15th Sunday Ordinary Time – Year C
Fr. Mark Gatto
Preached: July 13, 2025
You cannot see God, you cannot hear God, you cannot touch God. You cannot know God. God is mystery beyond our human capacity. We live on this tiny planet flying through space around a small star, the sun. In this enormous universe beyond anything we can imagine. The mystery of God is the foundation of this universe and beyond our imagining.
Yet, St. Paul says, “Christ is the image of the invisible God.” For this reason that we sometimes speak of Jesus as the Face of God. The mystery of God, the Creator, the heart and foundation of the universe, has reached out to humanity in Jesus. Through this grace of God, this free gift of God, we human beings are able to see, hear, touch God. We are able to know God, at least in our limited human capacity.
If you and I want to know God, we must turn to Jesus. Watch Jesus in the Gospels, listen to Jesus teaching, come near to Jesus in prayer and sacrament. Lots of people talk about God, but we need to allow our limited images of God to be confronted by the truth of the invisible God made visible in Jesus. Our images of God are more our own projections. We need to honestly examine the God revealed in Jesus.
In our Gospel today we have Jesus teaching and he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. He has just told the lawyer that to enter eternal life we must “love God with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind.” Then that we must “love our neighbour as ourself.” Then the lawyer does what we human beings have always done, he wants to put a limit on this love. He wants to restrict who he has to consider to be his neighbour. But, in that parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is making it clear that in the mind of God, there is no limit to love, there is no limit on who we must consider as our neighbour.
We human beings are ready to love our neighbour when they are our family. Or perhaps when they are the same race, the same religion, the same country. We usually dehumanize those who are different or inconvenient. In Nazi Germany, the Jews were dehumanized even in the language that was used about them. This allowed people to walk past them as they were being killed in concentration camps. In our world today, we continue to see people dehumanizing groups of people. This allows us to walk past them as they are being mistreated and killed in new genocides happening today.
Politicians speak of immigrants and refugees in a way that dehumanizes them. This allows us to easily walk past them as they are not our neighbour. Billionaires look out and see huge levels of inequality and large numbers of human beings living in poverty. They do not want to recognize those poor as their neighbour, they want to walk past them.
Each of us need to look within ourselves and examine our consciences. Is there another group of people who I refuse to recognize as my neighbour? Is there a limit I have on who I consider my neighbour?
We cannot see, hear or touch God, but Christ is the image of the invisible God, the face of God. As we look to Jesus we discover the heart of God. Do not create our own image of God, but see the true image of God in Jesus. Even when that challenges and confronts us. Through Jesus, God has taught us to love our neighbour as ourselves. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus made it clear that we cannot put a limit on who we consider our neighbour.
