Which of these do you think was a neighbor?
In the earliest days of the Christian community its members expected Christ’s return (after his resurrection) within their own generation or the next. In other words, this world would end and heaven would be our new home forever. In other words again, Jesus would come and sweep us up beyond the clouds into life without sin, death, even gravity.
But biblical scholars detect in the writings of St. Luke (whose Gospel passages we read this year) a different take on the future. You remember that scene at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles? Jesus is about to ascend into heaven and the disciples ask what’s going to happen now. And Jesus says, It is not for you to know about dates or times. But you . . . bear witness for me in Jerusalem, and all over Judea and Samaria, and away to the ends of the earth.
Well that’s going to take time! If anyone thinks Jesus is coming soon, he had better think twice. Indeed, after Jesus ascended on high, two mysterious men in white (angels?) say to the disciples: Men of Galilee, why stand there looking up into the sky? [Jesus will return but you have a job to do – make his message known throughout the generations to come.]
Which meant: you’ve got a community, a worldwide community to build – a universal church – that will need order, rules, sacraments, leadership (therefore hierarchy?), varieties of service, buildings, even basilicas, specialists, centralization . . . in a word: institutionalization. Scholars see in Luke’s writings the catholicization (organization) of early Christianity so that it can endure and spread over centuries of time. He set the church up to exist in this world even while contemplating the next.
Whereas those early Christians, who expected the world to end within their lifetime, were eager to leap out of this earthly world with both feet, Luke’s institutionalized church kept one foot in this world for the long haul while maintaining a foothold on heaven as well. Which may explain why the church, as our world has changed politically, technologically, secularly, tragically, has often been ambivalent about how to deal with earthly things – until the theologians leading us into Vatican II began to suggest that our Gospel tradition, if read in depth, advocates our residing and behaving with both feet in this world, with total commitment to the here and now (even as God behaved by choosing to become fully human among us).
The parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates such an extravagant commitment. E. E. Cummings translated this parable into a poem that begins: a man who had fallen among thieves. The victim is obviously drunk and therefore was vulnerable to assault, endowed with a changeless grin. whereon a dozen staunch and leal / citizens did graze at pause / then fired by hypercivic zeal / sought new pastures . . . The soiled clothes of the victim also turned them off. Not so the poet who concludes: brushing from whom the stiffened puke / I put him all into my arms / and staggered banged with terror through / a million billion trillion stars.
I think the poet is speaking about the kind of terror, the awe, the dread that comes of our acting in so much more a godlike way than we normally do. Such a challenge can almost scare us to death.