15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

My neighbour

 Lk 10,25-35

        When we like acquaint with somebody, we usually start by intelligent questions. We are only interested to create an opportunity and to discuss, although we don’t fan the argument. The scribe did the same. He asked Jesus how it is possible to enter into the Paradise. The answer was very simple:”Do you know the catechism? What does it say on this?” He answered: “I do. It commands to love God and the neighbour”. Continuing playing intelligent people, he asked:”Who is thus my neighbour?”. He gave Jesus the opportunity to tell one the most beautiful parable – The good Samaritan- which is used in many languages to indicate the one, who does good actions of charity without looking for a reward and without making differences between people.

        The parable is a modern one. Our technological society builds up barriers. Mobiles, computers, face book and msm unite people and annul distances. However people suffer solitude and poverty all the more. Many social offices are only a caste requiring indifference towards the needy ones and arrogance towards those waiting for an answer, care and consideration. Those in authority often look at the poor people to clash them down in their misery. We do experience every day the incapacity to help our neighbour, because we don’t like be involved and to meet perhaps uneasy situations. Sometimes social laws prevent us to care for need people.

        So we admire those who work according to their own thinking in doing good to people regardless any other social behaviour. They do everything on their own responsibility. The little thing, that a man does, is worth to create conditions to rehabilitate the miserable ones. Human relationship works out the condition to improve a rehabilitation process.
In any case we have to abandon any sentimentalism. Relationship in a multidimensional and technical society demands that people treasure the human dignity over all. We have to discover again the meaning of the word “neighbour”. Its social context creates a zone of humanity, that makes everyone close and important people. It doesn’t plead for a miracle or to abolish sickness and unbearable situations. It certainly asks to be close as a mother giving hope by her own incapacity to solve the drama.

        Mother Theresa was not interested to solve the problem of poverty. She cared to be by a dying old man, to whom she could not promise any recovery. She gave him a sign of her heartfelt love impossible to stop loving. The ocean too is made up by drops of water and each of them is worthy. St. Theresa of the Little Child knew her personal Christian call after severe spiritual inquiring. She wanted to be the love in the heart the Church. She walked by the “little way” of the everyday love, by loving her co-sisters and the hardship of daily love. She let to be involved in the love so as to love not what she wanted to but everybody who asked her to be loved.

        Our relation with people measures our personality. We need to be conquered by the experience to love everyday more than to look for any other goal. We have also to overwhelm the humanism of love. Our Christian relation with people springs from Jesus Christ, who loves every man and woman as to give his life for each one of us.


Fr. Tiziano Pegoraro,

a missionary priest at St. Ladislav Church in Bratislava,

Bratislava, 11 July 2010