The well-meaning but useless Samaritan

I’m not the only one frustrated that we are again awash in the all-but-meaningless phrase “our thoughts and prayers” after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The Washington Post ran a  thoughtful piece this morning under the headline, Why ‘thoughts and prayers’ is starting to sound profane.

Theologian Miraslav Volf invokes a familiar Bible story to show how we have so misused this notion, separating our thoughts and prayers from the action entailed in genuine prayer.

“It’s analogous to what is going on in the book of James 2:16,” he says. “If a person says to those who are cold and hungry, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? Or if you look at the story of the good Samaritan, we can easily imagine that the priest, who walked by a person robbed and left half-dead by the road, prayed as he was passing by. Still, he was a bad priest. The Samaritan was good because he did something to help the suffering person.”

Please read the whole piece here.