Posted by The WORD in other words (2022) by Fr Jun Javines SVD – Divine Word College of San Jose
Monday 27th Week in Ordinary Time
“I’d wanted to give a kidney for years—at least since I first heard it was possible after reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker piece on ‘good Samaritan’ kidney donors when I was in college. It just seemed like such a simple and clear way to help someone else through a procedure that’s very low-risk to me.
I studied moral philosophy as an undergrad, and there’s a famous thought experiment about a man who walks by a shallow pond where a child is drowning and does nothing, because leaping in to save the child might muddy his clothes. If I kept walking around with two kidneys, when there were more than 100,000 people on the kidney waiting list who would most likely die in the next five years if they didn’t get one, was I doing anything different from that man, really? Wasn’t I, like him, letting another person die to avoid a small cost to myself?” (Rick Ruzzamenti)
The Gospel today is concretely relived by Rick Ruzzamenti, a genuine neighbor indeed. In these times of pandemic where almost everybody is engrossed protecting oneself and family, the Catholic Church likewise calls for all of us to be engrossed with compassion, with a sense of solidarity, and to be a genuine neighbor.
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