Go and Do Likewise

Most of us have a version of the faith we can live with. We edited it ourselves, a line at a time, at exactly the places where the true faith got expensive and difficult. Sometimes the edit adds something: a rule we can keep, a box we can check, a way of knowing we’ve done enough. Sometimes it subtracts: a person we’ve decided the commandment doesn’t cover. Today’s readings catch both edits in the act. In Galatians, Paul hears that his converts are adding circumcision and the law of Moses to the gospel he preached to them, and he’s so alarmed that he skips his usual words of thanks and opens with a curse. In Luke, a scholar of the law knows the great commandment cold, then asks the one question that would let him shrink it: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with a man left half dead on the road to Jericho, two religious professionals who cross to the other side, and a Samaritan who stops.

Both edits come from the same place in us. We want a faith we can finish. A gospel with extra requirements tells us when we’ve earned it, and a shorter list of neighbors tells us when we’ve loved enough. Either way, we stay in charge.

Today is the Memorial of Saint Faustina Kowalska, whose name is joined for good to the Divine Mercy. It’s fitting that the last answer in today’s Gospel is “The one who showed mercy.” So here’s the question these readings put to you and me: where have we edited the gospel to keep it from costing us?

The Readings

First Reading: Galatians 1:6-12

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel, not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.

Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ.

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Gospel: Luke 10:25-37

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul’s letters usually open with a thanksgiving for the faith of the people he’s writing to (1 Corinthians 1:4-9; Philippians 1:3-11). Galatians lacks such an opening. Frank Matera, in the Sacra Pagina commentary, reads the gap as a signal of crisis: in its place Paul sets “a strong statement of indignation and amazement,” because the bond between him and the Galatians is in danger of dissolving. Cardinal Albert Vanhoye and Peter Williamson say Paul “immediately enters into battle, brandishing his most potent weapon, a repeated anathema.” The verb for “deserting,” metatithesthe (meh-tah-TEE-thes-theh), carries the sense of turning apostate, but both commentaries notice the present tense of the verb. The Galatians haven’t finished leaving, and the letter is “an intervention to stop a development that is under way.” Saint Thomas Aquinas can’t resist a pun: Galatia, he says, means “transferred,” so they’re living up to their name.¹

What were they deserting to? Vanhoye and Williamson explain that after Paul moved on, Jewish Christian teachers arrived saying faith in Christ and baptism were insufficient, and that Gentile believers also had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. The Galatians very likely thought they were becoming more faithful. Paul saw a road to perdition. Matera names the reason: if righteousness comes through the Law, “then there was no need for Christ to die” (Galatians 2:21). An add-on to the gospel quietly says the cross wasn’t enough. Aquinas explains why it runs the arrow backward. The Old Law was a figure ordained to the New, the way a portrait is ordained to the man it portrays, so the figure has to give way to the truth.²

Then the curse: “Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed.” The word is anathema (ah-NATH-eh-mah), which in the Septuagint translates the Hebrew ḥerem (KHEH-rem), a thing “set apart for destruction” (Joshua 6:17). Look at who Paul puts under it first: himself. Matera says it plainly: “Because he received the gospel, he is also subservient to it. Not even he has the power to alter it.” Aquinas explains why an angel can’t revise it either: “a teaching that comes directly from God can be nullified neither by man nor angel.” It sounds harsh, and Vanhoye and Williamson admit as much. Then they ask, “What is the value of a million dollars of counterfeit currency? Precisely nothing.” If you saw a friend about to drink poison, you’d grab the glass out of his hand. “It is a violent action, but it is the most loving thing to do.”³

Verse 10 follows: “Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God?” Vanhoye and Williamson hear a reply to rivals who claimed Paul had watered down God’s demands to win converts. His answer: “If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ.” The word is doulos (DOO-los), slave, and Matera says that as Christ’s slave Paul “has found a freedom which only obedience to Christ can bring.” Aquinas adds a careful distinction: “if I intend now and then to please men so that I might draw them to God, I do not sin.” Pleasing people for their own sake, with no reference to God, is what can’t share a heart with serving Christ.⁴ The gospel can’t be edited because of where it came from: “through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Vanhoye and Williamson note that Jesus is both the one revealing and the one revealed (Galatians 1:15-16).⁵ The content of the gospel is a person, and you can’t renegotiate a person.

Turning now to the Gospel. A scholar of the law stands up “to put him to the test,” just after Jesus has thanked the Father for hiding these things from the learned (Luke 10:21), as Pablo Gadenz points out. Asked what the law says, the scholar joins Deuteronomy 6:5 to Leviticus 19:18. Luke Timothy Johnson observes that Luke fuses them into one commandment, so love of neighbor carries the same weight as love of God. “Do this, and you will live.” Gadenz notices how much this passage cares about doing. The scholar asked what he must “do,” and Jesus will say “do” twice more before the scene ends. The verb is poieō (poy-EH-oh).⁶

“But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” The question had real legal range: Leviticus 19:18 speaks of “the sons of your own people,” while Leviticus 19:34 stretches love to the sojourner. Johnson catches the irony. The neighbor standing in front of the lawyer is Jesus, and he keeps testing him “in order to assert himself.”⁷ He wants a boundary. He wants to know where the obligation stops.

Jesus answers the question with a road. Gadenz says this road ran about seventeen miles from Jerusalem down to Jericho and dropped about 3,300 feet in elevation. Johnson notes that Luke’s word for the robbers is the one Josephus uses for the organized bands that made travel perilous. A priest comes down the road, probably heading home from his service in the Temple, then a Levite. Both see the man. Both pass by on the other side. Gadenz suggests ritual purity may have weighed on them, since a priest was forbidden to make himself unclean for a dead body outside his family (Leviticus 21:1-2), but the parable shows their reasons were insufficient: they stood idly by while a neighbor’s life was at stake (Leviticus 19:16). Johnson says they let safety or purity “justify their not even crossing the road to look.” Notice the verb. They justified themselves on the road, exactly as the lawyer was trying to do in conversation. Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in the Catena Aurea (kah-TAY-nah OW-ray-ah) of Saint Thomas, is blunt: “vain is the dignity of the Priesthood, and the knowledge of the Law, unless they are confirmed by good works.”⁸

Then the turn. After a priest and a Levite, any listener expected an ordinary Israelite. Jesus instead says that a Samaritan passed by. Gadenz lays out the hostility that the people had for the Samaritans: a lineage Jews counted doubtful, a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, Samaritans who scattered human bones in the Jerusalem Temple at Passover, and a Samaritan village that had just refused to receive Jesus (Luke 9:53). Still, a scholar of the law should have recognized the scene. Scripture tells how men of Samaria once clothed captives from Judah, anointed them, set the weak on donkeys, and brought them to Jericho (2 Chronicles 28:15). Johnson sums it up: “It is the hated enemy who is the hero with a human heart.”⁹

Luke slows down for him. The Samaritan saw the man, “had compassion,” and went to him. The verb is splanchnizomai (splangkh-NEE-zoh-my), compassion felt in the gut, and Gadenz notes that until now Luke has used it only of Jesus at Nain, where he too saw, had compassion, and came forward (Luke 7:13-14). That’s why the Fathers read the Samaritan as Christ. Saint Augustine, in the Catena, calls him “far removed by birth, very near in compassion,” and Saint Ambrose notes that this Samaritan “was also coming down,” like the Son of Man who came down from heaven (John 3:13). In a sermon Gadenz quotes, Augustine reads the whole economy of salvation in the details: “Wine and oil have been poured into you, you have received the sacrament of the Only-begotten Son; you have been lifted onto his mule, you have believed that Christ became flesh; you have been brought to the inn, you are being cured in the Church.”¹⁰

Then Jesus turns the question inside out: “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” Gadenz calls it a change of perspective: “The scholar had asked about the neighbor as the object who is to receive his love. Jesus instead presents the neighbor as the subject who gives love.” The lawyer still can’t make himself say the word Samaritan. He says, “The one who showed mercy on him,” literally the one who “did” mercy, and Jesus hands his own verb back to him: “Go and do likewise.”¹¹ The Catechism gathers the parable into its teaching on charity: the Lord “asks us to love as he does, even our enemies, to make ourselves the neighbor of those farthest away.”¹²

Put the readings side by side, and they’re one warning from two directions. The Galatians wanted to add to the gospel; the lawyer wanted to trim the commandment. Paul wouldn’t let anyone change the good news, an angel included, because the good news is Christ, who came down our road, found us half dead, and paid for our care out of his own purse. The scholar asked how far his love had to go. The gospel Paul refused to edit answers him: as far as Christ came for you.

Daily Application

These readings call for an internal shift: we must stop altering the Gospel, and this internal shift starts in the ditch. Before this parable is a command, it’s our own story. Augustine reads the half-dead man as the race of Adam, stripped and wounded, lying there because he “had not strength of his own sufficient to rise and seek a physician.”¹³ That’s what Paul is guarding in Galatians. We’re saved by the one who stopped, and nothing we add makes us more presentable to him. If you’ve been treating your faith as a list to finish before God will look at you, you’re doing the Galatians’ arithmetic. Let him pour in the oil and wine. Get to confession this week.

Saint Faustina spent her life on that truth. Franciscan Media recalls that in her day some Catholics pictured God as such a strict judge that they were tempted to despair, and that Jesus told her, “I do not want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to my merciful heart.” She also knew where her revelations belonged: “My sanctity and perfection consist in the close union of my will with the will of God.”¹⁴ Paul would have recognized the instinct. The Catechism teaches that private revelations, even those the Church recognizes, exist “to help live more fully by” Christ’s definitive Revelation in a certain period of history.¹⁵ The Divine Mercy is the Samaritan’s oil, poured out again for a century that badly needed it.

We must all get up and cross the road. Johnson describes the compassion this parable asks for as the kind that “translates itself into the self-giving that takes risks.” Name your Samaritan, and name your ditch: someone whose politics you can’t stand, a relative you wrote off years ago, the man with the cardboard sign at the intersection you’ve trained yourself not to see. Gadenz lists what the Samaritan spent: his oil and wine, his own animal, two days’ wages, his next day, the innkeeper’s help, and a promise to come back. Pick one person and spend something real on them. The Catechism calls these the works of mercy, bodily and spiritual, from feeding the hungry and visiting the sick to consoling, forgiving, and bearing wrongs patiently.¹⁶

Finally, watch out for the priest’s temptation, the one Paul refused. Vanhoye and Williamson warn that “the visible approval of other people can subtly replace the invisible approval of God as the goal of our labors.”¹⁷ Most of us cross to the other side for reasons that would sound fine if anyone asked. Jesus asks only who truly proved to be a neighbor.

You’ve already been found on that road. Let him heal you, and then go and do likewise.

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Notes

1. ↑ Frank J. Matera, Galatians, Sacra Pagina 9 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 45, 48-49; Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williamson, Galatians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 34-35; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, trans. F. R. Larcher, OP (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1966), chap. 1, lect. 2, at isidore.co.
2. ↑ Vanhoye and Williamson, Galatians, 35; Matera, Galatians, 50; Aquinas, Commentary on Galatians, chap. 1, lect. 2.
3. ↑ Vanhoye and Williamson, Galatians, 38-39; Matera, Galatians, 51; Aquinas, Commentary on Galatians, chap. 1, lect. 2.
4. ↑ Vanhoye and Williamson, Galatians, 39-40; Matera, Galatians, 48; Aquinas, Commentary on Galatians, chap. 1, lect. 2.
5. ↑ Vanhoye and Williamson, Galatians, 44.
6. ↑ Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 209-210; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 172, 174.
7. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 172; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 210.
8. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 211; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 173, 175; Saint Cyril of Alexandria, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 10:29-37.
9. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 211-212; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 175.
10. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 212-213; Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 10:29-37; Saint Augustine, Sermons, quoted in Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 213.
11. ↑ Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 213-214.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1825.
13. ↑ Saint Augustine, quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, St. Luke, on Luke 10:29-37.
14. ↑ “Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed October 3, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 67.
16. ↑ Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 176; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 213; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2447.
17. ↑ Vanhoye and Williamson, Galatians, 40.

Books Cited

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• Frank J. Matera, Galatians, Sacra Pagina 9 (Liturgical Press, 1992)
• Albert Vanhoye and Peter S. Williamson, Galatians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2019)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, four-volume edition (Baronius Press)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)