Good Samaritan’s neighborly love is our model

The oxygen is thin.
    

In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War devoured and buried young bodies in the jungle, the four parties seeking an exit strategy from a war rending the soul of America haggled for months, using power as the coin of the realm.
    

Before substantive talks could begin, the U.S., South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong) had to agree on the location and ground rules for the peace talks. 
    

Even the shape of the conference table in Paris consumed months of preliminary negotiations, with each side jockeying for a power position. Should the table be triangular, rectangular, oblong, diamond-shaped, oval, round or semi-circular?
    

Finally, under Soviet pressure, the North Vietnamese accepted a 15 1/2-foot round table, the same table built for negotiations that never happened in 1960 between Dwight Eisenhower and Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev over the future of West Berlin.
    

So, is it any wonder today why the world, as we know it, can’t sit down and talk about George Floyd and 400 years of unread and unrequited history, which includes footnotes on the crimes of driving while black, jogging while black and breathing while black? 
    

The history of George Floyd and the legions who came before him is as clear as the lived experience of every African American who has ever walked into a high-end retail store only to be shadowed  by a clerk as a potential shoplifter.
    

The history of George Floyd et al is as opaque as the dismissive logic of many whites, who simply prefer to remain tone deaf to social sin, unaddressed, and fall back on Old Faithful: “Can’t they just get over it?”
    

When the world is going 1960s crazy – when legitimate cries for justice and accountability for George Floyd are hijacked by those looting and burning – actions that mock and ultimately obscure the substantive issues on the table about the urgent message and sacred meaning of Floyd’s life and death – what can we do as Christians?
    

Let’s sit down in the cave for a moment with Jesus the Storyteller. There is no round table in the cave, but we are seated in a circle around him.
    

A scholar of the law – for a minute, let’s think of him as the mayor of a smoldering city – asks Jesus a question with mixed motivations, one part genuine interest, one part self-preservation: “Beyond loving God with all my heart and soul and strength and loving my neighbor as myself, what can I do to inherit eternal life? After all, Jesus, who do you say is really my neighbor?”
    

And then Jesus, the Word himself, tells us a story about a man who fell victim to robbers as he walked down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
    

The 18-mile route from Jerusalem to Jericho is an arid, hilly stretch, with the topography providing easy cover and escape for those bent on highway robbery. The traveler in Jesus’ story is beaten and left “half-dead.” 
    

The narrow, winding road makes what happens next even more immoral. The priest and the Levite who pass by the bleeding victim almost certainly would have had to step over his body. They could not have missed him, except they chose to.
    

Then, Jesus says, a Samaritan came upon the man and “was moved with compassion at the sight,” salving his wounds with oil and wine and carrying him on his donkey to Jericho, where he stopped at an inn and paid the innkeeper two days’ wages to care for him while he was away, with the promise of paying any additional charges in the future.
    

To a Jewish audience, Jesus’ answer to “who is my neighbor?” had to be both astounding and uncomfortable. Jews and Samaritans for centuries had hated each other, not unlike Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
    

Who, Jesus asks the scholar, was the victim’s neighbor? The scholar answers: “The one who treated him with mercy.” 
    

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.
    

Prayer and good intentions are a good start toward erasing the eternal scourge of racism, but there is always something more to do than that to become a true disciple of Jesus.
    

Leroy Baker, whose ancestors were slaves owned and then sold to a Louisiana plantation in the 1800s by the Jesuits who ran Georgetown University, attended the moving “Requiem for the Black Children of God” prayer service June 5 at Notre Dame Seminary. A religion teacher at Archbishop Rummel High School, Baker says the Parable of the Good Samaritan, 2,000 years later,  fills him with hope.
    

“We know that, by God’s grace, we have another opportunity,” Baker said. “Joseph said in Genesis 50:20, ‘What was meant for bad, God can use for good.’ By the grace of God, seeing so many different kinds of people come together like I’ve never seen before, by God’s grace, this is the beginning of a continuous journey toward our understanding of justice.
    

“It seems so simple. Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan, letting us know that our neighbor’s going to look a little bit different. So, if we take that and our yearning for the Eucharist and see that we are all made in God’s image and likeness, especially through Christ – we just start from that.”
    

We need to leave our caves. That requires dialogue, self-awareness and the recognition that we are our brother’s keeper, and our brother has a seat at the table.
    

“I have more than hope,” Baker says. “I have an abundance of hope, and I’m grateful for that.”
    

And, we have the Holy Spirit, the breath of life.
    

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.