In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the traveller who was beaten and left half dead is helped not by those closest to him, but by a complete stranger, writes David Schütz.
At the end of Jesus’ story, the Samaritan takes out two denarii and says to the innkeeper: “Look after him, and when I get back, I’ll reimburse you for anything extra you have to spend on him” (Luke 10:35). Following his spontaneous response to a chance encounter, the Samaritan now makes a free commitment to bind himself to his new Judean neighbour in a relationship of ongoing care.
My wife and I care for an elderly widow who came into our lives by chance 15 years ago. Raised in an orphanage in London and married to a Hungarian war refugee, she has no children or any other family. Over time, we became her family. She now has advancing dementia, and we are working to arrange a future care home for her.
Sometimes chance (or God’s providence) brings us face to face with someone in need to whom we have no family or social obligations, but we are called to care for them in the words of Jesus: “Whatever you did for one of these least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me” (Matt 25:40).
The US Vice President, JD Vance, recently gave an interview to Fox News in which he said:
“There’s this old school (idea) — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.”
The context of this statement was, of course, the debate over the US Government’s immigration policy. Mr Vance was proposing this “Christian concept” to support President Donald Trump’s stated policy to put “America First”.
In reaction, thousands of people around the world — Christians and non-Christians — used the social media platform X (Twitter) to debate the Christian ethics and obligations of love. Father James Martin SJ tweeted:
“Actually no. This misses the point of Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37). The man is helped not by those closest to him (a ‘priest’ and a ‘Levite’), but rather by a Samaritan. So Jesus’ fundamental message is that everyone is your neighbour, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbours’.”
Justifying himself, the Vice President (who was baptised into the Catholic Church in 2019) responded: “Just google ordo amoris (order of love).” And so, St Thomas Aquinas was drawn into the debate.
In his Summa Theologiae (IIa, 26), Aquinas asked the questions: “Should we show more love to those who are connected with us by ties of blood?” and “Should we show more love to one neighbour than another?” In scholastic theology, Aquinas’ answer came to be called the ordo caritatis (order of charity): our first duty is to love God, then our own soul (= desire our own salvation), then our neighbour, and only then our own body (our physical needs). Aquinas also ranked our responsibility to different ‘neighbours’:
“In matters pertaining to nature, we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.”
As his authority for this, Aquinas quotes Aristotle rather than Scripture. The same idea can be found in Confucius. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites the “order of charity” twice (§2197, §2239), in both cases in reference to the Fourth Commandment – a tradition we have inherited from Judaism. So is this “family first” idea particularly “Christian”? And does it in any way lessen our obligation to the poor and the stranger?
In fact, in his argument for an ordo caritatis, Aquinas had taken as his starting point something St Augustine had written centuries earlier:
“Further, all people are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time or place or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you (On Christian Doctrine, I:28).”
Drawing on accepted social philosophy, Aquinas took this to mean we should care first for those to whom we are closely connected by kinship or social ties, but that isn’t what Augustine said. When the Samaritan was travelling on the road to Jericho, an accident of “time or place or circumstance” brought him face to face with an injured Judean. At that point, this Jew became his closest neighbour, despite the fact that he was a complete stranger and belonged to a rival ethnic group.
Years ago, I came across a book by theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002) called The Rivers North of the Future. In it, he comments on the story of the Good Samaritan:
“In antiquity, hospitable behaviour, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawing around those to whom I can behave in this way. … (In the story of the Good Samaritan we learn) that we are creatures that find our perfection only by establishing a relationship, and that this relationship may appear arbitrary from everybody else’s point of view, because I do it in response to a call and not a category, in this case the call of the beaten-up Jew in the ditch. … This ‘ought’ is not, and cannot be reduced to a norm. It has a telos. It aims at somebody, some body; but not according to a rule.”
When “time or place or circumstance” puts before us someone in need, we don’t have time to dig out a copy of the Summa or even the Catechism to find out what our obligations are to this person or where they rank in the “order of love”. Rather, when we come across a body on the road of life — a person in need that God has placed in close connection to us by his providence — then we hear the voice of Jesus saying to us: “Whatever you do for this new brother or sister of yours, you do it for me.”
