Sunday Homily

Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J. 

July 13, 2025

The Parable of the Battered Traveler



"A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead.” So begins St. Luke’s telling of Jesus’ most challenging parable.

That hellish road where the mugging occurred was called the “Bloody Path”: 18 twisting miles of switchbacks through an arid moonscape; descending half a mile down from Mount Zion to the plain of the Dead Sea, near the lowest place on earth. Imagine going from Auburn to Death Valley in the distance of 20 miles. 

It was infested with highwaymen, packs of robbers who preyed upon lone travelers. Small wonder then, that a priest and then a Levite, a temple bureaucrat, passed on the other side of the road. They saw the battered traveler, mugged and bleeding in the ditch, and hurried along their ways. Broken, in the pit, down in the dumps, in the slough of despond, a mugged man baked naked in the hot sun as he waited for death. 

“But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight.” He stopped. He didn’t avert his eyes. He looked at a fellow traveler, not an enemy or an-other, not as one who believed in God differently than he did. A broken guy in a ditch, no more, no less than he. So he climbed off his donkey, and into the ditch. We don’t know what inspired him to stop. Had he himself been traumatized, victimized before in his life? Had he absorbed the scriptures in ways that the priest and Levite hadn’t? We don’t know. What we do know is that he approached the victim, hefted him up on his shoulder not worrying about staining his clothes with the battered man’s blood. He poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn, and cared for him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, 'Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.'

Now Jesus asked the scholar of the law “which of these three, in your opinion, the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan was neighbor to the robbers' victim?" He answered, "The one who treated him with mercy."
Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

Empathy and compassion are not the same as pity; Solidarity is not the same as charity. Pity is feeling at a remove. “Isn’t that too bad.” Empathy that flows from mercy, is seeing, not looking, feeling, entering into the lived experience of the other not as a client or a problem to be solved, but as a human being who is more like me than not. Solidarity is seeing and esteeming the other as neighbor, as a subject, not as the object of my charitable action. It’s getting down into the ditch with them, knowing that what the battered person there is no less a child of God than I am, no less treasured by God, even if they are despised or abused by those who should know better. 

The mystery of the incarnation of Jesus, God made flesh, God made vulnerable, God hanging on the cross, places Jesus in the same slough of despond, in the ditch alongside of us, bleeding too. What the Samaritan saw in the man battered by the robbers on the road to Jericho was the face of all the crucified, the crucified Son of Mary and mysteriously, at the same time, the face of every man and woman and child crucified by life’s troubles and sufferings, yet still worthy of reverence, care, and respect. 

Who is was neighbor to the robber’s victim? The scholar of the law responded: "The one who treated him with mercy."
Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

Listen again to the words of Moses, 

Listen again to your own heart: 

"For this command that I enjoin on you today
is not too mysterious and remote for you.
It is not up in the sky, that you should say,
'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us
and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'
Nor is it across the sea, that you should say,
'Who will cross the sea to get it for us
and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?'
No, it is something very near to you,
already in your mouths and in your hearts;
you have only to carry it out."

And Jesus says to us, "Go and do likewise."