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Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 14, 2013
10 AM & 5:30 PM Liturgies
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most well known selections in the entire New Testament. It’s right up there with the Prodigal
Son (both parables, incidentally, come from St. Luke’s gospel). Some people– and many preachers–think that the Good Samaritan story is one of the best guilt inducing selections in the whole Bible. Let me illustrate with a marvelously designed social science experiment.
Some years ago, two social psychologists conducted a rather famous experiment. They gathered a group of ministry students studying in a seminary and told them each had an assignment that had to be done in a very short period of time. They were to prepare a talk (or a homily or sermon) on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The thing was that the talks had to be prepared in a building on the other side of the broad campus. So all the students rushed out to get started.
Unbeknownst to the students, the researchers had hired an actor to play the part of a man in distress, slumped in an alley, coughing and obviously suffering.
Now remember, the students were to write their talk based on today’s
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gospel parable. So, what would happen, asked the researchers, when the students actually encountered a suffering man? Would they be more likely to be Good Samaritans themselves? Well, as a matter of fact, they did not.
Almost all rushed past the hurting man. One student even stepped directly over his body as he hurried to teach something about the Parable of the Good
Samaritan.
The researchers claimed to have learned something about something.
But the students learned how to feel even more profoundly guilty when they realized the results of the real experiment. Guilt was, you might say, a collateral outcome. I suspect for many of us, guilt is always a collateral consequence of hearing this parable. Would I walk by? Have I walked by?
Will I walk by again? Don’t answer too quickly just yet.
(Please forgive an aside for the academics in our midst. The title of the actual article deserves mention. It’s quintessential “academ-eze.” “From
Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in
Helping Behavior” [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 27,
100-108].) That’s a page-turning title if I ever heard one!
Some of you know from past experience that I tend to save some quirky reading materials to take on my summer vacation. Some of you know this
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because many of these books and articles eventually make their way into summer homilies. This year is no exception.
I read a fascinating book a few weeks ago by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University. He studies moral psychology, that is how we come to make good or bad decisions about what’s really right or wrong.
The book is called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by
Politics and Religion (N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 2012).
His thesis is simple if somewhat startling. He suggests that moral intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. We base our moral decisions on emotions far more than on reason. He says “Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and these first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning” (p. 2).
He uses a pithy image throughout the book. “The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.” In this image, the elephant is all of our emotions, our immediate intuitions about what is right and wrong, our “gut” reactions to situations. The rider simply justifies and provides later reasons for our decisions. One doesn’t move or direct elephants easily or quickly. Pity the poor rider in us all!
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There are always good, noble-sounding reasons, for what we do. But they are often not much more than justifications for what we already felt intuitively was the right thing. In a rather pessimistic summary of human morality, Professor Haidt suggests that self-righteousness (being in-tune with our “instincts,” our private “intuitions,”) is hard-wired into our DNA. We are only altruistic when it suits our elephant.
Let’s go back to the parable. So where does compassion come from?
Where does altruism start? And how does it start? These become very important questions. And Moses, of all people, seems to have the answer in this morning’s liturgy. This is Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites. And he says effectively: “Fear not your elephant. Your rider has a special switch that can be turned on at will. It is not a switch too high above any of you. It is not across the foreign sea. It is a switch written on your hearts. It is already in your mouth.” Just listen to God’s built-in default switch: love each other as neighbors and thereby love your God. That’s all God ever really commands. Just listen to that rider’s instruction and flip the switch!
Preaching last Sunday in Lampedusa, Sicily, Pope Francis urged much the same thing. Speaking of the 20,000 refugees who had died needlessly en route to this remote island, he urged the world to remember God’s switch.
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“Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters? No one! We all respond this way: not me, it has nothing to do with me, there are others who can, not me. But God asks each one of us: “Where is the blood of your brothers and sisters that cries out to me?”
Francis continues using today’s parable as a launch: “We all look upon the brother half-dead on the roadside, perhaps we think “poor guy,” and we continue on our way. We feel at peace with this. We feel fine with this; it’s none of our business.” He then speaks of the globalization of indifference and, in a stunning closing image, the Pope compares us all, himself included, to having “anaesthetized our hearts.”
This is not to induce guilt, but rather to remind us all of God’s default switch. It is in us all. It just needs to be remembered and switched on.
Who is my neighbor? I suppose a much shorter and simpler homily would have been to just sing Fred Roger’s opening song. It is a beautiful day in our neighborhood, in every neighborhood. So would you be?....could you be?....Please won’t you be my neighbor? Peace!
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