4 min read
November 21, 2024

Concluding a nine-part series on the corporal works of mercy and the nonprofits bringing them to life.

If you’re walking, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is dusty, long, and troubling: 18 miles, going down into the Dead Sea valley, dropping elevation by more than 3,000 feet, and marked by barren and inhospitable surroundings. In a day’s march, the voyager might encounter gloom or darkness, and even danger.

Which is exactly what was encountered—according to the famous parable told by Jesus—by “a certain man,” whose experience has stood for two millennia as a central lesson for charity and salvation, and which serves as a primary exemplar of the Corporal Works of Mercy, their several varieties brought to life here in Philanthropy Daily’s just-concluded “Working for Mercy” series.

Many of the seven meritorious practices are captured in this Biblical tale of a sojourner on the road to Jericho, who was stripped and beaten—to the point of being “half dead”—and robbed, then ignored by passersby. We may assume he was a Jew, making more emphatic the person who did indeed stop to help: a Samaritan, of a people who lived adjacent to Israel, proximate too in religion but with serious doctrinal differences—heretics, if you will—to produce a history lacking good-neighborliness. We may assume too that this feeling of disdain was mutual.

However, the grip of tribalism, and all its attending hostilities, did not come into play in Jesus’s story. Nor was there a whiff that the Samaritan—like the Levite or “certain priest” who too came upon the scene of misfortune—thought to pass by the stricken man. There was no pause or hesitation: Instantaneous compassion came at the sight of this traumatized and wounded man. It led to instantaneous action: The Samaritan tended to wounds, took the victim to an inn where he could be fed and recover, paid the innkeeper for his continued care, and promised to cover additional expenses upon returning from his travels.

A flurry of mercies come into play in this tale of abrupt need and unbridled charity, engaged in by both the Samaritan and the innkeeper, who we assume fulfilled the request for continued care of the beaten Israelite. At play here are the mercies of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and sheltering the homeless. Of the seven works of mercy formally embraced and designated by Christianity, beyond these five explicit ways the Samaritan employed to love his neighbor, one was clearly precluded by his attentiveness: burying the dead.

As for the seventh, remaining mercy, one can fancy: Maybe the robbers were captured and eventually visited in prison.

So much that is utterly essential and spiritually profound is tied up in this parable, which is instigated by a question from a lawyer testing Jesus: “What shall I do to gain eternal life?” The responsive tale makes clear that practical charity, in its various manifestations and met opportunities, and in its intrinsic extension of the status of “neighbor” to all people, is the thing performed to gain salvation, that “eternal life” raised by the tricky lawyer.

Charitable engagement, of the kind Jesus articulated—whether it is realized at some roadside inn operating in Roman-ruled Judea, or in the modern-day streets of Philadelphia or Detroit or Denver or other communities that have been the settings for the Working for Mercy series—is profiled and championed in these various articles. Each tells uplifting and inspiring stories of committed nonprofits that have made specific mercies their raisons d’être, directing their day-in-day-out responsibilities. While the articles rightly foster in the reader a sense of feel-goodism, they also call, as charity is meant to do, to a deeper importance—one which transcends the hunger satisfied, the thirst quenched, and the body clothed.

As with the parable of the Good Samaritan, collectively, the series’ articles show the relation between the immediate—helping that half-dead, beaten, and naked sojourner upon whom you’ve just stumbled—and the eternal, the destination revealed by Jesus’s promise of loving your neighbor.

Whether as an individual or as a voluntary association with a mission of charitable engagement, those who consciously work mercy, who do not pause when confronted with the immediate, that here-and-now need, that in-your-face opportunity (a tragedy, a flood, an illness), punch a ticket for that destination beyond Jericho: Heaven.

Maybe salvation is not the conscious reason why the good people who comprise the nonprofit organizations highlighted in the series do what they do. Maybe obedience is the motivation for the inescapable duty to their neighbor. After all, the parable ends with a command, not a suggestion: “Go and do likewise.”

Whatever ingredients make up the recipe for consequential action and the causes that are the motivation towards mercy, perchance you will be inspired by some of these stories about charitable organizations which have taken this divine command to heart:

We hope this Working for Mercy series has inspired you—in your role as a giver, a doer, a thinker—to do precisely that.