constant scandal to the faithful, openly displaying in their words and behavior that they have less faith than non-Catholics.  It’s one of the reasons so many Catholics have deserted the Conciliar Church either giving up religion altogether or in search of something “better”.  God will judge them fairly, given the failure of the shepherds to protect their flock.  It has happened before during the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth century, when many revolted against what they perceived as corruption in the Church.  They were wrong then, and these new apostates who flock to the enticing and oh so charitable mega Churches in their neighborhood are equally wrong now.  We can never replace corruption with a different kind of falsehood.

When the institution fails to provide the Truth of God, we have the obligation to seek that truth elsewhere.  But be very careful to make this distinction between the “institution” of the Catholic Church and the real Catholic Church, the Bride of Christ, the Mystical Body.  When we speak of the Catholic Church today, we should always have this distinction in mind—it’s our saving grace that we, who believe in the faith taught by the Catholic Church since its establishment by our Lord Jesus Christ, are members of that Church today, and that those who deny and compromise those teachings today are no longer members of the Church.  We have an enormous illusion in the world today, one where the Catholic Church appears magically to still exist in Rome, where a man in a white cassock is still almost universally recognized as the Vicar of Christ on earth, and which still makes its universal decrees to its members throughout the world.  The problem is that it truly is an illusion.   When those decrees forbid the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to take just one of hundreds of possible examples, we know immediately that this is not the actual Church of Christ.

What did the Samaritan leper of the Gospel do when he heard that Jesus was in town?  Did he stick with his false religion and seek healing from one of their “holy men?”  No.  He joined with the other Jews who recognized the true faith and the true bearer of that faith who alone had the power to heal.  We do the same today, and we should take courage from the example of this Samaritan who abandoned not the true faith, but the corrupted faith of the Samaritan religion.  We should take courage also from the other nine lepers.  They too recognized that their own Jewish high priests could not truly heal them, that they too had become too corrupted by power and greed to provide them with the healing and cleansing they sought.  They too recognized the true bearer of faith when he came to their town.  All ten of them, the nine Jews and the one Samaritan, lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”  And he healed them all.

Whether we returned to the true faith of our fathers from the Novus Ordo Church or from another non-Catholic sect, we were given the grace to recognize God in his true light.  And we did as the lepers did, and went out to meet him.  Here we are.  But are we now going to complacently accept where we are and do nothing more about it?  Or are we going to return to our Lord, here today in the Blessed Sacrament, just as truly present as he was in that village in the Gospel, and thank him from the bottom of our hearts that he has cleansed us from the filth of lies and false worship that exists, it seems, everywhere else?

This faith that we have had indeed made us whole.  We must give thanks for that, certainly, and then we must do more.  And Jesus said unto the leper, “Arise, go thy way!”  We must arise, not sit back comfortably in the dull routine of our daily lifestyle, and we must go our way.  What way is this?  Is it the way of preaching the truth to our neighbor, is it the way of teaching children, raising families properly in the right morals and faith?  Is it through moral activism, such as pro-life groups or the very opposite, through contemplative prayer, the Rosary, and adoration of God?  Maybe a mixture of some or all of the above or something else entirely, but somehow, in some way, we must obey our Lord who gave us the grace of being cleansed and healed from falsehood.  We must make our thanks to God for this great grace, and then we must arise from the communion rail and go our way, our own individual way to which God calls us.  We must follow our vocation wherever it leads.