Be merciful to the sinner

The parables are very often taken at face value, but all of them contain a deeper lesson about Salvation - the Good Samaritan is no different. At face value it is Jesus telling us to be kind and help others, but on a deeper level it is a beautiful reflection on God's love for us, and the virtue of Mercy. Its real lesson is 'be merciful to the sinner' by sharing the Faith with them. It is an exhortation to the spritual works of mercy.

Homily for XV Sunday in Ordinary Time (13 July 2025)

at St Joseph, Bugle Street, Southampton

'The Good Samaritan' by David Teniers the Younger (Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons)

Long before I even thought of becoming a priest, I wanted to be an actor. I spent most of my free time going from theatre to theatre to audition, rehearse and perform. Almost always, this was musical theatre, but my real passion, after visiting Stratford upon Avon with school and seeing an astonishing performance of Henry V at the Courtyard theatre, was for Shakespeare. I especially enjoyed playing in the tragedies, and I played Macbeth on no fewer three separate occasions, but the play I enjoyed watching the most was a comedy – Much ado about Nothing. And the reason I loved that play better than the others, is because of a single scene-stealing character, whose name is Dogberry.

Dogberry is the night constable, the chief of the citizen police, and what makes his character so funny is that he very often confuses his words and says exactly the wrong thing; instead of saying ‘we have apprehended two suspicious gentlemen’ he says ‘we have comprehended two auspicious gentlemen’ and he condemns a criminal he has arrested to ‘everlasting redemption.’ Every time he appears on stage, he says something that’s the opposite of what he really means – and we laugh both because of the double meaning and because of the other characters’ bewildered incomprehension. GCSE English lesson over – why is Dogberry and the much-lamented Shakespearean joke relevant to the Gospel this week?

Because very often Jesus says one thing and means something very different entirely but, unlike Dogberry, Jesus is doing it on purpose. Somehow, we often have this idea in our heads (probably from bad Protestant exegesis that wants us to take every line of the bible literally) that Jesus taught in parables so that people would understand Him better. In reality, Jesus taught in parables so that people who weren’t open to understanding His actual message wouldn’t understand it at all:

In Matthew 13:13 Jesus says;

The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’

He then, in vs.15, quotes from the prophet Isaiah;

‘For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart.’

So, Jesus taught in parables to obscure his real meaning from people who wouldn’t listen. Those same parables, today, are read by people who want Jesus to say only what they are prepared to accept, and listening they do not understand. Most of all, people want Jesus to be a secular teacher, a guru giving out sage life advice, rather than the unsettling idea that He might (in fact) be God made man coming to tell us something much more important.

None of Jesus’ parables gets this treatment more often and more egregiously, than the parable of the Good Samaritan. When we learn it in Catechism classes, and preach it from the pulpit, and teach it to schoolchildren, we take it at face value, we water it down, and we end up with Jesus telling us to just be nice to each other and help each other out. Now I can see the gears beginning to whir around in your heads, as you’re wondering, is Fr Edward telling us not to be kind and help each other out? Obviously not, of course you have to be kind and help people who are in need, but that isn’t the real point of the parable and if we cut it down to just that point we have missed the great wealth, the secrets of the Kingdom of heaven (Mt. 13:10) that Jesus has laid out in front of us.

So, if it’s not just about being nice, what is the Good Samaritan story about? For this, we have to crack open our great big book of the Church Fathers, and turn to the great fourth century Italian Bishop, Saint Ambrose of Milan. Although I am using my own words now to explain the parable, the interpretation of it is all St Ambrose.

Jesus begins with a man on a journey, but this was not just any journey; ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.’ Jerusalem, the Holy City, and Jericho, a pagan city. The journey the man is making is from the Sacred to the Profane – from somewhere good to somewhere wicked. The man is the whole of humanity – we have passed from paradise, lost by the sin of our first parents, and unless we turn around and head back in the opposite direction, we are headed for a very bad place indeed.

What happens, now our man has left Jerusalem? It appears he’s entered a rather rough part of the countryside: ‘he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead’ – he’s entered the country of the robbers, whom Ambrose reads as the devil and his fallen angels. Encountering him, they strip him – rob him of his dignity, and once he is stripped of his clothes they mortally wound him. This, Ambrose says is Original Sin – man stripped of the dignity of Original Justice (that is, the dignity of our close relationship to God) is wounded by the Devil and left to die.

It seems then that help is on the way – two characters come across the wounded and beaten man on the side of the road: a Priest and a Levite (that is, a teacher of the Law). But instead of helping, they pass by on the other side of the road. What is Jesus saying? Well, he’s talking about the Old Law – the teacher of the Law, the Levite, and the Sacrifices of the Law, offered by the priest, are unable to save the man – they pass right on by him.

Who does stop to help? A Samaritan. Now, there are two important things to note. First, Jews and Samaritans were mortal enemies – to a Jew a Samaritan and everything they owned were totally untouchable. Remember the story of the Samaritan woman Jesus meets at the well – she’s shocked that he wants to use her bucket for water, because drinking from a Samaritan bucket would have made him ritually unclean. Jews and Samaritans, as a rule, hated one another. The second important thing to note, is that almost any time Jesus tells a parable he puts himself into the story through one of the characters – this Samaritan is Jesus, and because Jesus is God, the Samaritan is also God.

So, what is Jesus saying – man, in the state of sin, wounded, pitiful, bleeding to death by the side of the road, is as unlike God, as separate from Him, as a Jew and a Samaritan. We were mortal enemies – we had nothing in common with Him. We had no reason to expect anything from Him, He had no reason to help us, any more than a Jew had expectation of help from a Samaritan.

And yet – what happens? I’ll switch to Greek for a moment:

καὶ ἰδὼν ἐσπλαγχνίσθη

and, having seen, he was moved with compassion.

Even, moved with compassion doesn’t quite do it justice – because that word esplanknisthe, is a word which means from the guts – gut wrenching compassion is probably the most accurate (if not literal) translation of that phrase. This is the crux of today’s Gospel – man and God were enemies, as bad as Jews and Samaritans, yet seeing us in our pitiful, wounded, state God takes pity – He is moved from his guts with compassion for us. He decides to act, to save wounded man. Our salvation is an act of great and painful compassion.

The Samaritan binds up the wounds with oil and wine – symbols of the sacraments of Baptism, Chrismation, and Holy Communion, and then carries Him to an Inn, to leave Him in the care of the innkeeper. He leaves two coins and charges the Innkeeper to look after the man until He comes back.

This is where we really get into it, because if the Samaritan is Jesus, and the wounded man is humanity as a whole – who is the innkeeper to whom he entrusts the care of the wounded man? St Ambrose answers – the Church. You and I are the innkeeper, and it is to us that Jesus has entrusted the whole of broken humanity so that we might care for them. The coins then represent the tools Jesus gives the Church so that we can discharge that office: he gives us sacred scripture and sacred tradition – the bible, and the sacraments of the Church.

At face value, the story is telling us to have compassion on the broken and the wounded, and when you scratch the surface of the parable and realise it’s about salvation you realise what brokenness and woundedness are. It’s not really about material suffering, but spiritual suffering – it’s about Sin. The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law have asked Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus has answered, in a roundabout way – have mercy on the sinner. In fact, at the end of the story, the Pharisee who asks the question has cottoned on to this deeper point – Jesus asks him who was neighbour to the man who fell among robbers and he answers ‘the one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus says – now you go and do likewise.

This leaves us with our challenge for the week. How do I show mercy like Christ showed mercy? How do I copy Christ, the Good Samaritan?

Mercy begins with the knowledge that every one of us is the wounded man at the side of the road – every one of us, through Sin, is separate from God. It means first acknowledging that I need mercy as much as the person sitting in the pew next to me, or the man who cuts me off in the Church car park after Mass. First, we’re all in the same boat.

Second, it means accepting that this Catholic faith we have been given, our two coins, are the only way that anyone will ever be saved from that pitiful state. It means understanding that sharing our Faith with others is an act of Mercy and that refusing or failing to share that faith is a refusal to be merciful.

How do we share our Faith? We don’t do it by joining those odd people with microphones who stand on the High Street blathering out random scripture verses to people who aren’t listening. We do it through the seven spiritual works of mercy – if you do nothing else this Sunday, go home and google them, because I guarantee you (if your attention span is anything like mine) you will forget them almost as soon as I’ve said them – here they are, the seven spiritual works of mercy:

1. Counselling the doubtful

2. Instructing the ignorant

3. Admonishing the sinner

4. Comforting the sorrowful

5. Forgiving those who have injured us

6. Bearing patiently with people who wrong us

7. (above all) Praying for the living and the dead.

If we can do nothing else, if we are too weak to counsel, instruct, admonish, and to comfort, if we are too angry to forgive and be patient, we can at the very least show mercy like Christ by remembering to pray for other people – especially the people we find most difficult or who have hurt us the most.

Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You go, and do likewise.’