Reflection on the Gospel-13th Sunday in Ordinary Time C Luke 9:51-62

May 20, 2013

-Veronica Lawson RSM
Some time back, ABC television featured a British film about the separate lives and education of two teenage school boys, one a Jewish Israeli and the other a Palestinian Arab. Judah and Mohammad have never met and are unlikely ever to do so. Geographically, they are near neighbours, but their lives are separated by a ‘security wall’ that keeps them and their people effectively separated and suspicious of each other, despite the desire for peace of many on both sides of the wall. Sandy Tolan’s heart-wrenching novel, The Lemon Tree, tells a similar story of women on either side of the divide. Both stories reflect a decades long history of violent conflict and hostility. That is more or less how it was between Jews and Samaritans in the first century, although the hostility in that instance had endured for centuries.