Some Jon Sobrino

One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?”
The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”
“Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”
The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?”
Jesus replied with a story: “A Jewish man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road.
“By chance a priest came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Temple assistant (Levite) walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.
“Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion (or 'was moved by pity') for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’
“Now which of these three would you say was a neighbour to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked.
The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.”
Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.” Luke 10:25-37

The Samaritan is presented by Jesus as the consummate example of someone fulfilling the commandment of love of neighbour. But there is nothing in the account of the parable to suggest that the Samaritan succours the victim in order to fulfill a commandment, however lofty a one. Simply, he is 'moved to pity.'
We hear of Jesus that he heals people and sometimes manifests sorrow that those who have been healed have shown no gratitude. But in no wise does it appear that Jesus performs these acts of healing in order to receive gratitude. No he performs them because he is moved to pity.
Mercy is a basic attitude toward the suffering of another, whereby one reacts to eradicate that suffering for the sole reason that it exists, and in the conviction that, in this reaction to the ought-not-be of another's suffering, one's own being, without any possibility of subterfuge, hangs in the balance.
Because he is merciful - not a 'liberal' - Jesus prioritizes the healing of the person with the withered hand over the observance of the Sabbath.
Let mercy be reduced to sentiments or sheer works of mercy and anti-mercy will be tolerant enough. But let it be raised to the status of a principle and the Sabbath subordinated to the extirpation of suffering and anti-mercy will react. Tragically Jesus is sentenced to death for practicing mercy consistently and to the last. Mercy, then, is precisely the mercy that materializes in spite of and in opposition to anti-mercy.

For Jesus, mercy stands at the origin of the divine and the human. God is guided by that principle and human beings ought to be as well. All else is ancillary. Nor is this sheer speculative reconstruction, as is abundantly evident in the key passage of Matthew 25. Those who practice mercy - whatever the other dimensions of their human reality - have been saved, have arrived for good and all at the status of total human being. Judge and judged sit in the tribunal of mercy and mercy alone. The one thing that must be added is that the criterion applied by the Judge is not an arbitrary one. Even God, we have seen, reacts with mercy to the cry of the oppressed; therefore is the life of human beings decided in virtue of their response to that cry. 

The church...should reread the parable of the Good Samaritan with the same rapt attention and the same fear and trembling with which Jesus' hearers first heard it. The church should be and do many other things as well. But unless it is steeped - as a church at once Christian and human - in the mercy of the parable of the Good Samaritan, unless the church is the Good Samaritan before all else, all else will be irrelevant - even dangerous, should it succeed in passing for its fundamental principle.

It is the practice of mercy that places the church outside itself and in a very precise locus - the place where human suffering occurs, the cries where the cries of human beings resound. ("Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" sing the oppressed blacks of the United States, and their song is worth many a page of ecclesiology.) The place of the church is with the wounded one lying in the ditch along the roadside, whether or not this victim is to be found physically and geographically within intraecclesial space. The place of the church is with the other and with the most radical otherness of that other - his suffering - especially when that suffering is massive, cruel and unjust.

It is surely urgent that the Christian, the priest and the theologian for example, demand their legitimate freedom in the church - a freedom so circumscribed today. But it is even more urgent that they demand the freedom of millions of human beings who do not have so much as the freedom to survive their poverty, to live in the face of oppression or even to seek justice, be it so much as a simple investigation into the crimes of which they are the object.
When the church emerges from within itself, to set off down the road where the wounded lie, then this is when it genuinely de-centres itself and thereby comes to resemble Jesus in something absolutely fundamental: Jesus did not preach himself, but offered the poor the hope of the Reign of God, grasping his fellow human beings by the lapels, giving them a shake and urging them to the building of that Reign. 
In sum, It is the victim lying at the side of the road who de-centres the church and is transformed into the 'other' (and the radically other) in the eyes of the church. It is the re-action of mercy that verifies whether the church has de-centred itself, and to what extent it has done so.
 Jon Sobrino, from 'The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross'