Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
July 10, 2016 5:00 pm · Father Dennis Riccitelli
A couple of years ago I had the fortune or misfortune to need bypass surgery on my heart. It happened very quickly so I didn't have a lot of time to fret about it. Went in one day for tests, the next day I was in the hospital, the next day I had the surgery. It all went well, of course I recovered, got out of the hospital, and went home. A few weeks later, I think it was the second follow up to the heart surgeon, not the cardiologist, but to the surgeon. I had had of course time to think then about what had happened to me, having had the need for bypass surgery. So, I was sitting in the doctor's office, waiting for him to come in and I thought to myself I'm going ask him a question.
He came in so I asked him, "So you had my heart in your hand." Which is what they do when they do heart surgery, they take your heart out and fool around with it and do stuff, and I said, "What does it look like?" And his answer was, "Oh they all look the same". So I kind of thought that was a brush off, "they all look the same", then on my way home, driving home, I thought to myself, well, wait a minute, maybe it wasn't a brush off. Because I remembered what he had told me the day before the surgery in the hospital. He said, "Father, I wanted you to know that less than 1% of the people that have this surgery die. Less than 1% die, and I will do my best to make sure that doesn't happen to you." And I am sure he did. So then kind of I put all this together, and thought to myself. Well, I think what he is saying is he does his best for every patient. The hearts all look the same to him, so it doesn't matter who's body it came out of, whether it's me as a priest, whether it's a rabbi, whether it's a black person, an asian person. He treats them all the same. He treats everybody alike. I thought, well that's a very good message. I think I'll take that and use that. And it's very appropriate for today's Gospel reading isn't it, the parable, about how different people treated the man who was beaten and left for dead on the side of the road.