thereby succeeded in loving him or her. That was clearly the attitude of the priest and the Levite in Jesus' story. I've no doubt these two clergymen were well able to rationalize their decision to pass by on the other side in any number of ways. Just like this lawyer, they could justify themselves.
To begin with, they could claim that it would be foolish to stop. This injured man might have been a decoy to trap naïve travellers who let their emotions get the better of their common sense. Then they could argue that it would have been unbiblical for them to stop. We are told that the man was 'half-dead', that is, unconscious. For all they knew, he might have been fully dead. If so, then the ceremonial law of the Old Testament forbade any member of the temple staff to go within 6 feet of him. If either of these clergymen had gone over to investigate, only to find they were dealing with a corpse, they would have become ritually defiled. And that would have meant not only going through an irksome procedure of ceremonial cleansing, but being ruled unfit to carry out their liturgical duties for a considerable period of time, to everybody's inconvenience and their considerable embarrassment.
But the chief reason they were able to defend their neglect of this injured man was that their interpretation of the law of love did not require them to do anything for him. A passive righteousness that simply refrained from inflicting actual harm on other people was all that was demanded, as far as they were concerned. They hadn't beaten the poor fellow up, had they? Therefore they were not responsible; therefore they didn't have to get involved. That was how their minds worked. Theirs was an ethic which took no account at all of sins of omission, and which could therefore ignore the man without suffering the slightest pang of guilt. 'Why,' they might have said to themselves as they continued down the road, 'he might not even have been a Jew, anyway!'
