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Thread: Today, when ICE threatens to round up migrant families in the United States, Catholics worldwide are hearing Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan, from Luke's Gospel (10: 25-37). It is almost painfully relevant. You know the famous story but I want to highlight 3 things: 
1) The Samaritan helped the stranger--a Jew, and therefore someone from a hated religious group--at great risk to himself. The Road to Jericho, which still exists, was a notoriously dangerous one in Jesus's day, filled with twists and turns, where bandits would lie in wait.
The Samaritan knew that there was real danger involved: after all, he is helping someone who was just beaten and robbed and left for dead.
Jesus invites us to help the "stranger" (in our day, the migrant, the refugee or internally displaced person) not just when it's easy, or when it's convenient, or when it's risk free, or hen he or she has the right "papers." But always. Even at risk to ourselves.
2) Some argue, "Those migrants aren't following the law. It's too bad, but they're breaking the law, and I want to uphold the rule of law." Yet as every Christian knows there are higher laws. Ironically, some of the same people who take this stand are strongly opposed to abortion
But that is "legal" as well, and yet they have no problem opposing those laws. Most people grasp that there are unjust laws.
Catholics need to see that any laws or policies that lead to migrants thrown into cages and living in subhuman conditions, and to children being separated from their parents, are unjust laws.
3) The Parable is not simply about being a "Good Samaritan" and helping our neighbor.
(As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, the priest and Levite say to themselves, "If I help this man, what will happen to me?" The Samaritan says to himself, "If I don't help this man, what will happen to him?") It is about even more than that.
It is also about how our salvation comes from someone whom we thought we hated, someone whom we thought was the "other." The Jewish man most likely hated Samaritans. And yet his very life, his salvation, depends on precisely on that person.
Our own salvation may depend on how we treat these strangers at our door.
Image: Central American migrants, moving in a caravan through Juchitan, Mexico, are pictured April 27, 2019, during their journey toward the United States. (@CatholicNewsSvc photo/Jose de Jesus Cortes, @Reuters)
