Luke 10:25-37
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
July 13, 2025
This Sunday’s gospel reading, the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37, surfaced in the news recently. In a Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance, a conservative Catholic, aligned “America First” politics to what he said was a Christian concept of “ordered love”—a hierarchy of obligation that prioritizes family first, then neighbor, then community, then country, and finally, the rest of the world. Later, on social media, Vance asked pointedly: “Does [anyone] really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away?”
Vance’s ordering can feel intuitively right. Of course, we prioritize the people closest to us. It’s hard to argue against caring first for our children, our partners, our communities, giving what’s left over – if anything – to those out of sight and mind. But the gospel disrupts our intuitive answers; Jesus consistently calls us beyond what is expected or culturally acceptable. He doesn’t just reorder our obligations; he often explodes the entire premise of hierarchy.
In Luke 14:26, Jesus tells would-be disciples they must “hate” – hyperbole for “detach from” – their father, mother, spouse, children, siblings, even their own lives. He protests against the powerful and aligns himself with the poor and the vulnerable. He says things like, “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). Jesus calls us to reorder our hearts, not around physical proximity or bloodlines or geographic borders, but around compassion.
Jesuit Priest James Martin responded to Vance’s comments by publicly referencing Luke 10:25-37, writing, “This misses the point of Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan. After Jesus tells a lawyer that you should ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ the lawyer asks him, ‘And who is my neighbor? In response, Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who has been beaten by robbers and is lying by the side of the road. The man is helped not by those closest to him (a ‘priest’ and a ‘Levite’), but rather by a Samaritan.”
Martin reminds us that the priest and Levite, presumably higher on the “order of love,” were the first to walk away, while the Samaritan would be the last person responsible for the wounded man. Samaritans and Jews of Jesus’ day were not only strangers from different regions and religions, but historical enemies.
Parables aren’t strict instruction manuals. Good Samaritan-ship doesn’t mean we are to abandon all our boundaries or attempt to help everyone everywhere, which is impossible and potentially harmful. Rather, it’s about guarding our hearts from hardening against neighbors we don’t yet know and understand. It’s about considering need above affiliation when we encounter a person outside our intuitive circle of obligation. Through this teaching, Jesus suggests that when ‘ordered love’ becomes a rationalization for walking past suffering, it ceases to be love at all.
In A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutiérrez notes that the Greek verb in Luke 10:33, often translated as “he was moved with compassion,” literally means “his heart was melting.” In other words, Jesus doesn’t tell this story to teach an ethic of measured responsibility. He tells it to model a radical love that will not always be practical or align with what we’ve been taught about duty. But this counterintuitive empathy is the kind of love that reflects the heart of God.
We are to “melt” with compassion when we meet another human in need. To distance ourselves from such emotion by ranking their worthiness not only makes us less humane, but less human. Jesus leads us to the stranger, to the poor and the vulnerable, not to order our lives, but to save our hearts.
Questions for reflection on Luke 10:25-37
- Recall a time you came across a stranger in need on the side of the road. What do you remember thinking when you saw this stranger? What do you remember feeling?
- When have you found yourself prioritizing order, duty or logic over the feelings of your heart? What led you to this position, or this ordering?
- When have you found yourself melting with compassion? What effect did this compassion have on your heart?
View the corresponding Order of Worship for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost.
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