Dear friends: I’ve noticed some pushback for commenting on Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan and how it asks us to care for the stranger. Some people have pointed to St. Thomas Aquinas’s traditional “ordo amoris,” or order of love, to say that we should take care of our family first, then the community, then the nation and, only then, people like refugees or migrants, i.e., strangers.
What’s going on? Well, in the “Summa Theologica,” the great summation of his theology, Aquinas asks and answers a long series of questions on love: for example, whether you should love a parent more than your children or a spouse. It’s an “order,” as in sequence, of love. And it’s mainly for within the household.
But Aquinas’s reflections, which are in part a meditation on Augustine and Aristotle, are not meant to tell us who to exclude, but mainly (though not exclusively) for reminding people what to do in families. Today, unfortunately, it’s being used to say, “Well, just focus on those closest to you, and whatever is left over, then maybe we can help the stranger.”
Even if you love Aquinas and Augustine (which I do), and even if you interpret it that way (which I don’t) the Summa doesn’t take precedence over the Gospel. Jesus’s command to love the stranger is not just a theological reflection, and not just an important part of our tradition, it’s Divine Revelation. Jesus tells us clearly that at the heavenly gates, we are going to be asked if we welcomed the stranger: that is, someone not part of our family, someone we don’t know. That’s how we will be judged, as he says in Matthew 25.
The early church of course practiced this welcoming–especially of the migrant, because where Christianity flourished was in the cities often near ports.
And no one in the early church thought that the call to discipleship was to take singular care of your family and then give strangers the leftovers. It was in fact all about redefining the idea of both family and neighbor and showing mercy to those in need.
Recently, I asked a Catholic moral theologian about all this and he said, “We have to remember this is the Summa, not the Gospel. Matthew 25 has a greater claim on us than the Summa.”
In the Gospels, Jesus often challenged the notion of family first. As surprising as it is to hear today, and as challenging as it is to the status quo, Jesus was creating a new sense of family and, moreover, a new sense of who our neighbor is.
A few days ago, I mentioned the story of Jesus’s family coming to “seize” him in Capernaum. But when Jesus is told that they have arrived, he says, Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:48-49)
But the clearest, and bluntest, example is when a man says that he wants to follow Jesus but has to bury his father first, one of the most essential, and sacred, filial duties for a son at that time.
Does Jesus say, “Oh, yes, the ‘order of love’ says do that first”? No, he says, “Let the dead bury the dead! But as for you go and proclaim the reign of God” (Lk 9:60). You can’t get much clearer than that.
As Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, the New Testament scholar, told me once, “For Jesus, ties to the Father were more important than ties to the family.”
So it’s not about the selective love of family, but about a new kind of family. And within that family is the stranger, the migrant, the refugee. And I’ll bet that Aquinas and Augustine would agree.