Fr David Neuhaus recently gave an inaugural lecture for the opening of the academic year at Hekima University College in Nairobi, Kenya.
“We Refuse to Simply Pass You By: Prophets of Hope in an Increasingly Divided World.”
Transcript of video:
I begin with a heartfelt expression of appreciation for this welcome to Hekima University College. I am honored to be with you today, although I would have liked to have been there physically. A word of thanks to the principal, Reverend Dr. Marcel Uwineza, who reached out to me.
The words you chose for this presentation derive from a declaration of the Jerusalem Voice for Justice, an ecumenical witness for equality and a just peace in Palestine, Israel, published on April 1st, 2025, titled “Out of the Depths I Cry to You.” I am sure that everyone has identified where the words “we refuse to simply pass you by” derive from. The Good Samaritan, in Jesus’s parable, stops to help the wounded person lying by the side of the road. Those who went down that road before the Good Samaritan had crossed over to the other side and hurried on, simply passing by.
Who could blame them? It is a dangerous and lonely road. The ones who attacked and left the wounded person there might still be there to attack. Each one of those who passed by is in a hurry. They have places to go and people to see, important things to do and missions to accomplish. So many justifications to ignore our neighbour in need. The Good Samaritan overturns the habitual way of thinking.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. proposed that the way we usually think is based upon fear firmly rooted in self-interest: What will happen to me if I stop? How much will it cost me? The Good Samaritan reverses the calculation: Not, what will happen to me if I stop, but rather, what will happen to my neighbour if I do not stop? The Good Samaritan is the prophet of hope that I want to talk about today.
But who am I? Let me first situate myself and where my reflection is coming from in terms of my own personal history. Three historical contexts have formed me as I am, and undoubtedly frame what I say.
My family is Jewish-German by origin. My grandparents were proud citizens who fought for their beloved fatherland. I remember discovering one day a small metal box at the bottom of a drawer in my parents’ home. It contained the military decorations my grandfather had won for his bravery in the First World War, fighting for Germany on the Russian front. A number of my uncles died or were wounded in that war. Two decades later, these proud Germans faced a choice: exile or extermination. When the Nazis made it impossible to be German and Jewish, those relatives who did not flee were murdered in massacres, gas chambers, concentration camps, or chose to take their own lives when the Nazis were at the door. Too few of their neighbors stopped. Instead, they passed by, hurrying on.
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents found refuge in South Africa. It is there that I was born. This time we were part of the privileged white elite. Apartheid rule meant that the vast majority of the population, the black people of South Africa, were sentenced to life in the margins — to pauperization, brutal repression, and hopelessness. Anyone who resisted was gunned down, arrested and tortured, thrown out of windows of high buildings, or pushed down long staircases.
However, I was privileged in a much more important way than being white. I was privileged because I had parents who raged against the system, teaching us to respect the dignity of every human being. They insisted that we not only stop and help, but also try to understand what had brought this system into being. Their efforts were amplified by the wonderful teachers I had at the private Jewish school I attended.
I was 15 years old when my parents sent me off to Jerusalem. Foremost in their mind was to get me out of South Africa before I would be drafted into the South African military. However, little did they know that I was being thrown from one frying pan into another.
Some Jewish Europeans, excluded, discriminated against, sometimes persecuted, had started dreaming of a national home at the end of the 19th century. Typical of many forms of nationalism, Zionism — Jewish nationalism — was based upon a series of myths focusing on a glorious past that must be restored. The treasury out of which Zionism drew its vocabulary was the Bible. What was proposed was that Jews should “return” to their “God-given homeland” after 2,000 years of exile. What the myth ignored was that the land they were claiming as their own was inhabited by an indigenous people.
What it exploited to the full was that this mythology had powerful echoes for all who read the Bible. In fact, Jewish Zionism was preceded by Christian Zionism, rooted in Protestant fundamentalism emerging in the 17th century. The two ideologies converged in the 19th and 20th centuries, when some Christian Europeans sought to get rid of their Jewish neighbours and some Jewish Europeans sought to reorganize themselves as a nation state in the heart of the Middle East.
The majority of the Jewish migrants who arrived — thousands before the First World War, then tens of thousands between the two world wars, and then hundreds of thousands after the end of the Second World War — either ignored the local Palestinian Arab population or actively sought to replace them. Very few made efforts to integrate, learn the language, Arabic, and live together with the native population.
The British colonial patrons throughout the 1920’s facilitated Jewish migration and encouraged the building of a future Jewish nation state. However, for Palestinians, and for many others in Asia, Africa, and throughout the world, Zionism looked like just another form of European settler colonialism. It did not take me long to realize the similarities between apartheid South Africa and ethnocentric Israel. Once again, I was part of the privileged — the Jews — in a state defined as Jewish and imposing a regime of discrimination on Palestinian citizens inside the state of Israel, and a brutal occupation on Palestinians in territories that had been conquered by Israel in 1967.
Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and ethnocentric Israel constitute the framework in which I am reflecting now on the theme: “We refuse to simply pass you by: Prophets of hope in an increasingly divided world.”
(A little word of explanation. I have deliberately, and hopefully not too provocatively, imagined both the prophet and the Good Samaritan as woman and not only as man. Hence the alternance in the use of the pronouns.)
What is a prophet? I propose to you that the Good Samaritan in Jesus’s well-known parable in the Gospel of Luke is a prophet. Her prophecy is the act of stopping, refusing to simply pass by.
In this context, then, what does it mean to be a prophet? In the Bible, a prophet is a person who steps into the midst of crisis. κρίσις (krísis) in Greek means judgment, discernment. The prophet perceives reality as crisis. God and God’s people are no longer communicating.
The people that God has called no longer listen to the word God is speaking. God is unwilling or unable to reach out to them. This sounds like strange language with which to speak about God. Is not God omnipotent, omniscient, omni-everything? Or has God abdicated that omni- in favor of a relationship in which God can be loved and respected, but also insulted, wounded, and even crucified?
Is that what it means to be free? God has bestowed freedom on the human person, and that freedom is used to withdraw from relationship, deny the deep crisis between God and humanity. The prophet is called into the fray.
The prophet called dares to say here I am and to step into the breach: speaking out, speaking for, speaking instead of, speaking to. This is what the word prophet means in Greek: προφήτης (prophḗtēs). Pro- meaning before or instead of, phḗtēs meaning to speak. The prophet provides a voice both for God and for the people torn between them.
The prophet gives a body to the absent one. Absent because of withdrawal from relationship. This is the crisis the prophet is stretched to mediate, stretched to breaking point between heaven and earth. The prophet’s life becomes the very battlefield on which the two parties — God and God’s people — are brought together. The prophet serves as a bridge between these two parties.
The prophet, as the great contemporary biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, who recently passed away, wrote, “is endowed with a prophetic imagination.” The prophet can imagine an alternative to the state of the world, a different way of being.
She perceives reality as crisis, as broken and bleeding. The powers that be present this reality as normal. They exert every effort to make believe that this reality is the only possible one. It has always been like this, must be like this now, and shall always be like this.
The prophet, defining this reality as crisis, defies these powers that be, able to imagine a reality different from the one presented as inevitable. She sees a reality of relationship instead of brokenness.
In all this, language is central. However, language is constituted not only by words but also by acts. Indeed, the prophet is a person of words united with acts. The prophet understands that God created the world with a word: “let there be.” And it was. This expression echoes throughout the creation account in Genesis.
The perfect efficacy of God’s word and act is echoed in the coherency of the prophet’s own words and acts. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, and many others were driven by a prophetic imagination that produces words and acts. These words and acts render God present in God’s absence. They re-present God.
The prophetic imagination ignites the prophet who rages against reality defined as crisis. First, the prophet grieves. The prophet formulates the abandon and hopelessness that are produced by the present reality, giving voice to the pain that emerges. The prophet breaks through the indifference, the anesthia of the powers that be that encourage us to pass by without stopping.
In the words of Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel, the prophet lives sympathos — suffering with both God and the people. The pathos, the suffering of God, moves him. It breaks out in him like a storm in the soul, overwhelming his inner life, his thoughts, feelings, wishes and hopes. It takes possession of his heart and mind, giving him the courage to act against the world.
The prophets allow themselves to stop, to see, to listen, to be moved with compassion. Their lament seeks to awaken us.
Second, the prophet remembers, calling to mind moments of relationship in the past. This memory keeps hope alive on a horizon of devastation and plugs us into a source of consolation. It has not always been like this. Memory salvages a vocabulary to formulate an alternative to contemporary reality, wrenching it from the seemingly omnipotent grip of the domination of the present.
Memory can construct a bridge from the past, over the devastating landscape of the now, to a future of hope.
Third, the prophet works on loosening the grip of the dominant ideology that seeks to normalize the present and plaster over crisis. The prophet challenges the wisdom that claims that “it has always been like this,” or “it needs to be like this,” or “this is the sacred order of things.”
The prophet denounces not only the ruling class that establishes, protects, and perpetuates the status quo, but also the priestly class that sanctifies this reality, claiming that prophecy has ended long ago and is no longer real or necessary.
Finally, the prophet constantly refines and purifies the prophetic imagination — a vision of relationship instead of crisis — so that it becomes neither an opium nor an illusion, but rather a fire that can motivate and invigorate, purify and recast.
The Good Samaritan’s prophecy is made up of acts more than of words. A series of verbs follows the prophetic initiative to stop alongside the wounded one. Notice the string of verbs:
He saw him. He was moved with compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two dinari, gave them to the innkeeper.
This string of verbs invites us into the action at the core of the prophecy: saw, was moved with compassion, went to, bandaged, poured, put, brought, took care, took out, gave.
The others who had passed by before him saw, and without stopping, crossed over to the other side. The Good Samaritan saw, not as they saw, but as God sees. He saw a child of God, a human being created in the image and likeness of God. He saw the wounded not as a disturbance, not as an inconvenience, not as collateral damage, not as an enemy, not as a threat, but rather as a person whose fate depended on him as a brother, a sister, a fellow child of God.
Once he saw, he was moved with compassion. The single word used here, the Greek verb esplanchnizomai, is particularly evocative. It can literally be translated as “he was gripped in his entrails.”
This very particular verb is used 11 times in the New Testament, mostly with Jesus as its subject. Compassion grips Jesus as he observes the suffering of the sick, the lonely, the tormented, and the bereaved. He acts out of compassion. Furthermore, Jesus attributes the verb to protagonists in his parables, both in the parable of the Good Samaritan and in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Being “moved with compassion” echoes the movement of both God toward humanity and, in moments of crisis, the movement of the prophet towards his brothers and sisters. It is the opposite of the indifference that characterizes a general attitude entrenched in our reality. It serves as the motor for the activities that follow.
The Good Samaritan is the counter to biblical Cain. This is most clear in the only words he speaks. We remember the exchange between God and Cain after Cain had killed Abel.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9)
The Good Samaritan said to the innkeeper: “Take care of him, and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” (Luke 10:35)
Whereas Cain, having killed his own brother, looks away and denies responsibility, the Good Samaritan sees the victim of human violence and takes personal responsibility.
The Good Samaritan’s prophetic imagination sketches out a very different world from the one most of us live in. Deeply aware of the crisis, the Good Samaritan can sketch out a world of restored relationship, replacing fear and suspicion, judgment and defensiveness.
The boundaries that have been so carefully drawn — to keep people apart, to include some and exclude many more, to protect some and empower them, and to threaten and disempower many more — have evaporated in a move of responsibility and solidarity that shakes up the status quo.
The Good Samaritan can see the pain, listen to the cry of distress, and hear it as God’s own call. This call is to live in God’s image and likeness, in relationship that links us not only to God, but to all humanity, the children of Adam, God’s firstborn.
In the act of listening, the Good Samaritan makes place for a you different from the I, yet linked to the I at the very core of being.
What is then hope in the prophetic message of the Good Samaritan? The Good Samaritan faces the tragedy of the present defined as crisis and the hopelessness it generates. She does not mouth pieties or turn away from death and suffering, burying her head in the sand like an ostrich.
In her lament, she allows herself to be fragile and exposed, raw and hurting. The hope she offers is not opium, clairvoyantly defrocked by Marx as part of religion understood as a drug that anaesthetizes burning rage for change. Neither is it illusion, revealed by Freud as the immature or psychologically unhealthy projection of a perverted imagination that seeks to escape reality.
No, it is a vision of relationship. The prophet must accept that God allows evil to have its day. Surely she rebels and revolts against this, even against God Almighty who allows it.
Abraham too cried out against God, who revealed to him the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah:
“Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked. Far be that from you. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:25)
Habakkuk railed against God who seemed deaf to his cries for relief:
“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save.” (Hab 1:2)
Jesus too, on the cross, cried out the sense of abandonment that echoes throughout history:
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Elo-i, Elo-i, lama sabach-thani?’ which is being interpreted, ‘My Lord, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (cf. Mark 15:34)
At the ninth hour, hope has evaporated. A certain kind of hope dies in contemplating the reality of crisis, the reality of division, violence, war, and death.
The prophet distinguishes between two kinds of hope. There is a hope that is future oriented. It hopes for certain things that seem to appear faintly on a horizon. It roots itself in an imagination that provides an alternative to reality. Legitimate when the horizon is not completely blocked off by massive walls that obscure any exit from the present.
However, when the present is a wasteland left over from waves of unceasing hatred, unrelenting vengeance, and brutal violence, then all of those things that might indeed be hoped for seem like phantoms. They appear briefly and then evaporate, shattered on the hard, merciless rocks of reality.
However, there is another sort of hope. One that is past oriented. A hope rooted in memory. It is a memory of a time when God did act, God coming to the assistance of a humanity crying out for God.
This is the central act of memory as the Christian stands before the cross. On it hangs a man crucified, who died an excruciating death. Gazing on him, the prophet recognizes the despair of the moment. She confronts her own complicity in the structures of evil that had this man condemned to death.
It is there that the call is heard and the decision is made to step outside of the circles of complicity — the circles that draw together the robbers who attacked and those that simply passed him by. In stopping, a horizon of hope rooted in the past opens up. Good Friday and Holy Saturday give way to Easter Sunday. God is remembered, in that God did not allow death, darkness, and evil to have the final word back then.
Surely this same God will not allow death to have the final word now. The prophet understands that sometimes God takes what seems like a very long time. An exasperated Habakkuk heard the words:
“If it seems to tarry, wait for it. It will surely come. It will not delay.” (Hab 2:3)
However, in what seems like an interminable delay, the Good Samaritan jumps into action, re-presenting the image and likeness of a saving God. In the absence of an active God acting decisively against evil, the Good Samaritan re-presents God in her own actions.
Remembering God’s acts in the past — how God created, formed, breathed life into the human person, stretched out a divine arm to save — prompts the Good Samaritan to act. In acting, the Good Samaritan keeps hope alive.
Hope is born in an act of faith: the conviction that God desires good for humanity. It is born in an experience of God’s life-giving love. The cherished memory of that love is the source from which the prophet speaks and acts.
It is this hope that will not allow the Good Samaritan to simply pass the wounded traveler by. Calling to mind relationship, stopping, is the act of prophecy that vivifies the relationship that is absent in a world of crisis.
It is this hope that does not ask the question, “What will happen to me if I stop?” Rather, it prompts the question, “What will happen to the wounded traveler if I do not stop? If I do not act and speak out?”
Hope motivates the Good Samaritan to know what is happening in the world and not look away. It pushes her to put faces, names, and stories to those lying by the side of the road. Hope is the life force that seeks to make the Good Samaritan, and all of us, witnesses to a humanity that is being extinguished in a world that turns away from the dead, the wounded, the starving, and all those falling by the side of the road.
Hope drives a resilience that pushes us on despite everything. I pray that this hope is not extinguished.
There are Good Samaritans in every generation. When I evoke Nazi Germany and the fate of my family, I remember those who risked their lives to save Jews, the righteous among the nations. These were men and women — few as they might have been — who stopped, spoke out, and acted, refusing the socio-political discourse of their day. At the risk of their own lives, there were those who saved Jews and protected them.
When I remember apartheid South Africa and the fate of so many who were crushed, murdered, and tortured, I remember too those who stood up to protest and denounce — few as they might have been — many of whom were in their turn killed, exiled, and imprisoned.
Today too, I remember Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs speaking out against ethnocentricity in Palestine, Israel. Courageous prophetic figures, few as they might be. Calling to mind these prophetic witnesses inspires to join them, continuing the struggle even when it seems that darkness reigns.
In Palestine Israel today, it is consoling that Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are part of the past — both having claimed to be eternal realities. May ethnocentricity in Palestine, Israel soon be part of the past too.
And now I look at you, my audience here in Nairobi. I wonder how you are hearing my words. What relevance does all of this have for you in your situations in Kenya — beyond, in all of Africa today?
Can we hope for newness in thought, speech, and action that will emerge from an Africa ready to stop, to speak out, to act, so that the Church can renew its listening to the call to be a prophetic body: warning and consoling, building up and encouraging, caring and healing in our divided world?
Can this Jesuit university be a witness of hope in the increasingly divided world, refusing to pass by those relegated to the margins?
A few weeks ago, the Society of Jesus’s Father General, Arturo Sosa, addressed the assembly of the International Association of Jesuit Universities in Bogotá, Colombia. Towards the end of his speech, he expressed a wish:
“Let us walk together into the future inspired by the Magis. Not seeking more of the same, but engaging the needs of our time with responses that are deeper, better discerned, more innovative, and more transformative. Let us be witnesses of hope.”
Fr Sosa spoke at length of the prophetic vocation of a Jesuit university. He stressed “that the Jesuit identity of the university invites us to see as God sees — which is to see through the eyes of those who suffer injustice.”
In his words, I can trace the figure of the Good Samaritan. For him, a Jesuit university is one that moves towards the margins of human history, where it encounters those who are discarded by the dominant structures and powers. It is a university that opens its doors and windows to the margins of society. With them comes a new breath of life that makes efforts for social transformation a source of life and fulfillment.
Calling for universities to engage in a collective discernment, he defined this central component of Jesuit identity:
“Discernment develops the capacity to perceive where God is at work in the global and local situation in order to choose what better leads to the glory of God, which is nothing other than the fullness of human life. One of your tasks as leaders of Jesuit universities is to cultivate that sensitivity that leads to the wisdom of discernment, the capacity to view the world and historical events through the eyes of the triune God.”
He insisted that a Jesuit university must be present in the world, aware of what is going on, and constantly developing solidarity with those in the margins. It must speak the truth that emerges from an attention to the wounded that have fallen by the wayside, refusing to pass them by.
In very specific terms, Sosa explained:
“A University of the Society of Jesus is called to discover and interact with the margins of society as a plural space fostering dialogue and deep understanding of historical, personal, and intellectual processes. The university is a privileged space for the exercise of human freedom: freedom to seek and to find, through research and teaching, paths of social transformation. It is a space where the evangelical message of liberation can contribute to finding better paths toward new life in the midst of the uncertainties and hardships of the daily realities that exhaust so many men and women. It opens space for hope.”
Now, I am a visitor, a passer-by. In preparation for my coming, I have tried to find out about Hekima. I have been in dialogue with Fr Marcel. Inspired by both Fr Sosa and Fr Marcel, and in all humility, I dare address a word to you as you begin a new year, as you students and faculty engage in the life of the university and commit to a prophetic vocation of seeing reality, seeking justice, doing truth.
In the strategic plan of your university for the period 2024–2030, I read that your mandate involves:
“transforming our society for greater glory of God and creating a conducive environment that upholds human dignity.”
In this line, one of the goals of the university is defined as:
“training our students to reflect on experience and apply the data to their studies in order to generate appropriate and contextualized responses to their situations in life and work, and become architects of transformation in the Church and society.”
With this in mind, we can say that the vocation of a university community is not just to accumulate knowledge and speculate with erudition, but to become active agents of change in a world that is passing through darkness. Seek out those in the margins and engage with them in a way that humanizes both them and you, creatively tracing a new inclusivity, drawing together the children of God.
Actively lamenting the way the world is, remembering the moments of liberation, speaking truth to power in denouncing normalized inequality, injustice, and violence, and imagining alternatives on a horizon of hope are all part and parcel of the vocation of the university community, making it a place of engagement and prophetic imagination.
Let this new university year be evaluated not only by academic excellence, but by a commitment to the formulation of lament, memory, denouncement, and hope. The university community is invited to take up the prophetic mantle, setting out on a journey that is intellectual as well as spiritual and social, active and creative.
Focusing on the margins, making them the center of reflection, the university community as prophetic witness can speak and act with integrity as an agent of transformation.
Theology then becomes a God-talk that begins at the side of the poor, oppressed, marginalized. No longer only words about God, theology can become a palpable re-presenting of God in a world that aches in God’s absence.
Peace studies and international relations go beyond geopolitical analysis, seeking to see as God sees — lamenting, remembering, denouncing, and re-imagining a world in which war, apartheid, ethnocentricity, and empire are no more.
Interfaith studies, rather than focusing on polemics, apologetics, and speculative debate, seek out ways that people of different religions can embody prophetic initiatives to include, rather than exclude; to open up the horizons, rather than shut them down.
Business innovation and social entrepreneurship are not focused on profit-making, but driven by the determination to address exclusion, exploitation, environmental degradation, and economic injustice — recognizing the true profit, the common good, that comes from creativity and healing.
Migration, security, and diplomacy studies put at their center mutual responsibility and global solidarity, taking as their patron saint the Good Samaritan. Walls that exclude, ideologies that demonize, politics that promote fear and selfishness can be replaced with compassion.
And at the beating heart of a Jesuit university, Ignatian spirituality helps the university community discern this process of realignment that makes the university an active agent of stopping, refusing to simply pass by. This is consonant with the way the strategic plan defines the mandate of Hekima:
“The graduates of our programs will therefore be men and women of faith, ardently engaged in the challenge of building up a young and vibrant African Church and general society rooted in the richness of different cultures, creating new bonds of solidarity among peoples, and struggling to overcome the global forces that tend to marginalize the whole continent.”
I end with a eulogy, a good word, for one who left us not long ago. Pope Francis added his voice to the prophetic witness of the Good Samaritan. He refused to simply pass by. I refer in particular to his stopping alongside the Palestinian people, especially those in Gaza.
Almost every day from October the 7th, 2023, until his death in April 2025, he witnessed to seeing what was happening and he listened to the cry in a very direct way. Pope Francis would call the Catholic parish in Gaza City almost every day to find out how they had survived that day. He would ask about their neighbours, about the dead, the starving, the sick, and the wounded.
His solicitude echoed too in his regular admonition: “War is defeat for everyone.”
Francis refused to pass by. He refused to be silent.
Thank you, Pope Francis, for being a Good Samaritan, for prophetically challenging us in a world that needs prophetic witness more than ever.
David Mark Neuhaus, SJ, born in South Africa in 1962 to German-Jewish parents who fled Nazism, served as Superior of the Jesuit Community at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Jerusalem. Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Seminary of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, from 2009 to 2017, he was Patriarchal Vicar for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in the Latin Patriarchate.